INNOVATION IS THE ONE WAY OUT OF OUR DEBT CRISIS

An A.R. Editorial
INNOVATION IS THE ONE WAY OUT OF OUR DEBT CRISIS
by Joe Shea
AR Correspondent
Bradenton, Fla.

I was asked at McDonald's this morning by a few older guys how America could possibly ever recover from a $14-trillion debt load that already eats up 6 percent of our nation's budget. I was able to reply in a single word. "Innovation" is that word.

When was the last time America enjoyed a balanced budget? Under Bill Clinton in 2000, the Internet's extraordinary usefulness for everyone from a giant investment bank to a little guy like me started becoming apparent far beyond Silicon Valley. The vast new tax revenues it brought in spurred huge economic growth, and the giant companies it created remain among the strongest there are.

But can we invent another Internet? The answer to that is yes, although it won't be a communications system. Instead, it will be a low-energy nuclear reaction (LENR) device that reduces the cost of energy close to zero. NASA leads the world in this research and has already developed a testable theory and product design that fully explains it.

Here at The American Reporter, we've been enthusiastic about a number of potential solutions to the problem of energy consumption. Currently, the cost of fossil fuels - even before the amount they cost to clean up, or to survive without cleaning up - is probably a substantial percentage of the $14 trillion national debt.

ExxonMobil, you may remember, became the first company in history a few years ago to have revenues of a trillion dollars in a single year; even with profits in the tens of billions, though, it has not been a net payer of taxes (neither am I) since then. Citigroup not long after was the first to have net assets of a trillion dollars, which have since been enormously impaired by ther sub-prime crisis it helped bring about. Those two companies alone, then, suggest that all of America's great corporations, when put back to work and paying taxes, can alleviate our debt burden.

But what we really have to hope for is a breakthrough on the real next frontier: energy. That is why on our front page today we have a video on work being done with a device much like the five-year "cold fusion" experiment of Drs. Stanley Pons and Henry Fleischmann revealed in 1989.

And we must offer a caveat: If another nation that is not inclined to share the science solves the cold fusion riddle before we do, the result could be total ruin for the American economy. If we are forced to compete against an industrial nation that pays almost nothing for energy, every dimension of our economy would suffer. That is one reason why these American-based devices - the ones we know about - need to be completed and become part of the public domain.

This time around, some of the most important work is being done not by figures unknown to the public but by the Chief Scientist NASA's Langley Research Center, Dennis "Dan" Bushnell. It would be fitting indeed if the cold-fusion breakthrough that is coming would come from NASA, just as the Internet itself came from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA, and ultimately belonged to the taxpayers of the United States.

"I think we're almost over the 'We don't understand it' problem. I think we're almost over the 'This doesn't produce anything useful' problem. And so I think this will go forward fairly rapidly now. And if it does, this is capable of, by itself, completely changing geo-economics, geopolitics, of solving quite a bit of energy," Bushnell told researcher J. William Monroe in May.

Bushnell's work runs in parallel but doesn't try to replicate that of Andrea Rossi, a non-scientist who is an entrepreneur teamed with retired Prof. Sergio Focardi of at Italy's prestigious University of Bologna, one of the oldest in the world. If you scroll down far below the current stories and news links to the videos on the American Reporter home page, you will meet Nobel Laureate in Physics Brian Josephson and his friend, Prof. Margaret Driscoll of the Material Sciences Laboratory in Cavendish College at Cambridge University - possibly the single most prestigious academic laboratory in the world.

With Driscoll asking the questions and Josephson answering - interpersed with video of the working devices that power a substantial factory in Bologna today - you will be introduced to the E-Cat, which is short for the cold fusion Energy Catalyst, of Rossi and Professor Focardi, who is retired from the university's physics faculty.

The device they are using to heat their independent lab is being prepared by a Greek firm, Defcalion Green Technologies, for the mass market in October 2012. It will reportedly sell for about $2,000. Its advent is almost upon us, and the mass media have not a clue. Events both terrible and bizarre may intervene - remember, the Exxon Valdez ran aground within a day of the announcement of cold fusion, which would make oil unnecessary except as a lubricant.

So, some disaster could certainly wreck these plans, such as a massive earthquake in Greece or a fire that destroys the factory or a scientific scandal, but if all goes reasonably well people will soon no longer be paying very much for electric power. The trillions of dollars that now go to huge hydroelectric dams, dangerous nuclear reactors, explosive natural gas projects and vast coal-fired power plants will go elsewhere - mostly into the pockets of ordinary people. The same is true of Bushnell's device. It has the same capacity to change the world.

Another device, known as CIHT, or what might be called a "hydrino" reactor, like Rossi's uses a proprietary nickel-based catalyst to knock a photon out the electron orbit of a hydrogen atom and in so doing produce tremendous heat that can be directly converted to electricity for homes, cars and factories.

That work, by Dr. Randall Mills of BlackLight Power in Cranbury, N.J., recently was validated in part by the Harvard Center for Astrophysics, which recorded emissions of energy below the ground state of hydrogen that Mills has long asserted would exist. Search on our home page by using Control + F to find the word "hydrino," and you won't be disappointed.

Mills' work has to overcome not only the objections of scientists but his own personality, and for that reason may be the last of these three to appear and be deployed. He has also questioned the science behind the Rossi-Focardi device, even as his own hydrino theories been questioned. Yet behind all three devices is a literal host of very similar ones that offer the same evidence of excess heat and the same promise of cheap energy for the world (see the "60 Minutes" video on this page). If their own personal idiosyncrasies don't undo or destroy them - these scientists are neither perfect nor saintly - you can be assured that espionage aimed at securing the secrets of these devices for America's foreign competitors is always underway. Oil companies that fear such a breakthrough - even as they try to achieve them in secret - will work in myriad ways to prevent the work of others from ever seeing daylight.

Like those before him, Andrea Rossi is vulnerable and unprotected by patents. His broken English, lack of advanced degrees and lack of patents, however, have spurred him to mass produce the E-Cat device on a mass scale before anyone else gets protected patent rights. Like the other two hydrogen-based devices, its fundamental fuel is water transformed to hydrogen, and for the time being that remains as free as the rain and the sea. Success will mean ruin for ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco and the entire petroleum industry, and wonderful things for the rest of us.

Should NASA complete its journey - there's not been much news since top scientists reported in 2009 that they had completed designing their device and were ready for fabrication - or should Rossi and Defcalion or Mills finally deliver, this world will change very quickly. The systems are all inexpenive to make, and millions of them can be marketed in the space of a year. If the savings prove as advertised, all of the world's energy and climate problems will be up for grabs, and the economic boost from savings by energy consumers will be unimaginably vast.

The evaporation of the fossil fuels industry will indeed be a "disruptive" event, as Wall Street would term it, and millions of jobs in the petroleum industry will disappear. At the same time, tens of millions of jobs will be created by the deployment of cheap energy devices of any character that works. Vast factories will be needed to assemble any of the hundreds of devices that will come unpatented to market. Legions of installers will be needed to deploy them.

But the persistence of the cost savings, which in the case of the Internet dwindle away over time, will be of long duration, and cheap energy will eat debt like a cow eats hay. With these innovations, the black cloud that hangs so ominously on the horizon today will dissipate. But the American people have a role to play: they must awaken their attention to the power of these devices to save them money and change their world, and ensure that their political leaders do nothing to block their way. That is a harder task than it seems.

Resource: (For the very sophisticated astrophysicist): A slide show on the latest in LENR physics, June 2011.