Fusion Energy: A Different Take

The recent news that scientists moved a step closer to fusion energy was greeted with enthusiasm and awe in much of the media, a bright spot of cheer amid the ongoing drumbeat of existential global threats. Only the most cynical of curmudgeons could pooh-pooh this hopeful development—right?

After all, energy is the foundation of human development. Civilizational advance is a tale of ongoing successes in shaping energy for human ends. The control of fire; the harnessing of draft animals; tapping of wind and water; combustion of oil, coal, and natural gas; and the splitting of atoms—each of these leaps led to a catalog of marvels, from cooking and agriculture to space travel and computing power.

Development is energy tamed, essentially. And bearing in mind the nearly ten percent of the world’s people who are chronically hungry, or the 20 percent who lack adequate housing—people who need a higher level of development—isn’t the prospect of a powerful new energy source welcome news?

The Problem of Unbounded Energy

That’s the upbeat view, apparently widely shared, judging from the media cheerleading. But another view deserves a hearing. The energy advances that drove development for millennia also brought growing levels of destruction, to the point that humanity’s capacity to thrive on this planet, and even to survive, is now imperiled. After all, what is climate change but the shadow side of fossil fuel use? What is environmental decline—whether species loss and deforestation, water scarcity, and pollution, or myriad other signs of environmental dysfunction—but the consequence of a fossil-fueled development pursued with little sense of limits? The power represented by fossil fuels in particular has vastly increased humanity’s capacity to extract, process, and consume massive quantities of resources, often with massive accompanying environmental damage.

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