Coal Vs Hydrogen Vs Fusion Power

     Recently scientists at Lawrence Livermore were able to push nuclear fusion past the point of getting more electricity out than you put in, and people think that there is going to be some sort of a shift in our power generation. Since the development involved shooting 192 lasers at a single point creating fusion plasma as hot as the Sun, and it was at Lawrence Livermore which is a U.S. government facility focused on military defense, the logical result of this will not be a power plant, this will result in some sort of a weapon like a laser cannon that the United States can use to shoot at things or people.

     The future of alternative energy on Earth is not fusion power plants, just like the future of cars on Earth is not electric, because the companies that make money off of charging stations are not necessarily the oil companies, and most importantly because we live in a capitalist world, and any future energy source has to be something that can be sold to make the current energy companies richer. Every decade or so the oil industry checks to see how much oil there is still in the ground in the form of oil reserves that can be affordably extracted, the latest surveys from the last decade have said that there is enough oil in the ground to extract at least through 2050 possibly 2060, so regardless of what you hear, that is what's going to happen. The people that currently make money off of selling oil will continue to make money off of selling oil at least until 2050, at which point we will transition to hydrogen which can be liquefied, condensed, and sold at gas stations like petroleum. They will generate hydrogen offshore with wind power like the Chinese and Australians have already started doing, then they will ship the liquefied hydrogen in tankers all around the world, with the first international shipment of liquefied hydrogen happening between Australia and Japan in 2022. 

     But what about California laws saying that all cars need to be electric, and what about the fact that Tesla has been making electric cars, and what about Ford Motor company that produced the F-150 Lightning pickup truck? Electric is not the future of cars on Earth, nor will it ever be, almost everything that Elon Musk does is to create infrastructure for a colony on Mars, with the goal of 1 million Martians by 2050, so he has solar panels and batteries that will work on Mars to generate electricity, and he has airtight Tesla electric cars to drive in the tunnels that he will create on Mars with his Boring Company, which also generates Lego style bricks from its boring equipment. He has rocket ships to transport colonists to Mars with SpaceX, and he could use Starlink for communications between Earth and Mars which probably will get its own array of satellites, leaving only Neuralink and now Twitter that are not specifically related to colonizing Mars. Infrastructure for Mars has little to nothing to do with the Earth, as the water planet our water can be simply split into hydrogen and oxygen and we can run our cars on hydrogen, which can't be done on Mars that lacks water, which is why Elon Musk produced electric vehicles. Ford Motor company got duped into producing the F-150 Lightning, and car manufacturers and governments around the planet are moving to electric, all under the idea that somehow this would help with global warming.

     If CO2 produced by humans does cause global warming then moving to electric does little to help, because according to the U of M 79% of all U.S. electricity is produced by burning fossil fuels, and according to Forbes 90% of power plants around the globe burn coal to produce electricity. In the last 50 years the global population doubled from 4 billion in 1974 to 8 billion in 2022, and demand for coal fired power plants is increasing, but there are abundant coal reserves on the planet to fill the needs. So we will continue to have power plants that burn coal, and cars that burn gasoline, and the oil companies that currently make billions of dollars off of selling gasoline at gas stations will continue to do so until it is not financially profitable for them, at which point they will switch society to hydrogen powered vehicles, but that will not happen until 2050 or possibly 2060, depending on exactly how long the oil reserves last.

     While ground transportation is the largest user of fossil fuels with almost half used in cars and trucks, airplanes use 8% and ships use 7% of global fuel, and starting in 2023 Rolls-Royce will have two different airplane engines that can run on 100% hydrogen, having set a goal for complete transition to hydrogen engines by 2050, but their logic is all based on the politics of global warming, which has little to do with the realities of energy generation, or the massive oil and coal reserves on Earth or the corporations that make money off of them.

     So in 2050 if all goes according to plan, Elon Musk will have a colony of 1 million on Mars driving around in tunnels with electric vehicles, while everyone else on Earth will be still be driving around in petroleum powered cars and flying around in petroleum powered airplanes, or driving around in electric cars that are powered by coal burning power plants. No one will be using nuclear fusion plants, but we may have some sort of laser cannons, maybe even deployed in space, and very few people will be flying around in hydrogen powered airplanes or driving around in hydrogen powered cars yet, because the oil companies still have decades worth of profits to make off of oil, and until the coal runs out we're going to continue to power 90% of all of the power plants on Earth with coal.