It’s easy to check if a proposed tech solution to the climate crisis is legit or not.
Examine the solution; if it looks like it might have been designed to cleverly carry forward the capital structures and shareholder value of fossil industries to the post-transition economy then that’s all you need to know. It’s a wealth preservation device and building it will waste time we don’t have, push zero emissions further out, and risk further warming.
Hydrogen is a good example: we’re going to need it and we’re going to need a lot of it but only for some pretty specific applications – for very long-distance transport (boats basically) or for running plant that’s a long way from the grid, that kind of thing.
Used in other applications it’ll bring with it all the costs of a new industrial process and a new distribution fabric. Hydrogen at the scale proposed by capital is a way to reproduce existing ownership structures, to protect investments – and the absurd, distorting overhead of doing that – building and maintaining networks, developing and selling a whole new ecology of devices, growing new markets and so on – all for the single purpose of protecting the value of the corporations that got us here in the first place – will cancel all the benefits.
And don’t get me started on the demented logic of using electricity (green or otherwise) to extract hydrogen and then burning hydrogen to generate electricity (and all the crazy variations on that model). Used in this way Hydrogen is a dirty fuel.