Jones Beene wrote:
> > JR: That is incorrect for several reasons.... First, oil company > presidents, a U.S. Vice President and most recently the Japanese Min. of > Science and Technology have told cold fusion researchers that they will not > allow funding for cold fusion research because if it works it would "disrupt > the energy economy." > > My response: That is naive if not absurd - and I seriously doubt that it > ever happened! I am quite certain it happened. It was recent. I spoke with the Japanese researchers present at the meetings, and I trust them completely. Plus I myself have heard similar sentiments from powerful, high level people in the U.S. and the U.K. such as Zimmerman. Money is fungible, profits are profits and there would be plenty of profits > which are substituted and shifted to LENR manufacturers (or BLP or MPI or to > any breakthrough) If this were true, sailing ship makers would have made steel steam ships, the railroads would have started airline companies, and Data General would be selling PCs. Coal companies today are not investing in wind energy. On the contrary, their lackeys in the U.S. Congress (Big Coal, WV) are trying to pass laws banning the use of wind energy in the U.S. Nuclear, oil and coal companies spread nonsensical rumors about wind at every opportunity. That phoney 'distuption' argument is like saying that computers were once > frowned-on by the authorities because they disupted the typewriter economy. > Silly. Which authorities? The typewriter company executives sure did! The typewriter divisions at IBM and other companies did, in some cases preventing the companies from entering the computer market until it was too late. In the late 1970s, I knew executives and staff members at U.S. computer and telephone equipment companies who where fired because they purchased personal computers (then called "microcomputers") and advocated their use to replace the mini- and mainframe products the companies sold. I myself worked for a brief stint (6 mos) doing technical writing at a major U.S. computer company where the headquarters banned the use of word processor running their own equipment, because a woman at headquarters ran a fiefdom with dozens of secretaries. She insisted that the tech writers use ordinary typewriters and Fed Ex and the pages every night halfway accross the country where "her girls" would "keypunch" them into the mainframe. Note that there was no technical impediment to using a word processor. Soon after I left that place, I myself wrote a capable word processing program for technical papers that ran on a minicomputer much smaller than the one we used there, with a 12 MB disk. It took me a couple of weeks. There is NO organized energy conspiracy! Zero. This is correct. The opposition to cold fusion is entirely unorganized and spontaneous. There is, on the other hand, a well organized conspiracy to promote plasma fusion, with headquarters in Gaithersburg, MD close to the DoE (http://fusionpower.org/), and those people attack and ridicule cold fusion whenever the topic come up or when a member of Congress asks the DoE for advice on cold fusion. There is also the infamous and continuing opposition to cold fusion by the plasma fusion researchers at MIT, which was well documented by Mallove and others. Anyone who thinks this is not motivated by academic rivalry for funding is nuts. The bottom line advantage must and will include full taxable profits - and > our government generally does not care who makes the profits, so long as > they can tax them. If you have been reading the newspapers for the last 8 years, you will have noticed that our government (and the Japanese government to a lesser extent) is run by oil company executives who stifled the development of plug-in hybids and higher fuel efficiency and went to war mainly to secure cheap oil, even though these policies cause global warming and lead to the destruction of GM. Such people will stop at nothing to prevent the development of cold fusion. Their favorite tactic is to smear, lie, or fire scientists who express interest in cold fusion, or support for it. That's what Robert Park and Peter Zimmerman themselves told me, in person, to my face. "We will root out and fire anyone who even talks about cold fusion." They were not kidding. Why do you suppose the Washington Post, Time magazine and other major media regularly attack cold fusion researchers as liars, criminals and lunatics? Do you suppose they really believe that? Or that they are completely unaware of the progress in cold fusion? I assure you, decision makers in every government on earth and every major corporation have read cold fusion papers. Most of them have downloaded the entire LENR-CANR library. Granted, most big wig decision makers know nothing about cold fusion, but hundreds of thousands of experts are aware of the claims, and there is no chance whatever that they seriously believe the researchers are liars or lunatics. Robert Park says this at every opportunity, whenever the Washington Post or some Congressman calls him, but I have a recent photo of him eating lunch with some leading cold fusion researchers. These are people he has known for years in other capacities, and he knows darn well that they are smart and sane. His attacks are pure politics. Of course there are many ignorant attacks at places like Wikipedia which are not political in nature, and probably not made by people with a vested interest in preventing cold fusion research. Also, these people know nothing about the research, whereas Park probably does, even though he claims he has never read a paper. - Jed
