For socialists the most important response to the ecological and energy crisis must be the need for revolutionary social change, but many environmentalists propose 'technological fixes.
Anti-GM campaigner and well-known futurologist Jeremy Rifkin gave a good example of this in the Guardian (September 17) when he promoted a 'hydrogen economy' as the only way to lift billions out of poverty.
The idea is to use renewable energy, such as sunlight, wind power etc. to generate electricity. This is then used to split water into its component parts -hydrogen and oxygen.
The hydrogen can be transported to where it is to be used and the main example Rifkin gives is the motor car. He states that because a car's hydrogen fuel cell could be plugged into a house and used to run appliances there, or to even sell electricity to the grid, this is some form of democratic decentralisation of the energy supply. He hails it as the essence of the politics of reglobalisation 'from the bottom up'! issues in generating enough hydrogen to fuel 500 million motor cars, let alone houses as well (and extending electricity supply further into the Third World). One scheme suggests tens of thousands square km of solar panels in the Sahara to generate the electricity.
Another proposal is to grow huge amounts of sugar cane and get the hydrogen chemically from that. Others have suggested making it in vast vats of genetically modified bacteria or algae. The hydrogen would then have to be shipped or piped to where it will be used. Every car would have to store the gas,