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Aircraft engineers in Germany have successfully tested the world’s first four-seater plane that uses emission-free hybrid fuel cells to fly. The 10-minute test flight Thursday at Stuttgart Airport in southwestern Germany involved two pilots and two dummy passengers. The twin-cabin plane, known as HY4, was developed by aircraft maker Pipistrel, fuel cell specialist Hydrogenics, the University of Ulm and the German Aerospace Center DLR. …

The once-distant promise of clean, affordable hydrogen-powered cars is starting to become a reality. Several major automakers, including Toyota, Honda and Hyundai, have started or will soon start selling these cars, which will be more expensive than comparable gasoline models but a lot cheaper than they were just a few years ago. Executives at Toyota say that the cost of making the critical components of hydrogen vehicles has fallen 95 percent since 2008. […] The broad adoption of hydrogen-powered cars, which emit only water and heat, could play an important role, along with electric vehicles, in lowering emissions of carbon...

WASHINGTON — Cars powered by hydrogen fuel cells, once hailed by President George W. Bush as a pollution-free solution for reducing the nation’s dependence on foreign oil, will not be practical over the next 10 to 20 years, the energy secretary said Thursday, and the government will cut off funds for the vehicles’ development. Developing those cells and coming up with a way to transport the hydrogen is a big challenge, Energy Secretary Steven Chu said in releasing energy-related details of the administration’s budget for the year beginning Oct. 1. Dr. Chu said the government preferred to focus on projects...

It is unfortunate that the mayor of Columbia and several influential professors at USC have been snookered into believing there is a future in hydrogen fuel cells. A lot of starry-eyed futurists have been telling us for the past 30 years that hydrogen fuel cells are the way of the future, but the science is not on their side. Some fuel cell advocates continue to say that fuel cells are twice as efficient as internal combustion engines, but the facts are otherwise. The recent study by the National Academy of Sciences shows that proton exchange membrane fuel cells (the type...

President Bush, a former Texas oilman, is not exactly the environmentalists' favorite eco-warrior. Even so, he has put himself at the forefront of one of their crusades.On Thursday, Bush called on Congress to approve $1.2 billion in research funding for hydrogen-fueled cars. "I'm going to work with the Congress to move this nation forward on hydrogen fuel cell technologies," he said, repeating a proposal in last week's State of the Union address. "It is in our national interest that we do so."Bush is proposing other hydrogen-related projects too. All told, he wants to spend $1.7 billion on research over five...