Over at The Reality Based Community, Michael O’Hare has a post about fossil-fuel usage and why electric or hydrogen fueled cars aren’t a solution to the problem:

I don’t know where to start with this stuff. Hydrogen is not a fuel, and neither is electricity. There’s no mine for either of them; if people start plugging in cars into the wall, power plants of all kinds will just rev up faster and longer, and the marginal electricity is made from natural gas, a fossil fuel that’s only somewhat less greenhousy than oil, though a lot less than coal. These cars have to haul an enormous stack of heavy batteries around, and half the energy that goes into the power plant is lost in the transmission and generation system anyway. “Clean coal” doesn’t mean “coal that doesn’t cause global warming,” it means less pollution of every other kind: coal, clean or not, is the worst greenhouse fuel until we figure out how to capture all the stack gas and put it somewhere (this is called carbon sequestration, and it’s a very long-term, daunting, technological road at this point).

The eventual conclusion is that the solution to this problem is, apparently, to live in small, tightly-packed communities, but I can’t help thinking there’s another solution, one that I’ve mentioned before, proposed by Varifrank. Encourage companies to allow their employees to telecommute as much as possible. That’s not a solution that would work for everyone, obviously, but it would help.