The Effects of Some Miraculous Breakthrough in Clean Energy
From my feed at Quora.com: Suppose cold fusion (or some other source of clean and abundant energy) was developed by China. How would this affect the current geopolitical status of the world? What would this mean for oil producers? Would USA and Russia try to destroy this kind of technology at any cost? How would this affect everyday life of regular people once the technology becomes publicly available?
Response #1: Since cold fusion is a myth, we might as well call it flubber.
If flubber existed, would US and Russia try to destroy the technology? No, we’d probably try to copy it, and/or claim simultaneous invention — flubbersky, perhaps. I’d like to think it would make the US happy, because we could stop caring about the middle east.
My response:
That’s very clever. The author of Response #1 is right about cold fusion, though I have to admit that I was a believer as a young man. Of course, I believed in all manner of nutty stuff as a young man.
As far as the guts of your question are concerned, this calls for speculation, but since you asked, here you go: The response above requires us to posit a moral goodness to the US, which I don’t, especially given that it’s essentially governed by corporate interests, though they’re not necessarily immoral, are certainly amoral. Are we to believe that the oil companies are going to fold their tents and embrace this new zero-profit energy alternative? That our military-industrial complex would rather not continue to play its role as butt-kicker all around the world?
If any of this were true, we would have already seen ample evidence of it. For years, our climate scientists have been calling for a program of the scope of the Apollo space program to build out low-carbon forms of energy. Do you see a concerted effort taking place here? I don’t.
As Alexis de Tocqueville commented in the 19th Century: ‘America is great because she is good. If America ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.’ He was exactly right, which is very bad news for the long-term hegemony of the US as a superpower.
