Posted on 05/10/2011 6:15:05 PM PDT by Free Vulcan
With coal mines heavily mechanized (if not quite automated although that's probably not that far off), coal has to sell at a sufficiently high price to pay for the electricity and capital costs ~ and the machinery requires a CREW, not just a miner with a pick and shovel.
It's easy to see virtually every coal mine in America falling out of use as the price of coal drops like a rock.
These price collapses will occur BEFORE there are sufficient numbers of cold fusion units to replace their energy output.
All this concern about job displacement is pointless, really. “Displaced” workers won’t disappear. In the aggregate, they will just move into areas created by the new reality of a world transformed by this device/process. Such as having a world populated by many, many small power plants stationed near where they are needed instead of the relative handful of large nuke, coal and gas-fired generating plants and the inefficient cross-country power grid that we now have.
This is not to say that an oil rig roughneck will not have difficulty adapting, many undoubtably will not be able to find a job that will support his oil-funded life style. Bust most will adapt, just like the people that used to work in domestic steel and textile industries. It can be unfortunate but the reality is that skills that were once prized can rather quickly become in low-demand or not necessary at all. Think of the guy/gal that repaired manual typewriters in the 1980’s. By the 90’s he had better have adaptated to servicing computer and printers. Or the guys that maintained our cold-room mainframe computer, disk drives and complicad CADD workstations that went to zero value in the 90’s. We couldnt even give that stuff away to schools. I personal removed all I could out of the mainframe computer so we could muscle it down the freight elevator to the dumpster at the loading dock. Junk...what originally cost over $1 million was now just worthless junk, replaced by PCs, file servers and HP printers and plotters. The point is that labor requirements are always evolving.
Now the group that I fear for? Our accountants and tax lawyers if we ever move to a flat tax. We would have a few million people with truly nothing to do.
The problem is the fuel displacement phenomenon has a very high velocity, and the job creation phenomenon has a lower velocity.
Lots of folks will get left in the lurch.
BTW, this is where I came in. The COAL FIELDS CRASHED as a place of employment in the 1950s. We had wave after wave of economic refugees fleeing Eastern Kentucky, etc. and coming to Indiana for work. Not all fit in. At one time Kentuckians alone constituted over 80% of the criminals in the prisons.
You know that Charlie Manson character? He was part of the wave ~ and unfortunately an all too typical type.
I used to drive home every evening from a place on Washington Street and English avenue in Indianapolis. One day I was driving North minding my business and this two group of hillbillies living in trashed housing areas on either side of English avenue decided to have a shootout! Just missed it but I heard the rounds pinging off the pavement as they fired at each other across the street.
Mississippi was hit with something a little different. Someone invented the cotton picker. Hundreds of thousands of black people fled the South for employment in the North. Mississippi people flocked to Indianapolis, Fort Wayne and Chicago.
They didn't make a dent in the hillbilly crime wave.
The point is people adapt slower than these technologies.
Interesting info. WRT the speed of the changes, I suspect governmental red tape and control (licensing, etc), union (jobs) and enviro (nimby) lawsuits and such things will slow down the conversion process.
For sure, we can bet this will be regulated and taxed to the max as a way to:
1) Smilingly provide the end users w/ cheaper energy, courtesy of your public utility. However...
2) Even though the process may provide cheap energy, governments will, IMO, add massive taxes/fees/’regulation costs’, or whatever they wish to call it to raise the revenues that it seems every country is now needing.
I say that b/c I can’t imagine that politicians could resist claiming a large part of the energy cost gap (old cost vs new cost) via some sort of tax/fee, etc. Can’t let the people have too much freedom, you know. They need to keep ‘em needing Big Government. Hope I’m wrong.
I’m surprised you retired. ;)
In fact I worked about that long as well. It was mostly fun. Interesting work with very talented people. But retirement is better. Do anything you want any time you want - just like kids get to do before they start to school.
I call it playing because the feeling is the same.
True. So what. There is a full spectrum of "costs of production" over many different oil wells....some of them will shut down, some won't.
"With coal mines heavily mechanized (if not quite automated although that's probably not that far off), coal has to sell at a sufficiently high price to pay for the electricity and capital costs ~ and the machinery requires a CREW, not just a miner with a pick and shovel."
