text: So it is more or less inevitable that we will indeed burn hydrogen, the most pristine of all fuels, just as they hope. And we will accept that the only readily available supplies of hydrogen in unburnt form are in gas, oil and coal. The policy will be to burn more fossil fuel, less efficiently--to extract a lot less heat out of the same amount of fuel. Even as manufacturers struggle to design new car engines that go farther on the same amount of heat. We will raise efficiency at every stage of the energy pipeline except at the source, where we will reduce it, drastically, far more than we can raise it in any of the tiers above. This may perhaps save the ice caps. It certainly won't ruin the oil companies.