One of the most troublesome high-tech news stories to linger in the media is the way that high-tech workers are treated in China. Foxconn, who employs a million workers in China building the iPhone and many other consumer electronic devices, has repeatedly come under file for creating working conditions that would be criminal in this country. Among the allegations are hiring children as young as 12 and paying them 70 cents per hour, enforcing 14-16 hour days hours in spartan and often dangerous conditions, and injuring or even crippling workers through non-existent safety practices and then simply firing them without paying for their medical treatment. The conditions are so bad that suicides are not infrequent (a problem that the company addressed by installing nets beneath the taller buildings). In case you haven’t been following the story, there’s good coverage in Business Insider.

Every time a new allegation emerges, iPhone users wag their fingers at Apple and threaten a boycott unless something is done. Apple responds by sending someone to investigate, and they return with stories of frank conversations with management, improving conditions and promises to do better. But the reality is that we, as citizens of the first world, cannot improve the working conditions in other countries, and shouldn’t. In the short run, our interference can only make the conditions worse.

Working conditions in China’s factories today are little different from the conditions during the early Industrial Revolution in Great Britain and the U.S. Then, eight year old children routinely worked 14-hour shifts for the equivalent of fifty cents in today’s money, although adult men might do considerably better, making $2.50/day (adjusted).

The conditions were dismal; poor light, unbreathable air, dangerous and heavy equipment with no safety features, and routine exposure to toxic chemicals. If you didn’t want to freeze, you brought in your own lump of coal for the furnace. Beatings and mistreatment were the norm for even the smallest offense, like being a minute late. Workers had absolutely no rights and were immediately fired for any infraction or injury. Unions were illegal and you could be arrested for inciting unrest if you tried to organize. Factories were sometimes fenced with barbed wire to “keep the young imps inside.”

Still, people flocked to the factories and stood in long lines for hours for the chance of employment. Why? Because these jobs, grim as they were, represented their best option. It was better to be a slave than to be a beggar or starve to death.

Child labor had never been a subject of controversy in a world dominated by agricultural and handcraft economies. Children always worked on family farms and boys as young as 10 were apprenticed to their crafts. As a result, improvement came slowly.

In 1833, the controversial Factory Act passed by British Parliament. Under this enlightened law, children 9-13 years of age were only allowed to work 8 hours a day and those 14-18 years of age could not work more than 12 hours. By 1899, about half the states had passed laws regulating child labor, but these were almost never enforced. In 1912, after a 9-year battle, activists in the U.S. forced the government to establish the Children’s Bureau to monitor child labor, but it wasn’t until 1938 and the Fair Labor Standards Act that the Federal government finally regulated the minimum ages of employment and hours of work for children.

These changes in working conditions could not have come about without the rise of an educated middle class, without the development of modern social and government institutions, and the improvements in the standard of living which were the benefits of industrialization itself. There is no short-circuit. Just as a child needs to grow through those awkward teenage years in order to develop the skills required to take on adult responsibility, a society needs to suffer the growing pains which lead to the development of institutions and an enlightened population.

Our outrage at the labor practices in China (or Nike paying teenagers $2.17/day to make sneakers in Jakarta) only serves to pressure companies to take those jobs elsewhere, removing the engine that was providing the possibility for economic and social growth. Higher salaries only fuel the type of rampant inflation that destroys local economies and breeds crime. For proof, we need look no farther than any modern tourist destination.

Fair trade programs, the darlings of the coffee, chocolate and handcraft industry, have fared poorly as well. While making American consumers feel good about buying foreign products, they have done little to help local farmers and may have even hurt them by creating an addiction to US markets and acting as a disincentive to the modernization and mechanization which could provide real and lasting benefit.

Americans need to come to grips with the fact that we really do not know what is best for the whole world. The factory jobs at Foxconn, as dismal as they may seem to us, are far superior to slaving in a rice paddy all day and represent real opportunity for the Chinese people, especially the women. So go ahead and enjoy your iPhone and your other toys. You are providing real economic opportunity to developing countries who, like us, will one day enjoy a standard of living that prices them right out of the global labor market. It just won’t happen overnight.

