A week after weapons manufacturing giant Lockheed Martin announced its solution to climate change—a nuclear fusion reactor design that may be ready for prime time in the next two decades—Grist responded with all the reasons to second-guess the company’s claim that in “20 years, we’ll have clean power for the world.”
Even if the technology works (and this technology has been said to be just around the corner for decades), Johnston notes that we need drastic fossil fuel reductions now, not in the 2030s, to avert “very serious long-term feedback loops” in the global climate. After that, fusion would have to reach billions of people very quickly, when more than a billion lack access to even basic electrification.
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“The good news is that we don’t need to wait for fusion,” she writes. “We already have clean, carbon-free energy sources that have been around for decades and are much further along in overcoming all these hurdles.”
