I am certainly glad that Eric took the time to weigh in on this thread, and reading his words, I am convinced that the right people will be making the decisions when the time comes.

I would only like to add the coal industry to the list of potential opponents. Natural gas and oil will find uses in transportation and heating for some time to come, but coal is only used in this country to generate electricity, to the best of my knowledge. The companies which own these resources will see the development of cheap, pollution free means to produce power as a severe threat to billions of dollars of future profit. The fact that much of the central and eastern part of the U.S. has no alternative to using their product gives them tremendous leverage to continue despoiling huge tracts of Appalachia and charging ever increasing prices. They will NOT be good sports about loosing this advantage. They would be happy to see wide use of FF only after they have sold the last lump of coal and the last barrel of oil. The important thing to remember about these people is that they don’t merely sell fuel resources, they are in the wealth extraction business.

I would like to think that market forces and popular will would be all we need to open this door into the future, but they rarely have been enough in the past. Great changes have needed a little muscle, a bit of guile, some misdirection, publicity, spellbinding, political hustle, and judo, to name a few of the arts which may have to be used.