[TaylorAlexander]

It’s a good question. I recall someone saying that the amount of direct heat produced by energy generation is very small compared to the heat captured from the sun by the greenhouse effect.

Also I don’t think it’s true that commercial fusion power plants would in the near term produce extraordinarily high energy levels compared to a large hydroelectric or fission nuclear power plant. The thing that’s great about fusion is that it requires very little fuel and doesn’t produce nuclear waste.

[sai_c]

I hope i did not understand you wrong, but what I meant was the following. We create electric energy from source X. The electric energy is mutated to heat, or mechanical energy or what not (computers produce heat, electric cars mutate it into kinetic energy and so on). Energy is never destroyed, it just changes its form. So if we produce/consume more energy than now (yes that's just theoretical) would that contribute to climate change in a significant manner?

[DennisP]

Eventually, yes. Right now waste heat is a tiny fraction of excess greenhouse heating, but if we kept multiplying our energy usage by a couple percent per year, we'd boil the oceans in four centuries.

https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist...

If we invent fusion, I think we could grow exponentially for quite a while, but it'll mostly happen in space. Controlled fusion makes a really great rocket.