Whether hydrogen becomes the people's energy depends, to a large extent, on how it is harnessed in the early stages of development. The global energy and utility companies will make every effort to control access to this new, decentralized energy network just as software, telecommunications and content companies like Microsoft and AOL Time Warner have attempted to control access to the World Wide Web. It is critical that public institutions and nonprofit organizations--local governments, cooperatives, community development corporations, credit unions and the like--become involved early on in establishing distributed-generation associations (DGAs) in every country. Again, the analogy to the World Wide Web is apt. In the new hydrogen energy era, millions of end users will generate their own "content" in the form of hydrogen and electricity. By organizing collectively to control the energy they produce--just as workers in the twentieth century organized into unions to control their labor power--end users can better dictate the terms with commercial suppliers of fuel cells for lease, purchase or other use arrangements and with virtual utility companies, which will manage the decentralized "smart" energy grids. Creating the appropriate partnership between commercial and noncommercial interests will be critical to establishing the legitimacy, effectiveness and long-term viability of the new energy regime.

I have been describing, thus far, the implementation of hydrogen power mainly in industrialized countries, but it could have an even greater impact on emerging nations. The per capita use of energy throughout the developing world is a mere one-fifteenth of the consumption enjoyed in the United States. The global average per capita energy use for all countries is only one-fifth the level of this country. Lack of access to energy, especially electricity, is a key factor in perpetuating poverty around the world. Conversely, access to energy means more economic opportunity. In South Africa, for example, for every 100 households electrified, ten to twenty new businesses are created. Making the shift to a hydrogen energy regime--using renewable resources and technologies to produce the hydrogen--and creating distributed generation energy webs that can connect communities all over the world could lift billions of people out of poverty. As the price of fuel cells and accompanying appliances continues to plummet with innovations and economies of scale, they will become far more broadly available, as was the case with transistor radios, computers and cellular phones. The goal ought to be to provide stationary fuel cells for every neighborhood and village in the developing world.

Renewable energy technologies--wind, photovoltaic, hydro, biomass, etc.--can be installed in villages, enabling them to produce their own electricity and then use it to separate hydrogen from water and store it for subsequent use in fuel cells. In rural areas, where commercial power lines have not yet been extended because they are too expensive, stand-alone fuel cells can provide energy quickly and cheaply.

After enough fuel cells have been leased or purchased, and installed, mini energy grids can connect urban neighborhoods as well as rural villages into expanding energy networks. The HEW can be built organically and spread as the distributed generation becomes more widely used. The larger hydrogen fuel cells have the additional advantage of producing pure drinking water as a byproduct, an important consideration in village communities around the world where access to clean water is often a critical concern.

Were all individuals and communities in the world to become the producers of their own energy, the result would be a dramatic shift in the configuration of power: no longer from the top down but from the bottom up. Local peoples would be less subject to the will of far-off centers of power. Communities would be able to produce many of their own goods and services and consume the fruits of their own labor locally. But, because they would also be connected via the worldwide communications and energy webs, they would be able to share their unique commercial skills, products and services with other communities around the planet. This kind of economic self-sufficiency becomes the starting point for global commercial interdependence, and is a far different economic reality from that of colonial regimes of the past, in which local peoples were made subservient to and dependent on powerful forces from the outside. By redistributing power broadly to everyone, it is possible to establish the conditions for a truly equitable sharing of the earth's bounty. This is the essence of reglobalization from the bottom up.

Two great forces have dominated human affairs over the course of the past two centuries. The American Revolution unleashed a new human aspiration to universalize the radical notion of political democracy. That force continues to gain momentum and will likely spread to the Middle East, China and every corner of the earth before the current century is half over.

A second force was unleashed on the eve of the American Revolution when James Watt patented his steam engine, inaugurating the beginning of the fossil-fuel era and an industrial way of life that fundamentally changed the way we work.

The problem is that these two powerful forces have been at odds with each other from the very beginning, making for a deep contradiction in the way we live our lives. While in the political arena we covet greater participation and equal representation, our economic life has been characterized by ever greater concentration of power in ever fewer institutional hands. In large part that is because of the very nature of the fossil-fuel energy regime that we rely on to maintain an industrialized society. Unevenly distributed, difficult to extract, costly to transport, complicated to refine and multifaceted in the forms in which they are used, fossil fuels, from the very beginning, required a highly centralized command-and-control structure to finance exploration and production, and coordinate the flow of energy to end users. The highly centralized fossil-fuel infrastructure inevitably gave rise to commercial enterprises organized along similar lines. Recall that small cottage industries gave way to large-scale factory production in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to take advantage of the capital-intensive costs and economies of scale that went hand in hand with steam power, and later oil and electrification. In the discussion of the emergence of industrial capitalism, little attention has been paid to the fact that the energy regime that emerged determined, to a great extent, the nature of the commercial forms that took shape.

Now, on the cusp of the hydrogen era, we have at least the "possibility" of making energy available in every community of the world--hydrogen exists everywhere on earth--empowering the whole of the human race. By creating an energy regime that is decentralized and potentially universally accessible to everyone, we establish the technological framework for creating a more participatory and sustainable economic life--one that is compatible with the principle of democratic participation in our political life. Making the commercial and political arenas seamless, however, will require a human struggle of truly epic proportions in the coming decades. What is in doubt is not the technological know-how to make it happen but, rather, the collective human will, determination and resolve to transform the great hope of hydrogen into a democratic reality.

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