Just in Time?

Like a lot of people my age, the infamous "Limits to Growth" issued by the Club of Rome in 1972 made a profound impression on me when I read as a youngish, Gene McCarthy liberal, shortly after returning from a stint in the Peace Corps. I offer that as a confession of sorts, since it is a bit embarrassing to admit that I was so credulous as to actually take the predictions in the report seriously. Many of the premises of the report were demonstrably wrong and the results of their modeling wildly exaggerated. That realization coupled, now, with 25 years of working as an environmental lawyer have made me profoundly skeptical of claims that "the end is near." For some people, the "end" is always "near" -- even though they have to keep finding new causes for the demise. (Right now the doomsday scenario is global warming.) As a result, I have come to consider claims that growth will kill us to be little more than natterings of hysterical luddites.

But even I have to admit that with oil at $60 a barrel despite record levels of production and with the breathless press coverage of arguments about when we did or will pass "Hubbert's Peak," even I have been getting a bit queasy. Could it be that, for all of its simplism and speciousness, the Club of Rome might actually have been right in some broad general sense? Could it be that there might actually BE "Limits to Growth"?

Well, given that frame of mind, this came as what I see as ENORMOUSLY good news: France to Host World's First Nuclear Fusion Plant . Perhaps this is news to no one but me, but there is enough confidence in the feasibility of generating electricity from fusion (think infinite energy with no by-products but water) that the US, EU, Russia, China, Japan and South Korea are prepared to plunk down in excess of 10 billion Euros to build a fusion powered electrical generating station.

I looked it up: Enrico Fermi and friends built the first nuclear fission reactor at the University of Chicago in 1942. By late 1955, Arco Idaho had become the first town to be powered by nuclear energy, and by 1962 nuclear power had been fully commercialized with six nuclear generating stations in operation, two of them built entirely with private capital.

I would like to think we could duplicate that schedule here. Even though the pace of scientific achievement is accelerating, today there is one big impediment today that didn't exist in 1945-55: the hysterical luddites. The people need to believe the end is near and will oppose tooth and nail, hand and tong, anything that might actually reduce the likelihood or imminence of catastrophe. Also, the development effort is being pursued by multiple countries rather than only one. But still, the key to our energy future is right there being built even now in France. Let's hear it for human ingenuity!