<[email protected]> wrote: What will happen to my utility pension Jed?
I predict it will be in trouble in 20 years. Fossil fuel companies and the electric power companies will enter into a long period of decline, similar to what the US Post Office is going through now. Except that the post office is likely to survive in some diminished form, whereas conventional energy companies will all vanish, without exception. The first to go will be wind, solar and nuclear fission. In Japan they are already talking about phasing out nuclear power. It used to be considered the cheapest source of electricity but I expect that when you factor in the cost of the Fukushima disaster it is now the most expensive. By the way, the pensions offered by US steel manufacturing automobile companies are in big trouble for another reason. GM would be completely competitive with other US and Japanese manufacturers if it were not for the fact that in the 1950s and 1960s, before robots became common, they employed many workers. Most of those workers are now dead but their wives are still collecting pensions. Until that generation dies off these companies will be settled with a large burden of pension payments. This is no one's fault. That problem will eventually fix itself, but the decline of conventional energy industries is irreversible. - Jed
