Now This Is Good

Many of our problems, economic and political, could be solved if we were less dependent upon foreign oil.

The first real step in that direction was just taken.

The new pump at the Shell station on Benning Road NE in the District doesn't look much different from the others, but it represents a new concept in automotive technology: hydrogen power.

The hydrogen-dispensing pump is the first installed at a public gas station in the country, according to officials from Shell Hydrogen and General Motors Corp., who will team up today to introduce it.

Liberals are naturally skeptical: "The major unanswered questions about hydrogen are not whether you can run a car on it. They are, how do you make it? What is it going to cost? And what is going to be the public investment in infrastructure?" said David Hamilton, director of global warming and energy programs at the Sierra Club. The Shell station on Benning Road NE is "devoid of economic reality. [Hydrogen power] doesn't exist in the real world except as a hugely subsidized example of something that the companies want you to see."

So even when they get exactly what they want, liberals still see it as a payoff to Halliburton.