Put this down as example #31415927 of journalistic inability to get basic facts right when it come to subjects that are slightly difficult like GCSE (high-school or pre-high-school for the Yanks) chemistry. This AFP article about Fuel-cell cars contains the following sentence:
There are still a number of barriers to the commercialization of hydrogen-powered cars. One is the infrastructure cost of building refueling stations. Another big challenge is reducing the cost of obtaining hydrogen itself, which has to be extracted from fossil fuels, such as carbon, or from water.
Err Carbon is not a fossil fuel it is an element and as anyone who did GCSE chemistry knows you can't turn one element into another via chemical means - this is why the alchemists attempts to turn lead into gold never worked. The only way to obtain Hydrogen from Carbon would be via nuclear fission and if we go down that path then we probably don't need hydrogen in the first place...
It seems to me that the "journalism as profession" and "only mainstream media is accurate" things are getting ever more frayed. Or at least the qualifications for being a journalist or editor appear to include a requirement to be totally ignorant of basic science.
I despise l'Escroc and Vile
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