Again, so what. "Capital costs" have already been invested. And the cost of the "crew" is much smaller.
"It's easy to see virtually every coal mine in America falling out of use as the price of coal drops like a rock.
See above point about different mines having different costs of production. Some will shut down, some won't.
"These price collapses will occur BEFORE there are sufficient numbers of cold fusion units to replace their energy output.
And why would that happen?? Demand will still be there for gasoline and coal to drive automobiles and power generating plants, which demand will only disappear as fast as those units are replaced by the fusion units, and no faster.
It's happened before. It'll happen again.
You realize this nickel to copper conversion device has the power to DEFLATE money like nobody's business. There will be no polite retreat from coal and oil and natural gas to the new system.
In the aggregate the "off switches" will follow a quantum curve ~ not an analog curve. On Monday wells are pumping. On Tuesday all the oil pumped will not recover the costs of doing so and they'll be turned off.
The guys with some cash are not going to be subsidizing your continued use of coal or oil.
That meant they were the largest civilian employer in America and at the same time the smallest federal agency (in terms of regulatory forms of governance).
Headquarters ran the post office through rule books and precedents.
What's not to like in that kind of operation. You could get to handwriting analysts with decades of experience just by walking downstairs. There were economists wandering about with several graduate degrees. There were top end statisticians doing cutting edge work. Lawyers all over the place who'd done quite interesting work and were willing to educate you on how to prosecute a trucking company. Then, for a while, I had a job where we'd be out there on the tarmack at night running around in trucks checking out the latest in Air Containers ~ can't hardly get that anywhere.
The best job is the one with entertaining and interesting stuff going on every day ~ even if the boss is bad.
I missed nothing. I simply disagree with your notion. And you have offered zero proof that it will happen that way.
"It's happened before. It'll happen again."
Yes, there will likely be some temporary disruption, but in the somewhat longer run, the result of cheaper and more widely available energy has ALWAYS been increased prosperity and standards of living. This is a much more soundly proven fact of history than your fantasy of instant collapse.
"You realize this nickel to copper conversion device has the power to DEFLATE money like nobody's business. There will be no polite retreat from coal and oil and natural gas to the new system."
Why not?? See my point about demand continuing and being balanced by the speed of deployment.
"In the aggregate the "off switches" will follow a quantum curve ~ not an analog curve. On Monday wells are pumping. On Tuesday all the oil pumped will not recover the costs of doing so and they'll be turned off."
And I still say BAH-LONEY. Repeating your assertion is not proof of any kind. Some wells will not be profitable, others will continue to be. What WILL collapse will be the industries related to oil exploration and well drilling, not ongoing production. Everything that moves will still need lubrication, and the chemical industries will still need carbon-based feedstocks to make their products.
"The guys with some cash are not going to be subsidizing your continued use of coal or oil."
See my above point about demand. What you're basically saying is that much of the current price of gas and oil is due to SPECULATORS jacking the price up, and they will seek another area to speculate in.
It wasn't all tariffs.
Now, how fast can the change occur ~ that seems to be your sticking point. You imagine that one sort of energy will ooze out as another oozes in. Yet, we had the Late Medieval charcoal burners put out of business with coal almost instantly. We had coal for home heating disappear in months as it was replaced with oil and cheap conversion kits. Home heating oil has been phased out so long ago in the Ohio Valley/Midwest no one can recall when gas took off ~ yet, that transition was quite fast, made faster with the provision of gas burner conversion kits for what had been oil furnaces.
Those are small markets on a world scale, but they are important for the lesson. Now, Europe ~ they went from coal-gas and oil to natural gas almost overnight. There were gaslines in place to ease the transition but within a couple of years ALL home ovens/stoves were tossed out and replaced with gas ovens/stoves. It didn't take long at all.
The European command economies cut off the old ways before the new stuff was coming in.
If this nickel/copper conversion device works the carbon industry will flicker out so fast you won't believe it.
We'll be back here next year saying to each other "WOW".
Sorry, but I simply don't believe that was a factor. I've studied a reasonable amount of history, including the Depression period, and I have not seen that idea put forth anywhere, by anyone (other than you). Show me the data.