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I recently became concerned that I might have sleep apnea, a sleep disorder characterized by abnormally low breathing or missed breaths during sleep. Although an individual with sleep apnea is often unaware of having difficulty breathing, even after they awaken, the condition can cause the daytime sleepiness and fatigue associated with any type of significant sleep disturbance.

My doctor prescribed an overnight stay in a sleep lab, which is just what you might imagine: you try and get a good night’s sleep in a hospital bed connected by a sheaf of cables to a stack of electronic equipment standing sentinel over you, monitoring your heart rate, blood oxygenation, and a host of other vital signs. In addition to measuring your vitals, this equipment keeps a log so that doctors can review what’s been happening.

This didn’t sound like much fun. Fortunately, the electronics revolution that has turned your cell phone into a computer/camera/navigation/videophone has dramatically reduced the size and cost of medical instruments as well. The monitor shown here fits over the end of your finger, is battery powered, logs up to 40 hours of data, and can be connected to a laptop via USB for data analysis, reporting, and battery recharging. It also sports a fully graphical display and built-in alarms if any of the patient values go too high or too low. But the best feature may be the cost. Instead of costing thousands like their rack-mounted counterparts, even the best of these devices can be had for well under $100.

As an experiment, I ordered one from Hong Kong, slipped it over my finger, and generated pages of data while I slept in my own bed. Next time I see my doctor, I’ll have the data she needs for a meaningful analysis at a fraction of the cost of a sleep study and with zero interruption of my life. Plus the data is more accurate because it reflects my behavior at home, sleeping in my own environment, instead of an institutional lab.

Inexpensive medical equipment like this will recast the very structure of medicine. Big medical institutions in this country aren’t likely to change how they do things right away because of the costs associated with organizational change. But emerging economies, remote settlements, and mobile care providers will be revolutionized. Mobile medical providers and rescue workers can carry one of these devices on a lanyard around their neck, providing valuable data at the point of care. Four of these devices plugged into an inexpensive laptop can turn a tent into a multi-patient ICU.

Perhaps the biggest revolution in health care will happen right in your own home. In the near future, every home medicine chest will contain devices like this, just as they carry thermometers today. When your child has an asthma attack or an allergic reaction to a bee sting, devices like these will provide an accurate, unemotional assessment of the patient’s status, making it easy for the doctor on the other end of the phone (or website) to decide if they need an ambulance, a clinic visit, or a couple of aspirins and a good night’s sleep.

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The moment you think you’ve lost your wallet, you get that panicky feeling. All of your cash, your ID, and your credit cards are suddenly gone. Your range of options is dramatically limited. You might be stranded somewhere, unable to get home or into the club where your friends are. You can’t buy food, lodging or transportation. It’s scary, frustrating, maddening, and the clean-up is a mess: you have to contact your bank, your credit card companies, your air travel and other loyalty card providers. You need a new driver’s license and perhaps social security card. What were all of those cards in your wallet? How do you reach all of those providers? Thank god you have your cell phone.

But given the choice between have my wallet or my cell phone stolen, I’d much rather lose the wallet.

My cell phone has all of the email conversations between me and my friends and my clients. There’s also a phone directory of everyone I know, a calendar with my birthday, their birthdays, and everywhere I am planning on being (or have been) for months. It would be easy to impersonate me on the phone, by email, and in all of the online communities in which I participate: email, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter. You could ruin my reputation, extort money, and victimize anyone I know.

There’s also confidential client data — presentations and meeting notes, recordings,and photos. All of that is in addition to the thief’s ability to access to my bank, financial institutions, PayPal, investment firm, and Mint.Com.

Cleaning up after having your wallet stolen is a cakewalk compared to the mess you’re in if your phone is compromised. Yet people are way more casual about leaving their phone laying around than their wallet.

Part of the reason for this is that the function of a wallet has remained relatively constant, while the function of a phone has dramatically increased in scope. Even though it’s a now a GPS navigation system, financial terminal, email client, Internet browser, hard drive, camera, media player and social media device, we still call it a “phone.” Our attitude about phones hasn’t kept up with the phone’s increasingly important role.  The truth is, if I had to eliminate one function of my phone, I would do without the part where you talk to people.

