Washington, DC, April 1 — CBS News has obtained exclusive video footage calling into question the claims by ClimateProgress blogger Joseph Romm that running a car on hydrogen is not practical.

Dr. Romm, a physicist and taxidermist, first became a minor celebrity in the tight-knit energy policy community when he reversed his pro-hydrogen-car position from the 1990s with the publication of The Hype about Hydrogen: Fact and Fiction in the Race to Save the Climate, which claimed to “prove” that hydrogen-powered cars are decades away.

As the video shows (warning, not suitable for children under 13), Dr. Romm has been driving a car that runs on hydrogen for years. In fact, the fuel Romm uses contains more hydrogen per gallon than the same volume of liquid hydrogen!

Jeremy Rifkin, hydrogen enthusiast and president of the Foundation on Economic Trends, said, “This confirms what we suspected all along. Hydrogen denier — I think he prefers the term “delayer”– Romm was just cashing in with a contrarian book. I’m sure he raked in literally hundreds of dollars spouting his nonsense.”

At a hastily-assembled news conference, Dr. Romm said, “Yes, it’s true. My car turns hydrogen into energy that powers the wheels. But … but it also runs on carbon. The engine burns gasoline, a hydro-carbon, and….” The croud began to jeer, at which point Romm brushed away a few tears and said, “So I made a mistake. That happens. It proves I’m human, which you know, for some people, is a revelation.”

Island Press has agreed to remove the book from the three remainder stores still carrying it.

Somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean — April 1: The WSJ reports today:

The U.S. taxpayer forks over a $1 subsidy for every gallon of biodiesel that is blended in the U.S. for export later. The idea was to give a nudge to the U.S. biofuel industry. But it is boomeranging, as the Guardian reports today in the latest installment on biodiesel “splash-and-dash….”

Increasingly, traders ship biodiesel from Asia or Europe to U.S. ports, where it is blended with a “splash” of regular diesel, the paper reports. That qualifies the shipment for U.S. export subsidies. Then it is shipped back to Europe where it is also subsidized. European biofuels organizations talk about between $30 million and $300 million in U.S. subsidies being exported that way to Europe.

The result? Biofuel’s already-tarnished environmental reputation comes under more fire, because round trips across the Atlantic add unnecessary transport emissions to the mix. And Europe’s own biodiesel industry has been shutting plants, despite its own efforts to ramp up production to meet political mandates. Imports are undercutting local producers on price.

The Christian Science Monitor has more details:

If the ship holds roughly 9 million gallons, it takes only about 9,000 gallons of traditional diesel (0.1 percent of the total) to make the entire load eligible for the blenders tax credit.

The US importer of the load applies to the Internal Revenue Service for the credit — a dollar for each of the 9 million biodiesel gallons, Mr. Baize calculates. The next day the tanker can set sail — dash — for Europe. There, the US importer resells the biodiesel, taking advantage of European fuel-tax credits that, in effect, keep biodiesel prices above US prices.

April Fool’s! Oh, wait, no. It just sounds too absurd to be true. They say, “You can’t make this stuff up” — and it turns out you really can’t.

Funny stuff

• EV-eon
• The Alliance for Burning Every Chunk of Coal (ABECC)
• Go south, young polar bear

Let me know about more energy & climate 4/1 stuff you see.

David Sassoon’s April Fool’s post at Solve Climate, Exxon & Peabody Energy Issue Call For Stiff Carbon Tax, claims that the CEOs of the largest oil and coal companies wrote a “letter to the White House and Congressional leadership today urging immediate adoption of a stiff tax on carbon” but concludes “happy April Fools to one and all.”

In a strange twist, the coal industry did in fact send a letter yesterday to Congress asking for a tax on carbon. A letter to Rep. John Dingell (D-MI) from the United Mine Workers of America and the National Mining Association — the lobbying organization for Peabody and other coal companies supports the Environmental Protection Agency proposal “that the Congress create a ‘Carbon Capture and Storage Early Deployment Fund’ supported by a modest fee on fossil-fueled electric generation to assist in raising the funds and defraying the risks associated with developing CCS technologies” at “approximately $1 billion per year.” The EPA working group estimated such a fee would increase electricity prices approximately 0.6%.

