In a dramatic scientific and engineering breakthrough, researchers at the Bay Area’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory recently achieved the long-sought goal of generating a nuclear fusion reaction that produced more energy than was directly injected into a tiny reactor vessel. By the very next day, pundits well across the political spectrum were touting that breakthrough as a harbinger of a new era in energy production, suggesting that a future of limitless, low-impact fusion energy was perhaps a few decades away. In reality, however, commercially viable nuclear fusion is only infinitesimally closer than it was back in the 1980s when a contained fusion reaction – i.e. not occurring in the sun or from a bomb – was first achieved.

While most honest writers have at least acknowledged the obstacles to commercially-scaled fusion, they typically still underestimate them – as much so today as back in the 1980s. We are told that a fusion reaction would have to occur “many times a second” to produce usable amounts of energy. But the blast of energy from the LLNL fusion reactor actually only lasted one tenth of a nanosecond – that’s a ten-billionth of a second. Apparently other fusion reactions (with a net energy loss) have operated for a few nanoseconds, but reproducing this reaction over a billion times every second is far beyond what researchers are even contemplating.

We are told that the reactor produced about 1.5 times the amount of energy that was input, but this only counts the laser energy that actually struck the reactor vessel.  That energy, which is necessary to generate temperatures over a hundred million degrees, was the product of an array of 192 high-powered lasers, which required well over 100 times as much energy to operate. Third, we are told that nuclear fusion will someday free up vast areas of land that are currently needed to operate solar and wind power installations. But the entire facility needed to house the 192 lasers and all the other necessary control equipment was large enough to contain three football fields, even though the actual fusion reaction takes place in a gold or diamond vessel smaller than a pea.  All this just to generate the equivalent of about 10-20 minutes of energy that is used by a typical small home. Clearly, even the most inexpensive rooftop solar systems can already do far more. And Prof. Mark Jacobson’s group at Stanford University has calculated that a total conversion to wind, water and solar power might use about as much land as is currently occupied by the world’s fossil fuel infrastructure.

Long-time nuclear critic Karl Grossman wrote on Counterpunch recently of the many likely obstacles to scaling up fusion reactors, even in principle, including high radioactivity, rapid corrosion of equipment, excessive water demands for cooling, and the likely breakdown of components that would need to operate at unfathomably high temperatures and pressures. His main source on these issues is Dr. Daniel Jassby, who headed Princeton’s pioneering fusion research lab for 25 years. The Princeton lab, along with researchers in Europe, has led the development of a more common device for achieving nuclear fusion reactions, a doughnut-shaped or spherical vessel known as a tokamak. Tokamaks, which contain much larger volumes of highly ionized gas (actually a plasma, a fundamentally different state of matter), have achieved substantially more voluminous fusion reactions for several seconds at a time, but have never come close to producing more energy than is injected into the reactor.

The laser-mediated fusion reaction achieved at LBL occurred at a lab called the National Ignition Facility, which touts its work on fusion for energy, but is primarily dedicated to nuclear weapons research. Prof. M. V. Ramana of the University of British Columbia, whose recent article was posted on the newly revived ZNetwork, explains, “NIF was set up as part of the Science Based Stockpile Stewardship Program, which was the ransom paid to the US nuclear weapons laboratories for forgoing the right to test after the United States signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty” in 1996. It is “a way to continue investment into modernizing nuclear weapons, albeit without explosive tests, and dressing it up as a means to produce ‘clean’ energy.” Ramana cites a 1998 article that explained how one aim of laser fusion experiments is to try to develop a hydrogen bomb that doesn’t require a conventional fission bomb to ignite it, potentially eliminating the need for highly enriched uranium or plutonium in nuclear weapons.

While some writers predict a future of nuclear fusion reactors running on seawater, the actual fuel for both tokamaks and laser fusion experiments consists of two unique isotopes of hydrogen known as deuterium – which has an extra neutron in its nucleus – and tritium – with two extra neutrons. Deuterium is stable and somewhat common: approximately one out of every 5-6000 hydrogen atoms in seawater is actually deuterium, and it is a necessary ingredient (as a component of “heavy water”) in conventional nuclear reactors. Tritium, however, is radioactive, with a half-life of twelve years, and is typically a costly byproduct ($30,000 per gram) of an unusual type of nuclear reactor known as CANDU, mainly found today in Canada and South Korea. With half the operating CANDU reactors scheduled for retirement this decade, available tritium supplies will likely peak before 2030 and a new experimental fusion facility under construction in France will nearly exhaust the available supply in the early 2050s. That is the conclusion of a highly revealing article that appeared in Science magazine last June, months before the latest fusion breakthrough. (I’ve subsequently learned that most of that data was first reported for a non-specialist audience in the New Energy Times in 2021.) While the Princeton lab has made some progress toward potentially recycling tritium, fusion researchers remain highly dependent on rapidly diminishing supplies. Alternative fuels for fusion reactors are also under development, based on radioactive helium or boron, but these require temperatures up to a billion degrees to trigger a fusion reaction. The European lab plans to experiment with new ways of generating tritium, but these also significantly increase the radioactivity of the entire process and a tritium gain of only 5 to 15 percent is anticipated. The more downtime between experimental runs, the less tritium it will produce. The Science article quotes D. Jassby, formerly of the Princeton fusion lab, saying that the tritium supply issue essentially “makes deuterium-tritium fusion reactors impossible.”

