<fznidar...@aol.com> 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

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