Re: Lomborg, part 4: water vapour and hydrogen economy

> If the future hydrogen energy economy relies on the least expensive sources
> of hydrogen (as economic behavior tends to suggest),

"Economic behavior" does not suggest this. Your so-called economic behavior
leads people to choose options that translate into the least number of
dollars. This can and does have little to do with what is or isn't actually
the least costly. You might say this is equivocation on words like "cost"
and "expense", and furthermore that this point seems to be the only point of
concern to me.

Even if you consider these points to be largely semantic (which they
aren't), still they couldn't be more important. None of the discussion of
the costs of hydrogen production are meaningful when there is such massive
market failure that by and large we haven't a clue as to the full social
costs. Thus,

> The cost (in energy) of producing hydrogen through electrolysis of water is
> significantly higher than the costs of extracting fossil fuels

couldn't be more misleading. You are implying that the market reflects the
full social costs of of extracting, distributing, and utilizing fossil
fuels. That's simply ludicrous.

Further, you're using circular logic. You say,

> With advancements in
> photoelectrolysis, perhaps using solar energy to produce hydrogen, we may
> see a shift.

which means that when you assert that electrolysis of water is more costly
than extracting fossil fuels, you're ignoring the fact that this is because
what we've got is fossil-fuel based electrolysis at the moment. That
extracting fossil fuels AND using them to power electrolysis is more
expensive than simply extracting fossil fuels alone is as rudimentary as the
multiplication tables.

My point, again, is that it does little to no good, and probably does a fair
amount of damage, to ignore market failure as a fact of life, and to go on
talking about costs as if the ones we can gauge today in the main are valid.