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He gets to look visionary and all environmentally friendly shoveling hundreds of millions of dollars to private companies for cars & generation systems that won't be broadly available much before 2015, if ever. And whenever anyone questions his stances on energy policy and the environment, he can wheel out his little hydrogen car as "proof" of all that his administration is doing, much as Detroit used PNGV throughout the 1990s as proof of their committment to innovation and efficiency.
In both cases, of course, this political prop will roll down a test track built from taxpayer dollars, but hell, what's a few billion among friends and donors?
On top of that, there's that little problem with hydrogen beging a net energy sink. This makes it rather difficult to base an extremely energy-intensive economy on the promise of fuel cells "someday", even if someday does eventually arrive.
Not that hydrogen doesn't have certain applications that make sense - remote power generation, for example. But Deus Ex Machina H ain't gliding up to save us as an overarching answer to energy problems.
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