Last Night News Bulletin (1)

Good evening, gentlefolk. It's seven minutes until midnight and there are 2,198 nights left in the Galactic Aeon. Welcome to Last Night News. I'm your guest host for the evening, Crow.

We've recieved news of some more skinmonkey madness up in Chris' neck of the woods. It seems that the Termite People have decicided that the gooey, nasty oil sand gunk under the Canadian tundra is quite valuable. So valuable, in fact, that they will be contracting with the French & Chinese to build nuclear power plants that will power the machinery needed to dig up vast areas of pristine wilderness and process the gunk into gasoline and mountains of toxic waste products.

For a perspective, we've asked our simian superstar, Prof. Hanuman, to comment. Over to you, Professor:

Now, I think I finally understand the buzz about the "hydrogen economy".

It always seemed like one of GW's pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps fantasies. Where would the energy come from to make the hydrogen? Somewhere, somehow, something carbon was going to be burned to turn the water into H2. Everything downstream seemed to be just inefficient slight-of-hand covering up that orignal burning of coal/methane/gas.

But now I understand. If this world is so damn desperate for gasoline that we will build nuclear power plants and dig up vast areas of pristine wilderness in order to turn nasty toxic goo into gasoline (along with huge mountains of even nastier, more toxic waste products), then we have reached the point of madness. Are the oil sands even net energy positive? Or are they just a way to store nuclear-generated electricity in a form that feeds our insatiable addiction to carbon-based fuels?

If we're truly at this point, then the time has come to make the switch. Why destroy vast acres of wilderness and add to the globe's already crushing burden of CO2 just to package nuclear energy in a SUV-friendly form? Skip the intermediate steps and just create liquid hydrogen at the source. The planet will thank us for it later.

Thank you, Professor! Who knows, maybe once New Orleans is under water, your cousins will start listening to us at last.

Oh wait, that already happened.

Anyways, back to our regularly scheduled program ...