Even if you’ve been slow to realize how important your phone is, criminals have not. Antivirus firm McAfee reports that last quarter mobile device malware was up a whopping 46%, while other threats we down overall. The problem is only going to get worse as phone functionality increases. This year near-field communication chips are being added to phones which literally turn them into wallets, meaning you can lose your phone and wallet simultaneously.

Virus attacks on your desktop computer are becoming passe, with most users aware of the threat and using a range of very good free and low-cost AV tools. On your phone, you’ve had fewer options. But that’s changing as phone manufacturers and software developers recognize this threat.

The first line of defense is to use your phone’s built-in password security. Most people don’t turn this feature on because it’s a nuisance to enter a password every time you pick up your phone to use it. Unless your phone is stolen by the NSA, this feature does a great job of protecting information stored in your phone itself, although it does nothing about data or documents stored on your phone’s removable memory card.

To encrypt passwords and other sensitive data that you carry around with you, there are specialized applications like OISafe. Programs like WaveSecure can help you track a missing phone, backup up the data on it, and remote wipe the memory on command.

Those applications are great if you know that your phone has gone missing, but the far greater threat is malware which can steal the data off your phone while you’re using at it. While there hasn’t yet been a wide-reaching virus attach on mobile devices, it’s just a matter of time as tablets and phones replace laptops as people’s primary mobile device. This past year has seen Norton, McAfee, AVG and dozens of smaller companies release smartphone security applications, many of them not very good. (Lookout Mobile Security is a standout, featuring anti-virus, lost phone tracking, remote backup and remote wiping.) Expect to see an arms race on mobile devices play out in a way similar to the way it did on the desktop, only at an accelerated rate. (Hackers and AV companies have, after all, learned a lot from the desktop wars and will be applying it to the battle for mobile security.)

So, you’ve been warned. If you haven’t taken the time to set the lock code on your phone, do it now. And think about installing an anti-virus application and a remote-wipe function. It’s simple to do now, and impossible to do when you realize you really need it.

Related posts:

1. I Fell in Love with an Android

What is the world’s biggest secret? Perhaps you are thinking “the formula for Coca-Cola”, “who shot Kennedy”,” what happened to the Holy Grail”, or “the location of Atlantis”. All good guesses, but these are merely historical curiosities.

Right now, the biggest secret in the world is the encryption key that unlocks the Wikileaks “insurance” file. In case you haven’t been following the story closely, Wikileaks has only published a small fraction of the massive database of government and commercial secrets which were leaked to them. However, on July 30, in response to strong US government threats, Wikileaks released to the world a 1.4 GB “insurance” file.

The file is encrypted with AES256, the same encryption algorithm used by the government to protect it’s own “Top Secret” files. Although Wikileaks has not made any public statements about the contents of this file, its purpose seems clear: in case something happens to the site or to Julian Assange himself, they made a backup of their secrets and stored it in the one place where it can never be destroyed; everywhere. Speculation is that this information bomb contains the balance of the State Department cables, as well as commercial and military secrets ranging from BP to The Vatican.

Every spy organization in the world and a half-million hackers and computer science students are hard at work analyzing this file. But without the key, they have little chance of success. What does a 256-bit key look like? In hexadecimal, it might be: “496e2031363932203139206d656e20616e642074776f20776f6d656e20″. But such a key is unwieldly.

A binary key is difficult to store and transmit, and it looks like, well, an encryption key.  More than likely, the key hidden in plain sight; a common, publicly available reference (perhaps the first line of Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible”).  To create a 256-bit key like the one above, you only need 29 characters, so “In 1692 19 men and two women ” would do nicely. Of course, you could also make it be much longer.

One thing is certain: someday we will know the answer. It is highly unlikely that several young people will all carry this secret to their graves, never succumbing to pressure, argument or temptation, and never making a mistake. And once we have the key, we will have everything because the file that it unlocks is readily available. (There are millions of copies of it around the world. You could easily get a copy for yourself.)

