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by avidphantasm 1594 days ago
At this point, I think fusion has the best chance of saving us from ourselves wrt to climate change, so long as the unforeseen consequences aren’t too bad.
2 comments

It doesn't seem like it's quick enough. We're, at minimum, decades away from it even being built out commonly, and to _really_ save ourselves we should have already replaced a substantial portion of the world's energy generation decades ago.
Sure, it may be too little, too late.

You don't know that until the failure is complete, though, and "it may fail" is a terrible reason to not try the best shots we have.

I mean, it _will_ fail at stopping global warming, there's no "may" about it. It will probably have other positive effects though.

I'm very onboard for any potential fusion power generation, I just don't think it has any hope of saving us from global warming.

Can we use it to put the CO2 back in the ground?

I guess there are some irreversible effects once warming reaches a certain threshold however.

Yes, this is part of what would need to happen: using a super abundance of essentially carbon-free energy to do geo-engineering on a massive scale (including artificial carbon sequestration).
It might in the future turn out to be more efficient with a "few" reactors than, say, lots of batteries and wind turbines and solar panels, from a resource perspective. But I think not even that will come true, if we optimize stuff enough, which we will have a long time to do before fusion is here.
Fusion would "solve" the climate change issue, but do nothing in regard to all other crises affecting our environment right now (biodiversity collapse, various sources of chemical and particulate pollution, fertilizer runoff...).

On the contrary, unlimited energy would exacerbate the man-made crises we are having today by further pushing the potential impact of man on its environment.