Reply To: Wealth of Nations, and Economics of Abundance

[Lerner]

First, I really don’t think there is a “party line” on how focus fusion will affect society or how it will be deployed. Our goal will be to get it deployed as widely and as rapidly as possible and to get the price to the consumer as low as possible. My personal feeling is that doing that will require a big political battle with lots of people involved. No matter how we arrange for licensing, and what encouragement we give licensees to keep prices low, it will still ultimately be a political question how much the electricity costs. For example, in the US it will be a political question of how much money will go to paying off the shareholders of companies who have obsolete electricity generators. If the political decision is that those shareholders will take the loss, then the electricity will be a lot cheaper. If the decision is to bail them out at the consumer’s expense, then the electricity cost will come down very slowly.

However, I don’t agree that trillions in profits on FF itself are inevitable. That assumes, for one, that there will continue for a long time to be a huge gap between fossil fuel costs and FF. But since oil and gas prices are astronomically higher than the cost of production, once the tight control over supply is broken by substantial deployment of FF generators, the price of fossil fuels will fall towards the cost of production. That will still be a lot higher than FF costs, but that will not lead to FF generators being priced way above costs. Look at the introduction of popular new electronic products. Even though initially demand exceeds supply, the price premium is generally quite modest. I can see billions in profits, but not trillions. There will be trillions in savings compared with existing prices.

I agree with Duke’s goals for spending money. The best way to do these things is to have them funded by the government. But that does not mean a Stalinist model or even a Western bureaucratic model. The ideal way to run things is democratically, with those doing the work, and those affected by it, involved in the decisions. Doing that is tough, because, like FF itself, it has never been done before.

Eric