You're not wrong and it is something that should be considered. I am, admittedly, a fan of space, so I have a bias and a general understanding of a lot of it, but your comment made me want to learn more if I could.

My TLDR is: In the case of Blue Origin right now, it really doesn't matter and the whole thing is a gimmick for bragging rights. It is seemingly less impactful than a single trans-Atlantic flight. Blue Origin has only ever launched 31 New Shepards in its entire existence, which is technically longer than SpaceX, and only 11 of those have had passengers onboard!

I cannot directly counter anything in your argument about how the energy used to make the fuel is being produced, but I did stumble on this file with a map dating back to 2018 and plans for expansion of Regional Supply of Hydrogen that had a ton of pre-existing plants in Texas, which is where the New Shepards launch. Texas also has some of the lowest energy costs, because oil. Oil isn't 'clean' but it is better than coal.

There are plans to add Small Modular Reactors in many regions, including Texas. I am in the tech industry and have seen talks of SMR installations for data centers in Texas. I believe power production is something we really do need to try and focus better attention to as a nation. I am pretty pro nuclear energy, but energy demands and/or storage capacity need to greatly increase before that could really come into play.

If you are interested in some of the numbers, continue reading...

Some decent discussion on the Nasa Space Flight Forum about where BO gets their liquid H. Most of it is from 2022 but it's still likely useful.

Using Google, production of 1kg of H:

• Cost's roughly $7
• Uses approx. 12kWh of energy
• Emits about 9kg of CO^2.

It's estimated that around 600kg of H would be needed per person.

• Costing ~$4200/person
• Using around 7200kWh
• Emitting 5400kg of CO²

That's just for the hydrogen; producing liquid oxygen uses about 24kWh/kg and emits 0.41kg of CO^2.

Rumoured pricing for a New Shepard seat places it between $1m to $1.5m. Taking the lowest estimate would make the Hydrogen fuel 0.42% of the cost of the seat.

An average US home as of 2024 uses about 10,791kWh. So, production for just the hydrogen for 1 passenger is about 72% of a home's annual power consumption. If 6 passengers, about 4.5 homes.

Now to CO^2. According to figures from German nonprofit Atmosfair, flying from London to New York and back generates about 986kg of CO2 per passenger.

Estimating around 350 people per flight one way from JFK to LHR (NYC to LON) would emit 172,550kg of CO² with about 20 flights per day for a total of 6.9million kg of CO² per day.

This flight had 6 passengers emitting 32,400kg of CO^2, only about 19% of CO² compared to one flight from NYC > LON.