Cracking the code through “brute force” methods is far beyond the capabilities of the worlds fastest (and most secret) supercomputers. An entirely new generation of computers, based on quantum physics, may have a chance, but that type of innovation is decades away.

Until then, unless someone screws up or forces Julian Assange’s hand, the Wikileaks insurance file will remain one of the greatest mysteries of the modern world.

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[In my previous posting, I discussed the shortcomings of the digital alarm clock and what my goals were for the ideal clock. A link to that posting is at the bottom of this one.]

How the Clock Works — from the Outside.

Our clock has only three interface elements; a big blue display (the time), a smaller yellow display (the alarm time) and a knob. Pressing the knob turns the alarm (and the yellow display) on and off. No yellow numbers, no alarm. Yellow numbers? That’s what time the alarm will go off. It’s that simple.

You change the alarm time by turning the knob. It moves in 15-minute increments, so in a couple of spins (forwards or backwards) you can move through a whole day. I’ve always thought that the little AM/PM light was hard to notice, so we’ve done away with it here. You set the alarm in 24-hour time. which makes it really hard to get it wrong; 7:00 AM reads as “7:00″ while 7:00 PM reads as “19:00.”

That just leaves the noisemaker. Rather than leave it up to the a radio station, which has too many parameters to set (volume and tuning) or may have unreliable programming, I decided to include my own noisemaker. Sure, we could have interfaced to an iPod, but adding another device undermines our assurance that the alarm will go off as planned. Instead, I’ve chosen to play sound files off a micro-SD card. This gives us lots of other capabilities as well, like making the clock chime on the hour, speak the time, or play different alarm tones at different times. Since the reader accommodates a 2Gb card, you can design your own audio “skin” if you like.

Last, but not least, we solved the power problem. With the old mechanical clocks, you lost exactly as much time as the power was out. With digital clocks, even a brief power interruption restarts the clock at 12:00.  Some clocks have a back-up battery in case the power fails, but most do not. The ones that do, require you to replace the battery periodically (which no one ever seems to do).

This clock keeps the correct time even when you pull the plug. For how long? At least a few days and maybe a couple of weeks (there are a lot of factors involved). The displays turn off and the alarm can’t sound when the power is off, but when power is restored, the time is still accurate.

How the Clock Works — from the Inside.

The guts of this machine contains a hard-working and very inexpensive 8-bit PIC microcontroller. (It’s the long rectangular black thing in the picture.) There is also some audio circuitry to play sound files off a micro-SD, an amplifier to drive a speaker, some LED displays, and a power supply to make it all work.

The Logic Board

The PIC microcontroller does all of the heavy lifting, keeping track of the time, managing the two displays, controlling the audio chip, and handling user interaction.

One more component worth mentioning is the carbon aerogel supercapacitor. (It’s the big round thing on the logic board.) This little guy stores up electricity when we’re plugged in. When we’re not, the microcontroller senses the power failure, shuts down everything non-essential and hunkers down for a long winter. It draws just enough power from the ultracapacitor to stay alive and keep track of the time. Supercapacitors are cool because, unlike batteries, they don’t get tired of charging/discharging so they don’t need to be replaced periodically.

Mechanically

I decided to build this clock into a CD storage container. It was about the right size, inexpensive, and I liked the color. In order to give myself a little more flexibility, I put all of the electronics on two boards instead of just one. There is a display board, which holds the digital displays and the knob, and a logic board which holds the microcontroller, audio electronics, and power supply. A 16-pin connector mates the two boards together.

The Display Board

The size of the display board, which is the larger of the two, is primarily determined by the size and placement of the LED displays. By putting the rest of the electronics on another board that mates behind it, I gave myself the option of fitting the whole thing into a smaller box than I could have if it were all on one board (in case I change my mind later).

In our next installment, we’ll talk more about the details of the design and how engineers design something like this.

Related posts:

1. Building the Perfect Alarm Clock in (1200 Easy Steps)

With everyone at the Consumer Electronics Show drooling over giant flat screen TVs and miniature tablet-shaped supercomputers, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at a common consumer device that we STILL haven’t gotten right after a hundred years or so: the alarm clock.

