When I wrote my book in 2004, I said that the energy sector has roughly 1.2 million workers. See chapter 20 table 20.1. Let's have another look at the numbers.
Employment in fossil fuel has not changed much since 2004. The number of people employed in alternative energy such as wind energy has increased. Here are some sources of information about overall employment and energy sector employment. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS): http://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/ceseeb1a.htm#ce_ee_table1a.f.1 Alternative energy employment: http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2014/01/60-seconds-of-thought-on-60-minutes-recent-clean-energy-bashing-vignette The latter says that the solar sector employs 119,000 people, and the wind energy sector employs 75,000 people. It says the biofuels industry "directly employed" 87,000 people in 2012. As I said, fossil fuel employment has not changed much since 2004. It still employs roughly 1.2 million people. The vast majority of these workers are the 868,000 people who work in gasoline stations. If cold fusion replaces conventional energy sources most of these 1.2 million people will lose their jobs, but many of the people working in gasoline stations may migrate to other retail jobs. Most gas stations nowadays double as convenience stores, and some may stay in business. The BLS table lists the number of people employed in gas stations: Gasoline stations with convenience stores: 755,000 other gasoline stations: 112,000 Here are some of the changes in fossil fuel employment since I wrote the book: Number of people employed in 2004 versus 2013 in -- Oil and gas extraction 132,000 versus 198,000 Coal mining: 75,000 versus 86,000 Gasoline stations: 868,000 versus 867,000 You see that solar and wind employment greatly outnumbers coal mining. This is why coal miners have less influence in Washington than they used to, and why the coal industry is fighting to prevent the use of wind turbines. Wind turbines now produce roughly 5% of US electricity. This means they have taken roughly 10% of the coal industry's earnings. Big coal used to have enormous influence in Washington, yet it has not been able to stop wind energy from taking 10% of its business. This bodes well for cold fusion. I suppose fossil fuel plus alternative energy employment is roughly 1.5 million people. In the book, I wrote: "To put 1.2 million jobs in perspective, 2.8 million people work in food and beverage stores, where pay and job benefits are usually better than at gas stations. Since people will buy the same amount of food, beverages and sundries with or without cold fusion technology, we will need roughly the same number of cash register clerks selling such things. The gas station clerk who moves to a regular grocery store will probably have a better job. These employment projections may underestimate the number of jobs that could be lost, because other industries may be substantially adversely impacted. For example, one fourth of the world’s ships are oil tankers, so shipbuilding may be reduced. On the other hand, it may increase, because cold fusion would be ideal for new Fast Ships or hovercraft, and cold fusion will lower the cost of all transportation, which may spur a worldwide boom in trade. . . ." As you see from the BLS table, 1.5 million is 1% of all workers. To put this in perspective, the Healthcare and social assistance sector employs 17,399,000 people, 12 times more than fossil fuel. I think it is certain that cold fusion will reduce employment in the energy sector to a number close to zero. There may be a few hundred thousand people involved in the research and development in the early phases, but eventually this number will decrease to a few tens of thousands, which I suppose is roughly the number of people actively engaged in semiconductor research. I mean R&D, not semiconductor manufacturing. I think it will take only a few people to produce cold fusion energy for two reasons: 1. The production machinery for cold fusion devices will be run by robots. 2. Cold fusion will be incorporated in engines and generators. Here is what I mean by "incorporated." At present, the BLS shows 37,000 people work manufacturing motors and generators. These same 37,000 people will eventually be manufacturing motors and generators that run on cold fusion. I do not think that a cold fusion automobile engine will be significantly more complicated to manufacture than today's gasoline engine. It will not take many more people, or more metal or other resources. Perhaps it will be somewhat more complicated, similar to a previous hybrid electric gasoline motor. So the mass of motors and generators and the number of units will not be much different than it is today. It will not take many more than 37,000 people to manufacture cold fusion engines. To put it another way, when you manufacture a cold fusion automobile engine, it will include the cold fusion cell at the core, and a built-in supply fuel installed in the factory. I suppose that will be in the form of a small tank of hydrogen or deuterium gas. In the entire US I suppose it will take a few thousand people to manufacture the tanks, purify the gas, and install the tanks in automobile engines and other power supplies. The labor that this handful of people does will replace all of the labor now performed by the 2 million people in the energy sector. I conclude that cold fusion will produce massive unemployment in the energy sector. This is regrettable. However, we cannot expect that cold fusion will solve the energy crisis and prevent global warming without also causing some problems. No solution is perfect. Anytime you fix a problem in society or technology, you always create some number of other problems. There is a nonsensical notion that progress is a zero-sum game. This is sometimes referred to as the law of unintended consequences. The idea is that technology always creates as many problems as it solves. That is completely untrue. Often, most consequences are intended and foreseen. In other cases, the unintended consequences turn out to be additional advantages that people did not anticipate. Many technologies such as LED lighting have almost no deleterious unintended consequences. LED lights have greatly improved people’s lives, especially in the Third World. They have saved thousands of lives; saved money; reduced pollution; reduced resource consumption, especially consumption of kerosene; and in general have done a tremendous amount of good at very low cost, with very few regrettable side effects. I expect that cold fusion will have a similar positive effect with few unfortunate side effects. However one of these side effects will be unemployment. I hope that society as a whole takes steps to mitigate the human suffering this will cause. Cold fusion will have a large deleterious impact on some oil producing countries such as Saudi Arabia, Russia and Venezuela. It will destroy company such as Exxon Mobil. It will bring a quick end to the wind turbine and solar PV industries. Eventually it will destroy the power companies. I feel sorry for the workers in these industries but I do not feel sorry for the stockholders or the management of Exxon Mobil. Those people should have taken note of cold fusion 20 years ago and they should have been the first to develop it. If they had done that, the profits would have come to them, and their future would be secure. - Jed
