Then what? Once you've got your hands on this invisible vapor, it's almost impossible to hold onto hydrogen.

“Hydrogen is the Houdini of elements,” observes energy reporter Alice Friedemann. “As soon as you've gotten it into a container, it wants to get out, and since it's the lightest of all gases, it takes a lot of effort to keep it from escaping.”

Liquid hydrogen stored in a vehicle's tank expands rapidly as it warms and boils off, rising like a zeppelin because it's 15- times lighter than air - and dropping the fuel gauge on the universe's most abundant element and exclusive commodity. After nine days, half your tank of explosive hydrogen will have vented overboard. So if you park your Hydrogen 7 in a closed garage, you will void BMW's warranty. And possibly the garage, as well.

“Hydrogen isn't an energy source - it's an energy carrier, like a battery,” instructs energy reporter Alice Friedemann. “You have to make it and put energy into it, both of which take energy. Ninety-six percent is made from fossil fuels.”

In fact, almost all of the hydrogen made in the United States comes from natural gas - “with an efficiency of 72%, which means you've just lost 28% of the energy contained in the natural gas to make it,” science writer Friedemann continues. “And that doesn't count the energy it took to extract and deliver the natural gas to the hydrogen plant.”

Another thing:

“When it's made from natural gas, nitrogen oxides are released, which are 58-times more effective in trapping heat than carbon dioxide,” Friedemann frets. This is the same ozone-eating nitrogen oxide released round-the-clock into Earth's upper atmosphere by armadas of airliners. Which is why cheap air travel has become so species-limiting.

By the way, natural gas is running out in North America.

“Supply is really tight,” cautions Paul Roberts, author of The End of Oil. And don't forget, reminds James Howard Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency: “Natural gas doesn't deplete slowly like oil, following a predictable bell curve pattern. It simply stops coming out of the ground very suddenly.”

We could import LNG in giant ships. Someday. But a Liquid Natural Gas terminal is a spark's - or terrorist's - dream. “It will take at least a decade to even begin replacing natural gas with imported liquid natural gas,” Alice Friedemann comments. And since it takes more energy to make hydrogen than that gas can store, “Making LNG is so energy intensive that it would be economically and environmentally insane to use it as a source of hydrogen.”

At least insanity isn't in short supply in the White House!

Imagine filling your gas tank and pumping that much fuel on the ground.

Handling compressed hydrogen is tricky because it wants to escape and explode. Handling liquid hydrogen at -423 F is a nightmare because it makes pipes and seals brittle - and also wants to explode. Either way, you need a heavy tank to haul it around. According to the U.S. National Highway Safety Traffic Administration, “Vehicle weight reduction is probably the most powerful technique for improving fuel economy. Each ten percent reduction in weight improves the fuel economy of a new vehicle design by approximately eight percent.”

And vice-versa.

But that much-maligned airship burned so ferociously because the butyl “dope” used for the first time to seal its giant outer gas bags somehow ignited. BMW has crashed its car, shot bullets into tanks filled with hydrogen, and roasted them in 1,830F flames for 70 minutes - and Stuttgart is still standing. As BMW exec Andreas Klugescheid declares, “It's not the Hindenburg.”

With the tigers in our tanks going the way of tigers in the jungle, BMW says that 300 of its 7,500 engineers are focusing flat-out on hydrogen. Der Spiegel reports that instead of being worried, BMW's competitors are “somewhat puzzled” by the company's decision to adapt high performance combustion engines to run on a fuel “as sensitive and problematic” as liquid hydrogen.

“We think it's nonsense,” says Frank Seyfried, research director for hydrogen fuel cell propulsion at Volkswagen.

“The fuel cell itself, although it works well in the lab, it's still very expensive,” Paul Roberts cautions. “There are so many things that we don't know about how reliable it is. We don't know how to put a fuel tank on a car that actually lasts long enough. These are all engineering hurdles that can be solved with additional research, but still, it takes time. Then you have to figure out how to manufacture these cars at a scale to bring the price down. Then you have to figure out a way to fuel them… And then you have to get it at such a way so that people don't kill themselves when we are dispensing it.

“It's going to take decades to figure all this stuff out. Hydrogen probably has a lot of potential and it will probably be an important part of the energy mix sometime in the future, but it's not going to happen anytime soon.”

