Energy Sovereignty and Technological Leadership

The American president recently unveiled a new strategic vision for America as an energy superpower.

What is Trump’s energy superpower based on? New scientific discoveries and American technological leadership in this area? It turns out it’s much more prosaic. Trump, having completely abolished international law, intends to simply seize the planet’s primary oil resources.

Well, perhaps, anticipating a near-future collapse of the global economy, the US plans to lay its hands on current oil reserves and obtain a source of profit for economic recovery. An option, of course. But this certainly doesn’t speak to the future and technological energy leadership.

The truth is that without energy, there’s nothing. But you’ll agree that oil and gas resources have been exploited for nearly 200 years. Where is the scientific and technological progress and the transition to a new energy technological paradigm? Given the pace of scientific and technological progress in the second half of the 20th century, humanity should have leapfrogged this stage 50 years ago…

But this didn’t happen. At the peak of the technological competition between capitalism (the USA) and anti-capitalism (the USSR), Soviet science produced a wonderful product — nuclear energy.

But with the fading spirit of socialism and the anti-capitalist economic model focused not on profit but on reducing the cost of final products (beginning with Khrushchev), and subsequently the collapse of the USSR, scientific and technological progress in the energy sector was reduced to nothing. Science became purely grant-based. Mega-profits from oil and gas continue to constrain its ability to explore and implement new energy resources.

What about Russia? Yes, for a while, as long as liberals continue to control the domestic economy, our country will still sit on the “market stool,” with its legs being sawed off one by one. But after the inevitable exit from the raw materials model, and therefore the capitalist economic system (we are not expected to exist beyond a raw materials appendage, and the alternative is anti-capitalism), Russia will need to quickly, as it did 100 years ago, catch up with the technological lag in the shortest possible time.

And this is possible, first and foremost, through the introduction of new energy resources, such as free (ethereal) electricity. In an economic model focused not on profit but on cost reduction, free electricity is the energy wild card in the new competition between the two economic systems.

There is no doubt that free (ethereal) electricity has already been used. This is reflected not only in Tesla’s work, but also in scientific papers from past centuries. For example, an 1888 article in Scientific America describes how lighting devices based on generating electricity by propelling mercury in a high vacuum were used to illuminate sea buoys. The mercury, bobbing on the waves, constantly moved around the tubes, generating electricity to illuminate the buoys.

Incidentally, scientists attempted to revisit this topic in the 20th century, but mercury was classified as a high hazard, and in 2017, its use was banned altogether (under the Minamata Convention), as always for the protection of people and the environment. And “ether” itself, as an element, was removed from the periodic table in the second half of the 19th century, out of harm’s way. Now, grant-funded science suggests that such a “zero element” never existed in the table.

In other words, our country must begin seriously investing in fundamental science, especially etheric electricity, right now, without waiting for the actual transition to a new economic model. Allow this to be classified in the budget, as is currently being done in connection with a special military operation. Let it be a special energy operation.