The original paper on "astonishing" "sky's the limit" "energy out of thin air" announcement.

Enthusiasm for the "astonishing" "sky's the limit" "energy out of thin air" announcement is if nothing else, extremely depressing.

It is, I think, evocative of the kind of wishful thinking, handwaving and denial - whipped up by journalists who have obviously never taken a college level science course - that brought us here.

Here's here:

April 25: 424.78 ppm
April 24: 423.96 ppm
April 23: 423.64 ppm
April 22: 423.23 ppm
April 21: 422.68 ppm
Last Updated: April 26, 2023

Recent Daily Average Mauna Loa CO2

These figures are roughly 90 ppm higher than they were in 1975, the early years in which my generation, the so called "Baby Boomers" began to assume political power with the result in a rise in the application of magical thinking.

History will not forgive us, nor should it.

The full "the sky's the limit" paper, untrammeled by illiterate journalists, happens to be open sourced.

It's here: Grinter, R., Kropp, A., Venugopal, H. et al. Structural basis for bacterial energy extraction from atmospheric hydrogen. Nature 615, 541–547 (2023).

Note that it is a fine paper, involving a topic with which I happen to be professionally if peripherally involved, enzymology, and the rather ignorant journalistic mangling of it should not reflect on the interesting, if highly esoteric of powering a bacterial cell using this enzyme even if has nothing to do with a twisted journalistic interpretation of "sky's the limit" hydrogen powered dump trucks being sent out to trash wilderness for our other magical thinking baby boomer bullshit, "wind and solar will save us" rhetoric.

The paper refers to hydrogen, atmospheric hydrogen which is a trace gas at a level of ppbv, (parts per billion by volume), 530 pppv being the exact cited amount according to the paper cited in the next paragraph.

The concentration of hydrogen in the atmosphere, some of which is anthropogenic as a result of the use of dangerous fossil fuels to manufacture hydrogen for the petroleum and ammonia industries is given in another open sourced paper, also in the Nature family of journals: Bertagni, M.B., Pacala, S.W., Paulot, F. et al. Risk of the hydrogen economy for atmospheric methane. Nat Commun 13, 7706 (2022). (The internal reference is from 1999, and the hydrogen in the atmosphere may be slightly higher, but I'll use this figure.)

One of the authors of the latter paper, S.W. Pacala, is a professor at Princeton University, and was the coauthor of the famous 2004 "Pacala and Socolow" "Wedges" paper - I call it the "Wedgies paper" -that is notable for the claim that dangerous natural gas is "not that bad" and could help save the world. I cannot help remarking that all these conditional "coulds," millions upon millions of them, have not done a damned thing to change the course of our destruction of the atmosphere. The "Wedgies paper" was published in the first week of August of 2004 in Science, when the concentration of the dangerous natural gas waste, carbon dioxide was 376.86 about 48 ppm lower than the concentration measured at the Mauna Loa CO2 Observatory (temporarily located at Maunakea) yesterday.

Princeton University is heavily invested, by the way, in the "renewable energy will save us fantasy," and Pacala's paper, also a "could" paper, which notes that while 95% of the hydrogen on this planet is currently made from dangerous fossil fuels, hydrogen "could" be made with so called "renewable energy," which Pacala liked 48 ppm of carbon dioxide ago, where "48 ppm of carbon dioxide ago" as a unit of time is equivalent to just shy of 19 years ago.

The heat of formation of water, it's enthalpy, is -241.8 kJ/mol. It's fun and illustrative to do a "back of the envelope" calculation of how much air it would take to light a ten watt night light, assuming the enzyme is almost 100% efficient, which it cannot be owing to the oft ignored laws of thermodynamics whenever pop energy fantasies are discussed in public. A mole of hydrogen weighs roughly 2 grams. A ten Watt light bulb requires, obviously, 10 joules per second. This means that lighting the bulb would require, at 100% efficiency, 10/242 = 0.041 moles, or 0.082 grams of hydrogen. A "mole" of air is generally taken to 29 g/mol. The ideal gas law, which can be used as a very loose approximation for "back of the envelope" calculations, says that the volume of a gas is proportional to the number of moles in it at constant pressure and temperature. At "room temperature," 298K on the absolute temperature (kelvin) scale, and atmospheric pressure 101325 Pa, the volume of a mole of gas is about 22 liters, or 0.022 cubic meters. The molar concentration of hydrogen is thus 2/29 * 530*10^-9 or 18 billionths of a mole.

This all suggests that every second, assuming that all of the hydrogen in this very, very, very, dilute solution could come into contact with the magic enzyme, a minimum of around 1.2 million cubic meters of air would need to be processed every second to light a ten Watt night light. This is about 20% (in "percent talk" higher than the volume of the Empire State building (around 1 million cubic meters), every second.

None of this is intended to cast aspersions on the paper itself, which is a fine paper on proteomics. The authors I'm sure never imagined that people were going to make absurd stretches involved in "sky's the limit" nonsense.

It does show however, how credulous our culture is with respect to issues related to energy. We engage in such credulousness at the peril for all of present and future humanity as well as for the entire planet.

The worst example of credulousness on this planet, widely embraced and incredibly stupid, is the idea is that hydrogen is clean energy. It's not. It's dirty energy, very dirty energy, part of the three card Monty game to greenwash dangerous fossil fuels. The fantasy that the solar and wind industries which as of 2023 still produce trivial amounts of energy, so as to be effectively useless even given the vast land areas already trashed for them and for the fantasies that support them, never mind the trillions of dollars squandered on them, will somehow someday make hydrogen "green" is nonsense, almost as nonsensical as thinking we could power a ten watt light bulb with an Empire State Building's volume of air processed every second so as to capture every molecule of hydrogen in it and transport it to the epitope of an enzyme.

Have a nice evening.