More marginal progress on the fusion breakthrough announced a year ago. They’re getting more energy than they put in to now make 10 pots of coffee. Not very encouraging. But just suppose hypothetically that some major breakthough happens here in the next year or two. Could we get enough reactors online in 5 to 10 years to not only help power civilization but to ramp up power for large scale decarbonization efforts?

Yeah I know the scale is immense, long term carbon sequestration is problematic, and we’re all doomed yada yada yada. After all, high school chemistry teaches everything to know about atmospheric dynamics and climate change, right? (Kind of reminds me of a guy in my group of friends who says he can design a Bussard Ramjet because he took high school physics.)

But again, HYPOTHETICALLY, were there an orders-of-magnitude major breakthrough in clean energy, would that change any of your convictions on solving the problem? How big a breakthrough would be required? If the world could get 10 or 100 or 1000 times the current energy we produce in a clean and cheap way, would that be enough?