<[email protected]> wrote: Yes has you read Lights in a Tunnel it is shareware and goes through this. > > Would free energy mean more or less jobs, perhaps Jed knows. >
When I wrote the book in 2004, in chapter 20 on employment I said that cold fusion would not have a large impact. Nearly everyone in the energy business will be put out of work, but a surprisingly small number of people work in that sector. Back then it was 1.2 million people in the U.S., including 0.9 million at gas stations. Many gas stations double as convenience stores, so not all of those people will lose their jobs. 1.2 million seems like lot, but consider that 6 million worked in "finance and insurance" back then. I concluded that this will not a big problem as long as society as a whole takes steps to re-employ people from energy sector. About half of them are highly skilled people who can build other things we will need, such as desalination plants for my pet megaproject (see chapter 8). The bigger question is: will the aggregate impact of cold fusion likely reduce employment, or increase it? There are two sets of answers: 1. Answers based on economics. 2. Answers based on technology. 1. Economics I don't know enough about economics to address this in any depth. Hal Fox envisioned an ever increasing economy after cold fusion removes the limits to growth. I don't see how that would work. I can't imagine what we first-world people would need with twice or three times or ten times more GNP. There is a practical limit to consumption. My wife & I have two cars already. We don't need a dozen. I have Netflix and I don't have time to watch more than 2 or 3 movies a month. What would I do with dozens of new movies a month? I sure as heck do not want to consume more healthcare if I can avoid it. I wouldn't want to eat filet mignon every day even if it were grown as cultured meat. No one in Atlanta wants to drive a car if it can be avoided. You could hand out free gasoline and free Mercedes-Benz cars, but you would not increase the consumption of transportation here because the traffic is so bad. I have not read this in the newspapers, but I get a sense that one cause of the Japanese economic doldrums of the last few decades is most people in Japan have enough stuff. Consumer demand is satiated. They reached the practical limits of consumption in the 1980s and 1990s. Population growth came to a halt, so there were no new consumers. Of course there are poor people there. Unfortunately, the number are growing, as is the gap between rich and poor. But most people are middle-class. I know many middle-class professionals of my age. By the 1990s, they all had enough living space (because they are not in Tokyo), plenty of books, electronics, nice cars, televisions, washing machines and so on. They did not need or want anything more. Automobiles and television sales are clearly at the replacement rate, and those machines last a long time. 2. Technology I am well qualified to address this, and I think the answer is clear. It is an easy question. There is no doubt in my mind that cold fusion will take far fewer workers than conventional sources such as fossil fuel, wind or fission. The 1.2 million people in this sector will be replaced with a few thousand people, who manufacture specialized cold fusion related materials and equipment such as finely divided nickel or purified hydrogen. Most energy will be built into the product. For example, automobile engines will have a supply of powder and nickel built in, which is replaced about as often as lubricating oil is now. It will not take any more production line employees to fabricate these engines than it now takes to fabricate something like a Prius hybrid engine. A cold fusion engine will not call for more expensive materials, greater precision, or more labor than conventional engines do, and of course there is no need for fuel. So everyone employed in extracting, purifying, transporting, or refueling engines of all types will be out of a job. In the transportation sector, all of those people will be replaced by a handful of auto mechanics who swap out the powder and hydrogen tank once a year, or once every 5 years. The electric power and natural gas sectors will vanish completely in the time it takes to replace space heating HVAC equipment, water heaters, and so on. That's about 15 years in the residential sector, and 30 in the commercial sector. However, once the electric power and other energy utility companies lose a about a third of the customers and revenues they will collapse. This should happen roughly 8 years into the transition. The U.S. Post Office has lost about 37% of its First Class business because of e-mail and it is on the verge of collapse. European and Japanese post offices survive, but they are downsized. The Japanese Post Office still doubles as a banking and insurance system, I believe. (Not sure what happened to Koizumi's plans to break it up. The actual Post Offices look the same to me.) Twenty years into the transition, there may be a handful of companies still selling oil extracted from the ground, or electricity from hydroelectric dams or fission reactors. They will be bankrupt, and probably supported by last-ditch government loans to prop up a dying industry. We may need to do prop them up long enough for the remaining houses and buildings to be cut over to cold fusion powered equipment. The last gasoline powered cars and gas stations will be long gone. When gas stations lose even 5% of their business, they close in droves. It is a marginal business, hardly profitable in the best of times. There may be a few oil companies selling natural oil from the ground for plastic feedstock or other industrial uses, but I expect it will be cheaper to synthesize hydrocarbons on site at the factories that need them. To summarize, if we decide to live more or less the way we do now, consuming about as much energy per capita as we do now, with roughly as much transportation, space-heating, illumination, data transmission and so on, then cold fusion will reduce overall employment by 1.2 million people. Inexorably. But, if we decide to do megaprojects that only cold fusion would allow, such as irrigating the deserts and colonizing other planets, I suppose overall employment might increase. Perhaps. But I think advances in computers and robotics will reduce employment so much that even megaprojects will not make up for it. Consider that even now, there are more unemployed people in China than the entire U.S. workforce. As Martin Ford (http://www.thelightsinthetunnel.com/) says: "If at some point, machines are likely to permanently take over a great deal of the work now performed by human beings, then that will be a threat to the very foundation of our economic system. This is not something that will just work itself out." - Jed
