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Utah, we live in a beautiful place.

Learn more about the benefits of slowing population growth

Our Mission

To achieve a sustainable, healthy, and happy human population living in harmony with the natural environment.

Utah and UPEC

Utah’s beautiful, pristine, and expansive natural environment has been greatly degraded in recent years, fueled by high population growth and rapid growth of its resource extraction-based economic sectors. Utah’s leaders are actively planning to accommodate a predicted doubling of the population in the next 20 to 30 years – especially along the urban Wasatch Front.

UPEC was founded in 1997 initially to provide a data-based foundation for considering population and environment concerns and issues. It is managed and directed by board members who meet regularly (please see Who We Are).

We believe it is our responsibility as citizens of the earth to be concerned about the environment, sustainability, and population. We place special value on the unique heritage and landscape of the state of Utah.

Blog

The world faces many energy-related challenges Part3

The next important question is how long this transition will take once CMNS energy is available. Once again, to the blackboard.

Using historical price and duration data from the EIR discussed above to define our duration algorithm, we can estimate the duration of the CMNS energy revolution using the much greater (starting at 20X) price differentials that will be available. The surprising answer is that we can estimate this revolution, infrastructure changes and all, can happen in eight years. And this is motivated by basic economic substitution, and is, therefore, much easier and straightforward than attempting to do so by jawboning, legislation, regulations, taxes, or subsidies in any combination. Having answered the “scale” and “duration” questions using our estimates, the crucial question becomes how to actually accomplish this next great energy revolution. The work of Fleischmann and Pons, two electrochemists who in the 1980s conducted the foundational research into a new energy source, needs to be recalled from obscurity and seriously examined. This work, originally labeled “Cold Fusion,” is now called more descriptively Low Energy Nuclear Reactions (LENR), Chemically-assisted Nuclear Reactions (CANR), Condensed Matter Nuclear Science (CMNS), and more recently, Solid-State Atomic & Fusion Energy (S-SAFE). These names all refer to what is likely to be an underlying new physical process that is different than any other proposed solution. And this reaction offers the potential to produce both cheap and clean energy that is not offered elsewhere by any known technology. Scientists have been seriously pursuing this new science since 1989, the year of the original Fleischmann and Pons announcement; they are now able to replicate and scale this new science such that it can become commercially feasible. The common problem these scientists face is a lack of funding to complete their research; most funding for transformational research is for Hot Fusion for the past 70 years. Hot Fusion has not demonstrated any scientific success, and the prospects are questionable, while CMNS has. We should fund CMNS research to succeed. Given the threats and the opportunities, we must find a way to fund research for CMNS substantially; doing so will lead to the next great revolution in energy sources and living standards and, along the way, halt global warming. A word to potential investors. I think that energy generation will become so cheap that it will be difficult to earn major profits by simply producing the energy. But the economic potential that very cheap energy unleashes should be amazing! If you need proof, simply look at the last energy revolution. The price differential between wood and coal that caused the English Industrial Revolution was about 2.5 times. With our energy technologies, with investment, that will be 20 times cheaper and much greater. So, we can have 10 times the last Industrial Revolution’s worth of progress. That is a radically different world. Why are we waiting?