You would think that a device so critical to modern life would be designed better, but in spite of the fact that there are thousands of models to choose from, they pretty much all suck. How often have you gone to bed the night before a critical meeting and been unable to fall asleep because you had no confidence that the alarm was set correctly? My own alarm clock requires at least a dozen cognitive steps to set the alarm with any confidence.

How it should work

You should be able to set your alarm clock in a few seconds. You should be able to tell from across the room if the alarm is set, and for what time. You should be able to set it in the dark, without your glasses. You should never be lying in bed wondering if you accidentally forgot to push some button or bumped the volume control and are going to get up late and look stupid.

So, forty years after the digital watch was rolled out at CES, I decided to design and built the perfect digital alarm clock. Even with all of the advances we’ve made since the 1960s, this has turned out to be a really interesting challenge. It involves assembly language programming, custom fabrication, parts suppliers from all across Asia, and an enterprising low-volume circuit board manufacturer based in Bulgaria. Why all the complexity? Because of the simplicity.

Simple = Complex

Let’s assume you want to fly to Los Angeles. (Don’t take it personally, it’s just an example.) Think about the steps you have to go through to make that happen.

• Determine when you want to go and when you want to return
• Go on various websites to find the right combination of itinerary, cost and airline
• Identify and use the correct payment method
• Manage your seat assignments
• Create appropriate reminders to ensure you arrive at the correct airport at the correct time
• Arrange for transportation to and from the airport

And this doesn’t even include packing luggage and all the personal aspects. This is just getting there and back. Now imagine you wanted to make this completely simple for yourself. What would you do? You’d hire an assistant and say “Steve, book me a flight to Los Angeles.” Very simple for you, but it requires that you interface with a highly complex and sophisticated machine — Steve.

The easier it is for the user, the harder it is for the designer. This is something I’d always more or less understood, but this project made that completely clear.

In the next posting, I’ll describe the clock itself: how the user experiences it, and the insane complexity behind that apparent simplicity.

(Read Part 2 of this article here.)

Related posts:

1. Building the Perfect Alarm Clock (Part 2)

I’ll just come right out and admit it: This gadget seduced me. You could set the retail package on a pedestal in the MoMA and it would blend right in. It is a work of art.

I opened up it up, stuck it in my ear and it just started working. It talked me through the process of pairing with my phone (a process which is ALWAYS a pain in the butt), and that was that; we were instant friends.

The Q1 is completely voice operated, even to turn it off. You can say stuff like “Redial”, “Call back”, “Answer call” or “Ignore call,” even “Check battery.” And, you can pair it with up to 8 devices just by saying “Pair me.” It can even monitor two phones at once and answer which ever one is ringing.

Nice, but how does it perform?

The Q1 actually has 2 microphones, one to monitor the environment and one to listen to you. The signal from the environment is fed into a DSP chip where the noise is digitally subtracted from your speech, giving whoever you are talking to a crisp clear signal devoid of road and wind noise.

One of my most demanding specifications is battery time. In spite of its light weight and small size, the Q1 has a talk time of 4 hours and a standby time of 100 hours. It charges through a standard micro USB connector. When it is time to charge it, you can use the tiny foldaway AC adapter or the USB cable to charge it off your laptop (both are included).

The USB cable has one other function. The Q1 is designed to allow the firmware to be upgraded to accommodate new phones, add features or (heaven forbid) fix bugs.

Sadly, the Q1 makes my Jawbone headset, which I was SO excited about just a couple of months ago, seem obsolete and hard to use. (Ouch!)

I’m giving the Q1 five stars.

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I bought an Android phone just to check it out (’cause that’s what I’m supposed to do; my friends count on me for that.) I bought it in spite of that fact that I hate T-Mobile, in spite of the fact that the Android didn’t support Microsoft Exchange or view PDFs or let me view and edit Microsoft Office documents, and in spite of the fact that T-Mobile wanted to assign me a “ghetto” 510 area code number. None of that mattered. I just wanted to see it. I had 30 days to return it and that’s what I’d do.

