World Saved! Pigs Fly! Film at 11. 
Turns out it's not a problem. Because we're saved.
Steorn, an Irish technology development company, has today issued a challenge to the global scientific community to test Steorn's free energy technology and publish the findings.If you have any stock in Exxon, now is the time to sell.Steorn's technology is based on the interaction of magnetic fields and allows the production of clean, free and constant energy. The technology can be applied to virtually all devices requiring energy, from cellular phones to cars.
Steorn's technology appears to violate the `Principle of the Conservation of Energy', considered by many to be the most fundamental principle in our current understanding of the universe. This principle is stated simply as `energy can neither be created nor destroyed, it can only change form'.Steorn is making three claims for its technology:
1. The technology has a coefficient of performance greater than 100%.
2. The operation of the technology (i.e. the creation of energy) is not derived from the degradation of its component parts.
3. There is no identifiable environmental source of the energy (as might be witnessed by a cooling of ambient air temperature).
The sum of these claims is that our technology creates free energy.
No, the sum of these claims is a collapse of physics as we know it and a complete overturning of the world order. Unfortunately, the sum - and the parts - are also completely unbelievable.
Steorn is not alone in their claims for extraordinary energy. Inifite Energy Magazine is home to monthly claims of cold fusion, "bubble" fusion, and half a dozen other exotic methods of extracting power.
Even more popular than cold fusion (which has acquired the taste of scandal in the public's mind), is "zero point energy." Dozens of sites discuss schemes and experiments designed to show that we can extract power right from the fizzing fabric of space-time itself. We can tap the "false vacuum," and create actual power from virtual particles. A device that can reach "over unity" (that is, it produces more energy than it takes in) is right around the corner. Right around the corner. Right around the... eh, apparently right around the same corner as peace in Iraq.
The number of companies that are "this close" to producing a workable product is almost as large as the number of Nigerian email scams flying around the Internet - and most are just as reputable. That's not to say that every "free energy" company is engaged in trying to part the gullible from their wallets. Only most of them. There are a few who are simply neck-deep in self-delusion rather than criminal intentions. However, evil or just fuzzy-minded, all of these companies serve one master: the status quo.
I've chronicled my own relationship with the first round of "cold fusion" too often to repeat it again. Suffice to say that many of us working in the fossil fuel industry, including some of its staunchest defenders, were ecstatic to think God or chance had planted a cosmic Get Out of Jail Free card in a beaker of bubbling water. Better than most, we understand the effects of what we do for a living, and the very real approach of the end of current reserves. Depleted fields and fruitless searches for replacements have an abstract quality to the public, but they're all too evident inside the industry. We welcomed our obsolescence.
Sadly, while fifteen years later the evidence suggests that something quirky is going on when you get heavy water and palladium bubbling in the same test tube, it appears extremely unlikely that this quirk is going to lead to energy production. The same thing applies to sonoluminescence. And zero point.
The claims these "scientists" make are far from new. In the first half of the twentieth century, Thomas Moray wrote numerous books and made nearly constant demonstrations of his ability to draw power from the "radiant energy" of the "aether." He, too, was always just around the corner from a practical device.
Before that, Hermann Plauson was given a patent on his device to extract "atmospheric electricity."
And before that... well, you can keep going right back at least as far as 1150, when Indian mathematician Bhaskara claimed to have invented a perpetual motion device based on the always popular unbalanced wheel.
All the experiments devoted to these technologies have generated a lot of academic and entrepreneurial Brownian motion. People are always attracted to the idea of making a big discovery, and nothing could be bigger than shrugging off thermodynamics to discover a source of endless energy.
But all talk about these technologies has only managed to distract from the real truth: we are running out of energy.
We are in desperate need of politicians who will declare:
1) The age of fossil fuels is ending. Oil and natural gas are in decline, and trying to replace them with coal is a losing proposition.
2) Making the transition to new technologies will be hard, costly, and will require real sacrifices. It's likely to make the privations of World War II look easy in comparison.
3) The longer we put off starting, the less likely we are to survive.
Those are really difficult things to hear. Politicians would not be politicians if they didn't first think of messages designed to get them elected. "You need to suffer now, so that you won't die later" has never been a particularly winning formula. You can't play "happy days are here again" while announcing that mankind stands at the precipice.
The folks at Steorn have issued a challenge. They're asking scientists from all over the world to watch a demonstration of their technology and verify that they're actually able to make the magic work. That's a high hurdle to clear.
However, the rest of us have an equally difficult burden. We have to find politicians brave enough to speak the truth about our hard energy choices, and we have to get these men and women elected into positions where they can do something about it. We have to convince career politicians that their loyalty lies in protecting the chances of a successful technology transition, not in protecting their own careers.
Compared to that, endless free energy doesn't look so tough.
KEYWORDS: energy, steorn, perpetal motion, cold fusion
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