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Comment by sircastor | Hacker News Reader

I’m reminded of a long bet made a number of years ago between Joseph Romm and Greg Blencoe that 1% of car sales in the US would be Hydrogen Fuel cell vehicles by 2015. I’d done a report on this in college and completely forgot about it, probably because hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are near impossible to find on the consumer market.

So Blencoe lost the bet and paid Romm the $1000 and wore a T-shirt. He posted a very short post to his blog saying it happened. [1]

What’s most interesting to me is that the blog has since disappeared. At the time these things seemed like such a big deal, but a few years on and it just vanished. It’s like the bet never took place and the advocacy for Hydrogen wasn’t a big deal. It was kind of shocking to me how ephemeral it is, in spite of “nothing ever disappearing from the internet”

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20160911231646/http://www.h2carb...

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I typically avoid the streisand effect by not reacting when something has attention, and then subsequently removing all references to it months later. Nobody important/loud enough notices.

My strategy is to never do anything noteworthy.

If that works to sustain your lifestyle, way to go.

Hasn't been the reality for me. I would prefer to be behind the scenes but that's not whats always been the case. I like the financial outcome though.

Great minds think alike :P

In line with David Mitchell. How will you ensure that your not doing anything noteworthy don't become noteworthy? As him dressing unnoteworthy would itself be noteworthy...

A relevant long bet: https://longbets.org/601/

Ironically hydrogen is having a renaissance as we speak

Are you sure? It’s 5 years after that Million ‘Murican Hydrogen bet was lost, and we’re still 2 full orders of magnitude away. (In spite of massive subsidies for fuel cell in California.)

At least 8,890 FCEVs are on the road today, a far cry from the 53,000 the California Fuel Cell Partnership projected by the end of 2017. "I don't see a lot of automaker interest in hydrogen," DeShazo argued. "Most automakers are betting on battery electric vehicles for the passenger market and delivery trucks."Dec 12, 2020

Only on Wall Street, which does not need to worry about actual physics or engineering.

... or even cash flow and profits.

Only because natural gas is so damn cheap it almost isn't worth selling.

If you're a natural gas producer, it makes a lot of sense to pump hydrogen fuel. Ignorant* people think it is green, so it is an easy sell to the populous. Since it is actually made from NatGas, the success of hydrogen would be a significant boon to a substance that has been teetering on the edge of being industrial waste for years.

* Unknowing, not stupid.

In theory you can capture the carbon at the point source. It would be far cheaper than capturing it directly from the air.

Although I think turning natural gas into hydrogen is wasteful it still proves that current usage of fossil fuels is not sustainable by showing that a "sort of" sustainable way of using fossil fuels exists.

Where from? I've seen a couple of big government grants announced (which honestly smell more of pork than genuine technology) but nothing approaching a useful prototype that's in any way competitive with battery EVs.

I see the opposite happening - electric winning and hydrogen losing. Airbus still wants to make hydrogen planes by.. 2035.

if something happened before the internet or since, but it's archived properly, did it really happen? :-P

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