Breakable wrote: It still remains to be seen if fusion power would make electricity 10 or 20 times cheaper. Anybody care to share current production/consumption costs and prices? I heard its in the order of 10 magnitude different, at least in nuclear fission case.

If by “Other Uses” you mean cheap Chinese plastic stuff, then I would really not mind to pay twice more for it. Considering that the world is less trashed and polluted, and that stuff would become better quality, carbon tax would be a great idea.
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Btw I heard a professor of Economics once mentioning that price of oil is reversely proportional to the production of Intellectual products, because when the price of oil goes up, it becomes more profitable to produce non-substantial products and services (oil is used everywhere else). So basically lower oil price encourages low-paying jobs in manufacturing and transportation, and high price in design and development. What kind of job would you like to do?

“its in the order of 10 magnitude different, at least in nuclear fission case.” The grammar of that sentence defeats me. One order of magnitude is 10X. Ten orders of magnitude is 10,000,000,000X. Current cost of production of electricity excluding capital costs ranges from about 1.5¢/kwh for fission to about 30¢ for wind and wave power. Capital costs and indirect costs increase those figures drastically.

Of course it “remains to be proven”; that’s what the entire enterprise at FF is about achieving. For the purposes of discussion we are assuming it will succeed. As for sneering at “cheap Chinese plastic stuff”, the alternative is expensive local plastic stuff. Or more expensive Chinese plastic stuff if you bump the price of oil enough. Make no mistake: cheap energy from FF will make more of everything available, including plastic stuff. But it will be possible (economically feasible) to “close the cycle” on waste much more completely. E.g.: that plant-based plastic I mentioned is naturally biodegradable.

Concerning your professor (and I refer you to John Tamny [John Tamny is editor of RealClearMarkets, a senior economic adviser to H.C. Wainwright Economics, and a senior economic adviser to Toreador Research and Trading (www.trtadvisors.com). He can be reached at jtamny@realclearmarkets.com] for a contrary opinion), I suspect his data set is very selective. The US’ oil price is much lower than Europe’s or Asia’s, but the scientific and technological output per capita and in total measured in patents or however you like is far higher, and has been since petroleum was first used as a fuel.

The low-paying jobs are never coming back to the US, regardless of oil pricing. The stages of development of the rest of the world guarantee other countries will always have a competitive advantage there, whatever the price of oil, until they “catch up”. Japan lost much of its manufacturing base to Hong Kong, China, India, etc. for the same reason the US lost much of its base to Japan decades earlier. The process of cost reduction cannot be reversed by fiat, taxes, import duties, or any other policy or law or program.

As a side note example of misconceptions about the resultant quality of life, if you exclude car crashes and gunshot wounds (for which the US has a particular liking, it seems!), Americans’ life span is greater than anyone else’s. Including Japan, France, Sweden, etc.