“At this stage, they have low reliability, have yet to achieve a driving range of more than 100 miles, and can't compete with electric hybrids like the Toyota Prius, which is already more energy efficient and low in CO2 generation than projected fuel cells,” adds energy teacher Farrell.

"All of a sudden Shell joined our board, and then the interest grew very quickly" remembers NHA vice president, Karen Miller. "Our chair last year was from BP; this year our chair is from ChevronTexaco."

Just as they had once lobbied to rip up trolley tracks to ensure America's oil-dependent suburban sprawl, the big U.S. automakers and oil companies hijacked hydrogen in the U.S. by pushing Washington to subsidize and "emphasize" fossil fuels in the national energy plan for hydrogen, MJ's Barry Lynn revealed.

Eight years ago, after killing off the resurgence of the electric car by forcing California to back away from its pending "zero emissions" regulations for 10% of all new vehicles to be sold there, the auto-oil mafia formed the International Hydrogen Infrastructure Group to keep tabs on federal officials charged with developing fuel cells. "Basically," says Neil Rossmeissl, a hydrogen standards expert at the Department of Energy, "what they do is look over our shoulder at doe to make sure we are doing what they think is the right thing."

BP, Chevron-Texaco, ExxonMobil, Ford and General Electric bought "many of America's top energy scientists, devoting more than $270 million to hydrogen research at MIT, Princeton, and Stanford," MJ reported. With at least several hundred billion bucks invested in peak oil, "There is a real interest in keeping and utilizing that infrastructure in the future," says former president of Texaco Technology Ventures, Frank Ingriselli. "And these companies certainly have the balance sheets and wherewithal to make it happen."

But do they have the oil?

Meanwhile...

"The American public continues sleepwalking into a future of energy scarcity, climate change, and geopolitical turmoil," end of oilman James Kunstler declares. "Oil production in the U.S. peaked in 1970. We're now producing about half of what we did then, and our own production continues to run down steadily.

"The issue is not about running out - it's about what happens when you head over the all-time production peak down the slippery slope of depletion. And what happens is that the complex systems we depend on for everyday life in advanced societies begin to falter, wobble, and fail - and the failures in each system will in turn weaken the others. By complex systems I mean the way we produce our food, the way we conduct manufacture and trade, the way we operate banking and finance, the way we move people and things from one place to another, and the way we inhabit the landscape."

Mark that on your calendar. "We won't really run out of oil," Roberts explains. "Because before oil runs out, it will become too expensive to use."

Our high dive off the oil peak, "will have massive consequences for the world economy and the way that we live our lives," reports The Independent. ?If consumption begins to exceed production by even the smallest amount, the price of oil could soar above $100 a barrel. In the 1970s, a reduction of just 5% caused a price increase of more than 400%. A reduction of as little as 10 to 15% could cripple oil-dependent industrial economies? committed to making the transition to fossil fuel-derived hydrogen.

And aren't we running out of water? "An epic drought in Georgia threatens the water supply for millions... Florida doesn't have nearly enough water... The Great Lakes are shrinking," AP reported in October 2007. "Across America, the nation's freshwater supplies can no longer quench its thirst. The government projects that at least 36 states will face water shortages within five years."

"Unfortunately, there's just not going to be any more cheap water," says Randy Brown, Pompano Beach's utilities director.

And you want to feed lakes of this liquid to cars?

This doesn't mean that carjacking America's energy future isn't going to make the usual suspects even richer. Though largely unreported by big corporate networks ever-mindful of their sponsors, the working sessions that developed Bush's Energy Roadmap five years ago "were dominated by representatives from the oil, coal, and nuclear industries," MJ discovered.

This team "will ensure that the new technology remains firmly in the hands of the top corporations," remarked energy watchdog, Dale Allen Pfeiffer.

"All the emphasis was on how the process would benefit traditional energy industries," recalls Mike Nicklas, one of 224 energy experts invited by the U.S. Department of Energy to develop a roadmap that ignores every Detour, Bridge Out and Road Closed sign leading off the oil chasm.

