The Governator is on a roll

Dick Morris, writing for the New York Post, has this to say:

We'll never change the Constitution to let him become president, but Arnold Schwarzenegger is conducting a one-man revolution aimed at providing presidential leadership.

The East Coast media has missed the full dimensions of the California governor's accomplishments and bold proposals. Together, they constitute one of the most astounding, imaginative and forward-thinking agendas in our recent history.

The things that Governor Schwarzenegger is doing can be summed up as follows:

• Promote use of hydrogen as fuel for automobiles.


• Promoting a voter initiative to have legislative and congressional districts drawn by independent jurists who aren't permitted to take account of incumbency or party in creating the districts.


• Eliminate public school teacher tenure and pay and promote teachers based on merit instead.

These are all worthy goals, however I do have a problem with some aspects of the first one. According to Morris:

With financing projected to come one-third each from federal, state and private sources, California will offer hydrogen fuel every few miles in urban areas and at least every 20 miles along the highway system by 2010. Eventually, he and the leaders of Washington, Oregon, Baja California and British Columbia will work together to create a "hydrogen highway" that will run from B.C. (British Columbia) to B.C. (Baja California).

The Schwarzenegger plan calls for state-subsidized production of hydrogen and for tax incentives for those who purchase hydrogen cars.

As usual, it's government and taxpayer money that is being touted as the answer to this problem. Well, if a state wants to do that, then fine. That's what states' rights is about. The use of Federal tax revenue to support this is, at the very least, questionable, and more probably unconstitutional. But then so is most of what the Federal government does anyway.

Replacing gasoline engines with hydrogen-fuel cells would eliminate two-thirds of America's need for oil — a demand that we could meet entirely with domestically produced oil.

Now that sounds impressive but it ignores a very basic fact which is that the hydrogen has to come from somewhere. Generating hydrogen requires energy. I've heard that it may be possible to get it from ethanol, which of course comes from plants. If sufficient quantities can be obtained using that method, which would also probably require burning some of that ethanol to provide the energy to crack the rest, then great. Otherwise it will have to be supplemented with other energy sources such as hydroelectric, nuclear, or burning of coal and/or petroleum fuels. In other words, it may be possible, but it's not nearly as simple as this article makes it sound.