> It's one thing to spend a few million funding some climate change denying think tanks. It's a whole other level of deception to spend hundreds of millions on a technology in the hopes that others will fall for it.
First, anti-science campaign they’ve run is on the order of billions - there were individual “no big deal” ad campaigns measured in millions. It’s truly hard to appreciate the scale of that half-century committed effort to influence the public and politicians around the world, so I would urge extreme skepticism before relying on any of their claims which hasn’t been validated by truly independent sources. Their later green campaigns have been well-publicized but the actual work has been a tiny fraction of their total R&D expenditures.
One of the big things to keep in mind is how often they’ve talked about carbon capture or sequestration far in advance of what the actual technology is capable of. They do that because it allows them to say they’re doing something but just can’t stop business as usual until it’s ready. A key part of this is that they often fund genuine research where the academics involved are really trying to make progress but it’s just a hard problem.
What I would worry about with hydrogen is continuing what we’ve seen since the 1970s: big promises but no meaningful impact at reducing use of fossil fuel. That comes in two forms: the most obvious is simply that there aren’t many hydrogen cars you can buy and the logistics are daunting so most people don’t buy it (or literally cannot because e.g. they don’t live near one of the few dozen stations in the entire state of California). Things like storage and transportation still have significant unsolved problems before they’re ready for mainstream adoption.
The second would be more subtle: currently, almost all hydrogen is produced from hydrocarbons. It is very easy to imagine a campaign selling the image of solar powered electrolysis but relying on fossil fuels “at first”, where the companies know there’s a huge gap before the process doesn’t depend on things which emit CO2. That’s the scenario I had in mind, where there’d be a likely legal defense that they were just too darn optimistic about being able to switch.