Hey! Over here…Yeah… F-r-a-n-c-e.

This morning was the farmer’s market in the Madeleine at Albi, which takes place just where the New Bridge intersects with the river Tarn. It’s one of the nicer spots in Old Albi. Here’s the view from between the charcuterie stand and the garlic merchant:

I was on line to buy goat cheese behind an old man, maybe 90 years old. Given the quantity of cheeses he was loading into his basket, I’m sure that if asked, he would attribute his spry longevity to eating lots of goat products.

When he was loaded up, he turned to me and said, “you know, this is one courageous woman!”, pointing to the woman behind the cheese-laden table, who I know lives out in the country not far from here, milks her goats, makes her cheeses, and comes to sell them at the Madeleine every Saturday morning.

“Why is that?” I asked.

“Well, she came all the way from Holland to live here. It’s so far away from her home!”

I agreed wholeheartedly, then couldn’t resist mentioning that he would probably find me courageous, too, since I came from New York City to live in Albi, and that is even further away.

He thought about that awhile, smiled, agreed that I must be very courageous, too. Then said, “You know, I’ve always been curious about something about America, so if you don’t mind questions from a nosy old man… My brother spent some time in Atlanta and told me disturbing stories when he came back.”

Uh-oh, I’m thinking, here it goes, I’ll have to say something about the Moron Elite and the Coup d’Etat in America. That yes, I believe in Darwin. That I had left 15 years ago and don’t understand either. Then reassure him that being American was not contagious and talking to one would probably not lead to renal failure.

“My brother was always surprised that the Negroes had to sit in the back of the buses, in their own section, not mingling with the white people.”

For a split second, I had the thought that W had turned back the clock of human civilization yet again, but then Condi & Co came to mind, and, well, na-a-a-h, not possible.

“But that was 50 years ago,” I said.

“Yes,” he replied. “My brother was in Atlanta in 1952.”

So with some relief, I was able to tell him that certain things in America had changed for the better. Long time I haven’t been able to say that.

Dr. Albert Jacquard is a professor of mathematics and genetics somewhere in Paris and a French intellectual of some note. A few years back, I accidently read a small book of his that included the following wonderful metaphor which I repeat from memory (apologies if I got something wrong):

Imagine, he wrote, that a type of large pond-lily (really big nenuphars), say 1 m² each, are capable of reproducing so rapidly that they double overnight.

One nenuphar is put in a large lake. The next day, obviously, there are 2 nenuphars. The day after that, 4 nenuphars, and so on. The lake is very, very large. When you’re standing on the shore, you can’t see the other side.

The moral of this tale is NOT that after 30 days this huge lake would be completely clogged by all the nenuphars, which by then number 2³⁰.

The moral of the story, boys and girls, is that no one would probably notice that the lake had a problem until the 27th or 28th day of the month, when the lake would be spotted, respectively, by a very inconspicuous 6.25% or 12.5% of invasive aquatic weeds. And by then, it’s too late to do anything. The lake, for all intensive porpoises, is dead.

After reading this parable the first time, I thought that Dr. Jacquard must be the coolest dude around. He enabled me to perceive clearly what the upcoming end-of-the-world might look like from my still comfortable seat in the 21st century. Wow!

But then, one day, Albert Jacquard came to speak in Albi, the town where I live. Disappointingly, he turned out to be an ideological old fart, spouting surreal nonsense to a rapt crowd that just gobbled it up. I did not leave the salle with an insatiable need to torch a few cars while chanting the “Internationale”. But many others did.

The mass media, who have a pretty good record of getting any important news wrong, have been talking up the ‘Hydrogen Economy’ quite a bit. They are mostly referring to the notion of putting powercells in cars, which split water into component hydrogen (and oxygen), then using the hydrogen as a pollution-free fuel to run vehicles.

This is a very sexy idea. It will require a gigantic investment in new infrastructure throughout the world (hydrogen manufacture, refill stations, ubiquitous fuel-cell automobiles), but this gigantic investment is small change compared to really big investments like the Iraq war. (Actually, building a hydrogen-owered world would cost slightly more than the Iraq war.)

It is also a wrong idea. It cannot ever work. This is explained nicely in an interview with Dr. Ulf Bossel, organizer of the Lucerne Fuel Cell Forum, in an interview on The Watt website dating back to 2006. Here is an illuminating excerpt:

With the same amount of electricity, original electricity, be it from wind solar energy, with the same amount of electricity you can drive an electric car three times farther than a hydrogen car. On 100 kWh of electricity you can drive an electric car 120 kilometers while a hydrogen fuel cell car of similar size can do only about 40 km. If we want to have mobility and a sustainable future, we have to go for electric cars and not for hydrogen cars because we electric cars are less costly to operate. It is not the vehicle technology, but a question of energy cost of the fuel. Hydrogen must always be much more expensive than electricity needed to split water by electrolysis etc. That is a very clear picture. I have analyzed the situation to illustrate how much water and electricity is needed for certain hydrogen jobs. If you take the Frankfurt Airport and Frankfurt Airport is perhaps comparable to the airport at Montreal. About 50 jumbo jets leave Frankfurt every day, each charged with 130 tons of kerosene. If you replace kerosene by hydrogen on a one-to-one energy base, each plane needs 50 tons of hydrogen. As a side remark: 50 tons of liquid hydrogen occupy 720 cubic meters of space, while 130 tons of kerosene take only 160 cubic meters. We need totally different airplanes for hydrogen. But that is another story. To fill the 50 jumbo jets one needs 2,500 tons of liquid hydrogen every day. 22,500 cubic meters of water, the water consumption of a city of 100,000, must be split by electrolysis. For this one the continuous electricity output of about eight nuclear power plants is needed. Now, if the entire traffic at Frankfurt Airport was all done with hydrogen, one would need the water consumption of the City of Frankfurt plus about 25 nuclear power plants. Using hydrogen for all public air and road transport in Germany, it would take the power output of about 400 nuclear power plants plus enormous amounts of water. You need nine kilograms of water to make one kilogram of hydrogen. The Rhine river and all other rivers would be dry in the summer because the water is used to make hydrogen. So, we are really approaching limits and we have to talk about these limits before we talk about a hydrogen economy.