Ie $200 million/year. The 2022 USA military budget is [1]$715 billion , some 3,500 times as much. It seems to me that the priorities are not quite right here.

OK: I know that increasing funding can only speed up R&D so much but given the huge cost of impending climate change - surely we should be investing more; we being more than just the USA.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_States

Meanwhile, almost 40% of the world's population subsists on around $2.00 per day and commonly doesn't even have access to electric power. Climate change 'sacrifice' is well surrounded by quotes - all it really means is reining in the ever increasing demands of the 60% on finite resources that are not distributed equitably.

I think that he has a point. If you are sucking 200 - 250% of the energy out of the earth most of it from stored carbon, then even if you have fusion working today you will still need to ween yourself off the fossil fuel teat.

Well, as I recall the MANHATTAN PROJECT was funded by the military and was part of the war effort in WW2, where they invented CONTROLLABLE FISSION.

So I'd consider DOUBLING the military budget and TASK THEM with making fusion electricity a practical reality.

Nice plan, but unfortunately, the science to bring people back from the dead is still 20-30 years away.

They made a fission bomb in the Manhattan Project. I'm not sure the military made useful fusion reactors. As for paying them to make a fusion bomb, it's already been done. All the best Nukes are fusion devices these days.

I don't think the military made useful fission reactors, at least not at that point, but they did make quite a lot of the research that went into them. I guess bob was referencing e.g. the Fermi pile, which IIRC was developed as part of the Manhattan project.

...we'd have cracked fusion decades ago.

There's also the fact that, so far, every time we've managed to come up with a new energy source, instead of replacing polluting or inefficient sources, we've just increased energy consumption. If somebody cracks fusion, is the power going into dismissing combustion plants, or is it going into flying cars?

It's a question for politics, not for science; unfortunately, politics, as a field, is nowhere near as eager to go looking for answers.

I realize you got downvoted, but you're right - coal, for example, is still with us in a big way in the world.

One of Arthur C. Clarke's books (maybe 3001...?) touched on the idea that the transition to fusion could actually make Global Warming worse .

Limitless free energy for everyone, but nowhere to dump the excess heat...

Doing the maths we currently get ~25MW of incident solar energy for every human being on this planet. its not terribly significant.

unfortunately the power density is not high enough to utilize properly unless we can manage to build a giant magnifying lens... (solar cells can do around 200W per square meter, requiring a LOT of square meters for panels, especially when you consider electric cars and 30kwh or so per week needed for average driving)

This makes some kind of sci-fi sense. In the real world, though, the orders of magnitude are wrong.

It's a bit like worrying that if we start seriously exploiting tidal power generation, then the Moon is going to fall.

We don't have fusion power yet, but we do have fission power. So we should be producing enough energy so that we can get to net zero carbon emissions immediately without any major economic sacrifice.

There will still be some adjustments, such as people using trolley buses instead of cars to get to work. Although methanol fuel could allow people to have cars even if they can't afford an electric car.

The ENTIRE "reasoning" (if you can even CALL it that, as it is SO UN-SCIENTIFIC) that man-made CO2 *ALLEGEDLY* causes climate change is the BIGGEST [POWER/CONTROL GRAB] HOAX in CENTURIES. I think "flat earth" and "geocentric universe" (right Gallileo?) come in 2nd and 3rd, respectively (though the only power being grabbed and/or maintained in THOSE cases was from an overbearing church...)

Hint: CO2 is *terrible* at being a greenhouse gas (especially compared to WATER), is at equilibrium [with plants, rain, bodies of water, etc.], varies based on water temperature (which holds less CO2 at higher temps like a soda going flat when warm) and volcanic activity (which spews CO2), has been seen rising [1]NEAR A SPECIFIC VOLCANO since 1958 which seems to drive "all of those charts" [not a representative sample in other words; volcanoes are known to often spew tons of CO2 when they are not erupting, more than humans even] and CO2 does not even absorb IR radiation well at frequencies that correspond to black body radiation for temperatures ACTUALLY FOUND ON EARTH.

(it does not take long to find this information, you just have to wade past the MIS-information dump from climate change activists)

And, you KNOW that there is NO WAY IN HELL that CHINA will become "carbon neutral". Why SHOULD they? They're busy EXPLOITING THE REST OF THE WORLD for being so GULLIBLE as to SHOOT OUR OWN ECONOMIC FEET over this.

(facepalm icon as well)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mauna_Loa

In essence what you say is correct, however the malfunctioning caps lock key detracts from what you are trying to say. By the way, the Mauna Loa observatory's measurements are carefully controlled to get a proper reading of the CO2 concentrations.

Climate science is a very complex field. As an engineer I can see many, many red flags when it comes to what the likes of the IPCC publishes, such as:

- moving goal posts (we always have ten years to save the planet, but this time we mean it),

- not even the most basic grasp of statistics. Meaningless averaging of climate model outputs to arrive at a more "exact" outcome when the models can't even correctly predict the climate for 1950, and

- the concept of an average temperature deviation for the planet, blissfully ignoring that if the poles are way too hot and around the equator it is way too cold, these values might cancel out, but we still have a huge problem.

I could go on and on about the issues in climate science. But in politics, facts don't matter and our leaders are woefully incompetent when it comes to science.

This is a science/technology site, bob, not the comments section of the Daily Mail, so most people here know enough basic physics to be able to see through this kind of conspiracy theory nonsense.

Not that there aren't conspiracies around CO2 release, of course there are- after all, either you're being paid by one to post this nonsense, or you should be profoundly embarrassed to be working for some of the richest corporations that have ever existed free of charge.

Mixing half-truths generally produces bullshit and that's what you've managed to do here.