Nicklas sat on a committee chaired by a ChevronTexaco executive. "The whole meeting had been staged to get a particular result, which was a plan to extract hydrogen from fossil fuels and not from renewables," the chair of the American Solar Energy Society later said. With cheap oil rapidly running out, the resulting plan for America's energy "does not call for a single ounce of hydrogen to come from power generated by the sun or the wind."

Instead of investing in the renewable energy revolution currently sweeping Europe, Scandinavia, Britain and China, Bush asked Congress for more than $22 million to produce hydrogen from coal, nuclear power and natural gas. At the same time, overall funding for renewable research and energy conservation was slashed by more than $86 million.

"Cutting R&D for renewable sources and replacing them with fossil and nuclear doesn't make for a sustainable approach," observed Jason Mark, director of the clean vehicles program for the Union of Concerned Scientists.

But it will keep those dinosaurs grazing until the lights go out.

Talk about faith-based initiatives!

Energy experts say that driving gasoline cars is more energy efficient than using that same petroleum to make hydrogen for fuel cells. “If the hydrogen does not come from renewable sources,” says John Heywood, director of MIT's Sloan Automotive Lab, “then it is simply not worth doing, environmentally or economically.”

But it is worth doing.

If you happen to profit from oil, natural gas or coal.

She's not alone. German energy experts from the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy say that rushing into a hydrogen-based economy like freaked out addicts looking for our next fix is nuts - or as they put it, “not an ecologically sound” idea.

While California Rep. John Doolittle was exuberantly extolling the new energy bill's hydrogen fuel subsidies at a crowded Capitol Hill news conference, Rep. Pombo turned to House Majority Whip Roy Blunt and whispered, “This is bullshit.”

Pombo later explained that Bush's plan to lavish $2 billion developing hydrogen-fueled cars is “not a short-term solution because we just don't have the technology to produce it.” And the hydrogen cars are “multimillion-dollar prototypes that nobody's going to buy.”

Aussie car testers agree, saying, “This technology is still in its infancy and will take many decades to refine and improve.

Washington's National Resources Defense Council also concur that wagering America's energy needs on fuel-cell technology “means having to wait 15 to 20 years to produce cleaner cars and wean the country off of oil.”

But we don't have 20 years to get off the oil teat. “Hydrogen cars are a poor short-term strategy, and it's not even clear that they are a good idea in the long term,” Alex Farrell concludes.

“Our environmental problems are serious and growing now,” comments a blogger named Nico. “And while President Bush trumpets the long-term gains of hydrogen, he's actually reducing investment in clean technologies that already exist, sopping the profit-flushed fossil fuel industries with billions in subsidies, and actively opposing efforts to make today's cars and trucks cleaner and more fuel-efficient.”

When Bill Reinert, U.S. manager of Toyota's advanced technologies group, was asked in January 2005 when fuel cell cars would replace gasoline-powered cars, he replied, “If I told you 'never,' would you be upset?” Thanks to internet lobbying, the world's leading hybrid carmaker is moving towards plug-ins.

Former acting Assistant Secretary of Energy, Joseph Romm took a long look and wrote, The Hype about Hydrogen: Fact and Fiction in the Race to Save the Climate. His verdict?

But “better fuel efficiency” for individual transportation is still not going to meet the immediate 90% reduction in fossil fuel use scientists say is necessary to keep Earth's fast-rising temperatures within a three-degree coping range as world population soars toward 8 billion wannabe drivers.

Walking, bicycling, mass transit, ride sharing, car co-oping, short-range electric vehicles, and just staying home are much better immediate, low-cost responses to transporting our bodies and goods through converging climate and oil shocks. To really beat the coming carbon crunch, James Kunstler and other energy experts say we are going to have to drastically downsize our over-consumptive lifestyles, provide more for ourselves locally, and quickly curtail our wasteful energy use.

What's wrong with that?

Paying attention is always a useful exercise. The karmic choice is up to each of us. Instead of indulging in hydrogen hallucinations like nodding carbon junkies, we can make conscious individual and neighborhood transitions to less-stressed lives of voluntary simplicity now.

Or we can deal with the dizzying disruptions of involuntary simplicity tomorrow.

Either way, we will all be arriving on a very different planet Earth shortly.

And yes, there will be a timed, pop quiz.

It's strictly pass-fail.