Welcome to Planet Hydrogen. This site is a response to growing interest throughout the world in HYDROGEN – especially in hydrogen extracted from water using electricity generated by sun, wind and wave.
We are a group of environmental campaigners, based in Manchester UK, but with friends and contacts in many countries. We formed in August 2009. We are interested above all in the climate and the ocean, both of which are under threat from the excess carbon dioxide and other gases which human society is putting into the atmosphere.
What are these threats? What has hydrogen got to do with either of them? What is this website trying to do?
THE CLIMATE is being changed by the heating effect of carbon dioxide, with which we are overloading the atmosphere by our burning of fossil fuels, all of them carbon-rich, and by our burning of forests which have been standing until now for thousands of years. The science of climate change and consequent global warming has been established beyond reasonable doubt, and the remedy to this drastic perturbation can only be through the three following measures (the “Three Rs of climate remediation”), all devoted to countering the carbon threat:
- Restraint in all energy use, whatever its source, by the use of appropriate technology.
- Refuelling of all human society by non-carbon resources.
- Retrieval of the excess carbon dioxide already residing in the atmosphere, and its safe storage for the indefinite future.
For our immediate concerns on this site we concentrate on number 2 above – we believe that the only feasible long-term alternative to fossil carbon is renewably generated hydrogen. The burning of hydrogen releases to the environment merely the very water from which it was extracted (by renewably generated electricity). It cannot have any adverse effect on the environment, as the water thus produced re-enters the rain cycle, and is a tiny fraction of the water which is always present in the atmosphere.
THE OCEAN is already being changed, foreseeably and measurably, by twin effects from the carbon dioxide overload in the air above it.
1. The increasing heat is being transferred from the atmosphere to deeper and deeper layers of the ocean, changing the marine environment in many damaging ways, and causing the thermal expansion which leads to sea level rise.
2. The extra loading of ocean water by carbon dioxide is leading, as was long predicted, to a pronounced acidification of this key environment, and to a probable and very serious decalcification of sea creatures at the bottom of the whole marine food chain.
HYDROGEN, we believe, is an essential component in humankind’s endeavour to de-stress our total environment. There are only two of nature’s elements which can be employed on the necessary large scale to answer our needs for heat, energy and overall human welfare: carbon, via fossil coal, oil and gas, which is leading us into a dangerous future, and hydrogen, whose widespread and total adoption would help us to avert these dangers.
PLANET-HYDROGEN.ORG will explore, explain and retain all the issues related to hydrogen, and will answer all your individual questions.
For further information, or if you wish to participate in our work, find us at:
office: Planet Hydrogen, Bridge 5 Mill, Beswick Street, Manchester M4 7HR, UK
email: mike@planet-hydrogen.org
mobile: 00 44 (0)7729 117814