Edmund Storms <stor...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
> As you can see, the political will does not exist to do anything heroic. > The will is not even present to develop cold fusion, which in any > case would require years before it had any impact at all. > Political will to act has often appeared very quickly, sometimes overnight, sometimes within hours of a triggering event. Dramatic examples include: the US response to the attack on Pearl Harbor, the fall of the Berlin wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Never underestimate people's ability to act in their own best interests, quickly and rationally, in response to a crisis. Look at the way people living in England responded to the Black plague. They kept what we now call "essential services" going. They kept millions of people alive even while they risked and often lost their lives. Freeman Dyson wrote, ". . . [The] experiences of World War II made an indelible impression on people of my generation. At the bottom of our hearts we still believe you can have anything you want in five years if you need it badly enough and if you are prepared to slog your way through the barriers of confusion and incompetence to get it . . . The accepted wisdom says that, no matter what we decide to do about economic problems, we cannot expect to see any substantial results [for 15 years]. The accepted wisdom is no doubt correct, if we continue to play the game by the rules of today. But anyone who lived through World War II knows that the rules can be changed very fast when the necessity arises." If it becomes generally known that cold fusion is real, similar dramatic events might ensue. You claim that it would take years for cold fusion to have an effect. How many years? Ten or 20 would be enough. The U.S. built all of the armaments of WWII starting form nothing in 1938. By 1945 it had manufactured a mass of equipment -- ships, guns, airplanes and so on -- greater than the mass of equipment we would need today to reverse global warming or replace most energy sources with cold fusion. - Jed