Goodbye, Sprint!
What a surprise! After spending 100 hours playing with the phone (downloading software, configuring things, hooking up external devices, even making some phone calls), I had to admit I was in love. Goodbye, Sprint! Nothing else matters.

Why? It’s all about the software. In their attempt to lock you into their platform, brand themselves, and encourage you to buy silly things from them (like ring tones), the carriers all cement a layer of useless bloatware over the phone’s native programming. This junk is always thrown together haphazardly, poorly integrated, and badly designed. Basically, Microsoft and Palm and Sprint each have their own agenda and they are slugging it out in the arena of your phone. (Even now, Sprint is delaying the launch of it’s own Android phone so that Samsung can add a bunch of Sprint crap to the user interface.)

In contrast, the Android is designed to be open. There are hundreds of programs available for it, most of which are free, and they all play well together by design. You can add and remove them at the touch of a button without ever having to deal with your carrier.

Zillions of Programs

Zillions of Programs
“Who needs zillions of programs on their phone?”, you ask. Well, there’s one that can use the camera to take a picture of a book or a CD and find the lowest prices for that item in nearby stores and on the Internet. Take that, William Shatner!

There’s an augmented reality program that uses the camera to display whatever you are looking at on the screen, drawing labels over the picture in real time to identify what you are seeing. It will point out Angel Island, the Golden Gate Bridge, Coit Tower, San Quentin, and so forth. A similar program identifies the stars and constellations as you point it around the night sky.

Around the house, you can snap pictures of barcodes as you run out of things and it will put them on your shopping list. There’s a compass and a runner’s log and even an audio editing tool to make your own ring tones. It’s a camera and a GPS and a voice recorder, plus email and a web browser. It has visual voicemail, newsreaders and music and podcast players, Skype and Twitter clients. Oh yeah, and it’s a phone!

Plus, if you ever lose it, you can send it a text and it will tell you where it is. There’s also a bunch of games for it, but I’ve been having too much serious fun to play with them.

Why Android and Why Now?
There’s no end to the creativity people are demonstrating with the Android, but why this platform and why now? Because Google and the Open Handset Alliance found a secret formula for harnessing the creativity of developers.

First of all, they built a device that has all the hardware you need to do interesting things. It has a GPS, a 3-axis accelerometer and a magnetic compass, WiFi, 3G networking, and bluetooth, a touch screen and a keyboard, speaker and a processor with video and music capability. If you can’t have fun with all that, then you shouldn’t be programming. It even has a multi-color LED.

Secondly, they created an operating system that works like a Lego set, making it easy to build programs out of pieces of stuff that you and your friends have done before. Need a map of your current location? Just call one up. Need to play an alarm tone at a certain time? There’s a system service for that.

And last, but not least, they made it easy to get your new software creation into the handsets of thousands of grateful users through the Android marketplace. Even if your first creation is free, you can make a ton of money selling the advanced version for $0.99. And the cost to be a developer is just $25.00 (a paltry sum when compared to other developer programs.)

AND it's a Phone

The Future
The Android platform is still in its infancy, but it’s remarkable how quickly the market is maturing. It seems clear that Android’s operating system is going to break out of the phone and spawn a whole new generation of portable computers that will replace the laptops of today. In short, netbooks are going to fall in love with Android, too. Chip manufacturers are already tooling up and companies like HP are making early announcements.

I think Android as a new computing platform makes perfect sense. After living on the Android for a week, my big, fast Windows machine feels clunky and out of date. If the Android had a little bit bigger keyboard and screen, I’d use it for everything, relegating my Windows machine to really big jobs like video editing, 3D modeling, and first-person shooters.

And what about the iPhone? A beautiful product for sure, and a terrific success story for the company, but once again Apple is headed in the wrong direction by vertically integrating. Silly boys, the future is open!  But that’s a story for another time.