So Peabody’s lobbyists actually did call for a $1 billion tax on fossil fuels — so long as the proceeds go to the coal industry.

San Francisco, CA — April 1: In response to Nobel laureate Al Gore’s new $300 million ad campaign urging immediate action to fight global warming, a new California-based coalition, S.T.O.P, has formed to launch response ads.

S.T.O.P. — or Support Technology-Only Policies — was the brainchild of GOP strategiest Frank Luntz along with Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus of the Breakthrough Institute. STOP Board members include Newt Gingrich, Bj¸rn Lomborg, Roger Pielke, Jr, and Michael Crichton. President Bush is honorary Chair for Life.

Pielke, a well-known climate policy analyst and taxidermist, said, “Contrary to what the alarmists at ClimateProgress.org say, we don’t propose to fiddle while Rome burns. We propose doing research into musical instruments that can play themselves because I, for one, don’t want to keep fiddling forever.”

Luntz said that based on extensive polling and focus-group testing, the primary message of the organization was “Technology, technology, blah, blah, blah.” He said that message beat, “We need to take action now to save future generations,” by 52% to 43% among all Americans, 71% to 25% among all conservatives, and 92% to 5% among viewers of FoxNews.

Washington, DC — April 1: In a surprise move, the Bush Administration today replaced the Endangered Species List with the Unendangered Species List.

In a news conference, the President said, “I have been advisored that my climate, air, and water policies now threaten most living things. Thorny, the Interior guy — I like to call him the Exterior guy, heh, heh, heh — anyway, Thorny says that compiling the old list would have added $1 billion to the deficit over the next ten years.”

Secretary Kempthorne introduced the new list saying, “We just felt it would be a lot easier to identify the species not endangered by our policies.”

The Secretary’s staff handed out a single page containing the entire list, which includes Rattus rattus, kudzu and Toxicodendron radicans, Blattella germanica, Plasmodium falciparum and Plasmodium vivax, endroctonus ponderosae, African trypanosomiasis and tse-tse fly, tubercle bacillus, the order Scorpiones, the algae supergroups, and the entire Cactaceae and mosquito families.

Bush then added, “That Thorny — he’s like some sort of Noah guy.”

INTRODUCING THE BIPOLAR BEAR

In a related story, the President called the winner of the “Rename the Polar Bear” contest, Dr. Sara Bellum of Nome, Alaska. As reported earlier, rather than attempting to protect the polar bears’ Arctic habitat, which is expected to be ice free by 2020, the Interior Department held a contest to simply give Ursus maritimus a new name.

Dr. Bellum, a taxidermist and practicing psychiatrist, explained her winning entry, “I noticed the bears were getting very sad and tired in the summer when the sea ice melted and they had to spend more and more effort catching fewer and fewer seals. But then come the fall they began moving inland, frantically eating everything in sight, rummaging through garbage and attacking people, which, perversely, seemed to make them quite happy, at least for a while. So that’s where I came up with the name. Bipolar bear. Ursus manic-depressus. I never expected a call from the President. He asked if he could call me ‘brainy.’ Like I haven’t heard that one before.”

The first runner up was Danish mathematician, Bj¸rn Lomborg, with his entry “Ralop Bear.” Lomborg, a well known global warming delayer and practicing taxidermist, has long argued that polar bears would rapidly evolve backwards toward their brown bear ancestors from whom they diverged tens of thousands of years ago. Bj¸rn, whose name coincidentally means bear, could not be reached for comment, but a post on his blog explained, “Ralop — it’s ‘Polar’ backwards. Get it?”

According to Interior staffers, Ursus manic-depressus is the only large mammal on the Unendangered Species List.

Related Posts:

• Will polar bears go extinct by 2030? — Part I
• Will polar bears go extinct by 2030? — Part II