There are lots of aspects of climate science which should be treated sceptically; but this doesn't mean they're fundamentally wrong.

For example, CO2 is no longer in equilibrium because we're burning fossil fuel faster than the released CO2 can be recaptured. Over time, and we're talking geological time, a new equilibrium will probably be established.

The temperature of the ocean is less relevant for how much CO2 can be dissolved, though note that this also contradicts your point about equilibrium, than what temperature increases actually represent: energy stored. Though current changes are to surface temperature. This is why apparently minor changes in temperature can lead to greater storms and also why greater absorption is also making surface water more acidic.

China is going hell for leather on renewables, not least because it's getting worried about potentially more catastrophic weather events. It will take a while to get there but it has already started to affect its coal-based generation capacity. And, in any case, it's not that much more of an emitter than the US was.

But all this doesn't detract from the answer to parliament: even if we can get fusion working soonish, we won't be able to build up capacity sufficiently before 2050 to meet our goals; whether these are related to climate change or energy independence.

The big problem of fusion is that despite progress it's still a long long way from delivering and may well never deliver energy at an affordable cost.

Meanwhile there are alternatives that are technically orders of magnitude easier.

Solar is good but doesn't fit the UK climate. The Xlinks project aims to deliver power from Morocco where solar is 5 times more efficient in winter than the UK. The technology it needs is 3,800km high voltage undersea cables, which sounds absurd but it's existing technology. It incorporates wind and battery backup too to match our electricity demand curve. https://xlinks.co/morocco-uk-power-project/

Quaise Energy are using powerful gyrotron microwave devices that were developed to heat the plasma in fusion research. They cut through rock and will be used to drill down to hot strata for geothermal power. As they use RF rather than conventional mud cooled drill bits they can drill much much deeper and vastly quicker. They will be used to drill 10 to 20km into the earths crust where the temperature is going to be 500C just about everywhere, making geothermal possible just about everywhere. If it works (possibly a big "if" but much more feasible that any fusion concept) the plan is to "repower" existing fossil fuel power stations with geothermal energy extracted from deep underneath them. https://www.quaise.energy/

That repowering idea sounds good. Not sure whether steam pressure and temperature matter, but I like the idea of not throwing away huge chunks of existing infrastructure.

Those long cables are the weak link in the Xlinks project. Underground, and undersea cables are both expensive and notoriously difficult to maintain, for largely obvious reasons.

Copper prices more or less doubling in the space of 12 months is, I imagine, also a serious risk to the project and/or cable manufacturers.

The converter stations required are at least a known quantity, if only a few built at that scale so far.

There's good power to be had much closer to home (wind), and could be made much more reliable for the sake of sorting out some transmission scale storage. Maybe 20GW would do it. The only viable places for that "at a single node" in the UK would be a Severn barrage, or using the Scottish lochs. More distributed variants of storage would do the trick.

The current government is mostly blind to storage and incentivising it, because in a free market, storage reduces the ability of wholesalers to profiteer off price spikes. Funny that, what we've just seen the last few months.

But doing nothing, with no long term plan to speak of has been the hallmark of the last 40 years of UK government, red or blue.

The only viable places for that "at a single node" in the UK would be a Severn barrage

A Severn barrage would have adverse environmental impact.

A Severn barrage would be disastrous, environmentally, but tidal lagoons* would be feasible with much less environmental impact, albeit with less energy produced, so less cost-effective.

*Very large concrete donuts in the water, that retain water at high tide and slow release to generate power.

"The current government is mostly blind to storage and incentivising it, because in a free market, storage reduces the ability of wholesalers to profiteer off price spikes."

Governments are largely blind to anything that takes longer than the life of a Parliament.

We already have undersea interconnects to France, Ireland, and a new 720km link to Norway - the undersea cable business is [1]booming , apparently (sorry, subscription required but the gist of the article is clear from the headline).

I appreciate long interconnects are difficult, but you could have made the same statement about offshore wind 15 years ago and now look at us. So I'm not sure it's an insurmountable problem. But yes, I do kind of wonder why they don't just do the interconnect to northern Spain and use the grid there. Brief scan of the [2]Wikipedia article makes me think Spain/Portugal would be pleased to have that cable too.

[1] https://www.economist.com/business/2021/10/11/the-booming-business-of-knitting-together-the-worlds-electricity-grids

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Spain

Geothermal drilling in Cornwall recently caused earth tremors, of much the same magnitude as fracking caused, which were used to get fracking suspended in the UK.

The fact that we have just had a natural earthquake in the UK somewhat more powerful and which caused no significant damage and no injuries is unlikely to have the slightest impact on the fracking argument.

So Geothermal - yup, good idea, and the technology seems to work and be able to provide reliable 24 hours/day energy. However, be prepared for objections from the self-proclaimed environmentalists.

Assuming working commercial designs can be up and running within 28 years (Hmmm....!), one then has to stamp them out in adequate numbers to meet demand; plus transmission and, most crucially, the distribution capacity to use them in all the places where oil and gas need to be substituted.

Given the lead time on even a bog standard CCGT is at least 5 years one does not suppose the transition away will be especially quick.

I don't dispute the potential of fusion to end a lot of the worlds problems with energy, but companies don't just decommission perfectly good equipment with decades of life left in it.

Not unless you outlaw / hard end date the older technology through other means.

Fusion is still a better bet than the "Small Modular Reactors" our clown premier, Moe, is funding here in Saskatchewan. And carbon capture. Anything and everything is being done here to avoid actually TACKLING the problem at hand. :(

Beware of false dichotomy.

I don't see one in the conclusion: the subsidy industry is up and running and, largely, driving policy.