As the US presidential campaign gets into full swing while gasoline prices are spiking, President Barack Obama has been addressing energy issues on the campaign trail — and this will probably be a dominant theme in the race for the White House this year. Yesterday, speaking at a Daimler truck plant in North Carolina, Obama talked about how oil is the “fuel of the past” and called for action to promote alternatives.
“We’ve got to develop every source of American energy; not just oil and gas, but wind power and solar power, nuclear power, biofuels. We need to invest in the technology that will help us use less oil in our cars and our trucks, in our buildings, in our factories. That’s the only solution to the challenge, because as we start using less, that lowers the demand, prices come down,” Obama said.
People who are following LENR technologies will surely notice the absence of any mention of LENR as a possible solution from Obama — which at this point is not particularly surprising given that the field is largely out of favor with the scientific community. But one might suppose that some of Obama’s science advisers have alerted him to some of the work and discussion going on with LENR within his own government (in the military and at NASA) and elsewhere (Rossi, DGT, Piantelli, etc). Perhaps, being far removed from the research labs and scientific circles word has not reached him about LENR possibilities. Even if the president was aware it is still early days, and perhaps not the time to bring a largely untested technology into the public arena.
Regardless of what the politicians say, there does seem to be a gradually increasing awareness that LENR holds real possibilities as a viable alternative to many sources of fuel. Whether there will be any impact on this year’s political campaigns remains to be seen, but Andrea Rossi has said he plans to start marketing his domestic E-Cat this autumn, and start taking firm orders from the public. This could happen at the height of the US election season, and it will be interesting to see if it has any effect on what candidates do and say.