Now, how fast can the change occur ~ that seems to be your sticking point. You imagine that one sort of energy will ooze out as another oozes in. Yet, we had the Late Medieval charcoal burners put out of business with coal almost instantly. We had coal for home heating disappear in months as it was replaced with oil and cheap conversion kits. Home heating oil has been phased out so long ago in the Ohio Valley/Midwest no one can recall when gas took off ~ yet, that transition was quite fast, made faster with the provision of gas burner conversion kits for what had been oil furnaces.
And what were the economic consequences. Again, I've studied history quite a bit, and both my parents lived through it, and I have seen no data to indicate any significant disruption.
"I" believe in the law of supply and demand. Demand will continue, and thus so will supply, albeit at a reduced level.
The worst hit will almost undoubtedly be the coal industry, because it's products are used almost entirely to power electric generation, and the E-cat will be direct competition. The only thing I can see that might support some level of coal usage is if it continues to be needed in iron production/refining. AFAIK, there is, at this point, no substitute for carbon to remove impurities in iron...but I'm not "up" on that technology, so may well be wrong.
"Those are small markets on a world scale, but they are important for the lesson. Now, Europe ~ they went from coal-gas and oil to natural gas almost overnight. There were gaslines in place to ease the transition but within a couple of years ALL home ovens/stoves were tossed out and replaced with gas ovens/stoves. It didn't take long at all.
And exactly what proof is that this change resulted in a major economic dislocation. The replacements for those ovens/stoves had to be made...and so generated jobs to do so.
"The European command economies cut off the old ways before the new stuff was coming in.
"European command economies" are not governed (in the short term) by supply and demand. In the long term, drastically so, and their distortions make things worse for their citizens.
"If this nickel/copper conversion device works the carbon industry will flicker out so fast you won't believe it."
You're right, I do NOT believe it. The US went from an economy based on burning wood (even up to the Civil War, Mississippi river steamboats burned wood), to one based on coal as wood replacement, to one based on oil as coal replacement, to one largely based on natural gas (and that transition would have happened faster and with less disruption if "little Jimmy" Carter hadn't emulated those "European command economies" by preventing natural gas being used to generate electric power), all without the kind of major disruption you claim will happen. And in fact, productivity and prosperity increased at each such transition.
"We'll be back here next year saying to each other "WOW"."
On that, I hope you're right.
Still, the economic dislocation occurred because the method of extracting coal became far less labor dependent. The fact that you've never encountered any materials regarding what was called "the failure of the coal fields" doesn't mean such materials don't exist.
Then, too, I witnessed the refugees flee Appalachian coal fields for the MidWest. Others who post here did also. Whether you were aware of it, it happened.
True, because the population has gone up significantly along with the gigantic increase in the use of electricity, but all those steam locomotive engines (and ship engines) were NOT figments of my imagination. The number of different uses of coal has decreased drastically, replaced by oil. And coal for energy generation would have been replaced by natural gas without Jimmuh's interference (and if Rossi's gizmo doesn't pan out, still will be replaced...coal simply can't compete economically with NG).
"Still, the economic dislocation occurred because the method of extracting coal became far less labor dependent. The fact that you've never encountered any materials regarding what was called "the failure of the coal fields" doesn't mean such materials don't exist.
So, provide a link.
"Then, too, I witnessed the refugees flee Appalachian coal fields for the MidWest. Others who post here did also. Whether you were aware of it, it happened."
I've witnessed a lot of things. That doesn't make those things universally applicable. You're talking about ONE industry, at ONE TIME in history, and generalizing that across all industry, and for all time periods. Not exactly a valid thing to do. Today's population is both more educated and more mobile, and thus more willing to pull up stakes and "move where the money is".
Hi, I’m new to FreeRepublic.
There is much debate on the Web about whether LENR is real and what the physics is, but precious little on how it will affect economies, etc. FreeRepublic is one of the few sites I have found with any discussion of LENR’s ramifications. So I registered... :)
I was wondering how long OPEC would hold together for. Once it becomes clear that the members’ oil in the ground may become marginal or uneconomic to produce because of LENR engines, then I suspect that some members’ will start pumping oil out a bit quicker in a ‘clearance sale’, so to speak. This would cause oil prices to fall fast once the taps are opened up.
Any views? Tia.
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