Links:

Silicon Alley Insider, “HP Considering Android for New Netbooks”
Engaget, “Save us from Apple’s groundbreaking, developer-shackling App Store”
New York Times, “T-Mobile to Use Google Software in Devices for Home”

Related posts:

1. Sprint Rolls out Flawed Android Strategy at Developer Conference

"Same S*** Different Fuel"

Ahhh…the hydrogen economy. What a wonderful idea! Hydrogen can be made from electricity and water. Then you can put the hydrogen into your car where it is turned directly into electricity in a fuel cell, and the only waste product is water. It’s a completely closed system; water to hydrogen to water to hydrogen to water. There’s really only one problem with it:  it doesn’t work.

A little basic science: Hydrogen, in its cleanest form, is made from water by putting in electricity (one electron for every hydrogen atom.) But the process is highly inefficient. The very best that you could even theoretically hope to achieve would be breaking even (although we realistically have no hope of ever coming close to that). Which means, you have to think of hydrogen as a battery (although not a very efficient one). It stores energy from electricity (that you have already made elsewhere), gives some of it back, and wastes the rest.

The simple truth is, there is no free lunch. There are no hydrogen mines and hydrogen can never be used to make the electricity to make itself because it is a net consumer of electricity. So why are we even talking about it?

Oil companies are promoting H2 (that’s science geek speak for “hydrogen”) for a couple of reasons. First of all, you will still have to go to the pump to fill up on hydrogen. This means they don’t have to release their stranglehold on you and your gas tank. The very thought of a world where people have clean energy delivered directly to their homes WITHOUT making a trip to the 167,000 gas stations in America is terrifying.

Secondly, you have to ask “Where are they planning to get all this hydrogen?” Simple, the same place they get everything else; oil!  That’s right, just because you can make H2 from water doesn’t mean you have to. Remember, splitting the hydrogen out of water requires putting energy into the process; more energy than you get out by using the hydrogen. Even if they wanted to make hydrogen the clean way, where would they get all that energy?

Nope, better to just make hydrogen from oil. After all, half of the energy in simple hydrocarbons (natural gas and such) comes from hydrogen. The problem is, the other half comes from carbon (read “greenhouse gas”). That means that oil companies can just retool their big refineries into making hydrogen instead of gasoline. Problem is, splitting the hydrogen out leaves a big pile of carbon (probably as carbon dioxide). That leaves us back where we started which, frankly, is just what they had in mind.

The oil companies are hoping that you were asleep during high school chemistry and that, with a little sleight of hand, they can make the carbon “disappear” and get you off their backs. But the truth is that we have built these massive global enterprises with the sole purpose of digging up carbon and distributing it to everyone inexpensively so they can burn it. Until we stop doing that, we’re going to be in trouble. As the old saying goes, “When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.”

Car companies are promoting hydrogen, too. What’s their angle? They know that economical availability of  hydrogen is years away. By coming out in favor of hydrogen, they can appear to be promoting a green technology which, unfortunately, just isn’t there yet. Net result, again, business as usual. No need to retool the factories and no need to sell electric cars until the hydrogen fuel cell is available.

But why resist? Wouldn’t they make just as much money selling electric cars and regular cars? Yes, and therein lies the problem. Car manufacturers and their dealer channels don’t make any money selling cars. They make their money servicing cars; performing oil changes every 6,000 miles and servicing the the thousands of parts in an internal combustion engine that are damaged by the high temperatures and RPMs or simply wear out. Electric cars, on the other hand require almost no service. Electric cars would put the traditional dealer channel out of business.

Electricity is the answer. For now. Converting oil into hydrogen and carbon dioxide doesn’t fix the problem. Converting electricity into hydrogen and back into energy doesn’t make any sense. The only thing that makes sense is putting electricity directly into your car and using it as electricity.

Where will we get all this electricity? There isn’t an easy answer to this question for now. We have hydroelectric today, and solar and wind are coming online fast, with geothermal and tidal and a host of other technologies in the wings. And for the time being, a bunch of it will have to be generated by burning carbon and using (God help us) nuclear reactors.

But we don’t have any electricty to waste, and hydrogen is a wasteful technology. Its only advantage is that it props-up oil company and auto company profits.

So, tell the car companies that you know they are stalling. Tell the oil companies that you know they are hiding all that carbon somewhere. And let’s quit pretending that there ever could be such a thing as a “hydrogen economy.”

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