So why all this attention toward the imagined potential for fusion energy? It is yet another attempt by those who believe that only a mega-scaled, technology-intensive approach can be a viable alternative to our current fossil fuel-dependent energy infrastructure. Some of the same interests continue to promote the false claims that a “new generation” of nuclear fission reactors will solve the persistent problems with nuclear power, or that massive scale capture and burial of carbon dioxide from fossil fueled power plants will make it possible to perpetuate the fossil-based economy far into the future. It is beyond the scope of this article to systematically address those claims, but it is clear that today’s promises for a new generation of “advanced” reactors is not much different from what we were hearing back in the 1980s, ‘90s or early 2000s.

Nuclear whistleblower Arnie Gundersen has systematically exposed the flaws in the ‘new’ reactor design currently favored by Bill Gates, explaining that the underlying sodium-cooled technology is the same as in the reactor that “almost lost Detroit” due to a partial meltdown back in 1966, and has repeatedly caused problems in Tennessee, France and Japan. France’s nuclear energy infrastructure, which has long been touted as a model for the future, is increasingly plagued by equipment problems, massive cost overruns and some sources of cooling water no longer being cool enough, due to rising global temperatures. An attempt to export French nuclear technology to Finland took more than twenty years longer than anticipated, at many times the original estimated cost. As for carbon capture, we know that countless, highly subsidized carbon capture experiments have failed and that the vast majority of the CO₂ currently captured from power plants is used for “enhanced oil recovery,” i.e. increasing the efficiency of existing oil wells. The pipelines that would be needed to actually collect CO₂ and bury it underground would be comparable to the entire current infrastructure for piping oil and gas, and the notion of permanent burial will likely prove to be a pipedream.

Meanwhile, we know that new solar and wind power facilities are already cheaper to build than new fossil fueled power plants and in some locations are even less costly than continuing to operate existing power plants. Last May, California was briefly able to run its entire electricity grid on renewable energy, a milestone that had already been achieved in Denmark and in South Australia. And we know that a variety of energy storage methods, combined with sophisticated load management and upgrades to transmission infrastructure are already helping solve the problem of intermittency of solar and wind energy in Europe, California and other locations. At the same time, awareness is growing about the increasing reliance of renewable technology, including advanced batteries, on minerals extracted from Indigenous lands and the global South. Thus a meaningfully just energy transition needs to both be fully renewable, and also reject the myths of perpetual growth that emerged from the fossil fuel era. If the end of the fossil fuel era portends the end of capitalist growth in all its forms, it is clear that all of life on earth will ultimately be the beneficiary.

Updated bio: Brian Tokar is an activist and author, and a long-time faculty and board member of the Institute for Social Ecology. For most of the past 15 years he has been a lecturer in Environmental Studies at the University of Vermont. His latest book is Climate Justice and Community Renewal: Resistance and Grassroots Solutions (Routledge, 2020), an international collection on grassroots climate responses, coedited with Tamra Gilbertson.

Our core ecological problem is not climate change. It is overshoot, of which global warming is a symptom. Overshoot is a systemic issue. Over the past century-and-a-half, enormous amounts of cheap energy from fossil fuels enabled the rapid growth of resource extraction, manufacturing, and consumption; and these in turn led to population increase, pollution, and loss of natural habitat and hence biodiversity. The human system expanded dramatically, overshooting Earth’s long-term carrying capacity for humans while upsetting the ecological systems we depend on for our survival. Until we understand and address this systemic imbalance, symptomatic treatment (doing what we can to reverse pollution dilemmas like climate change, trying to save threatened species, and hoping to feed a burgeoning population with genetically modified crops) will constitute an endlessly frustrating round of stopgap measures that are ultimately destined to fail.

A growing resistance to the Chepete/ El Bala megadam is challenging President Evo Morales’s plan to convert Bolivia into South America’s leading energy powerhouse. 

Last November, representatives of 17 indigenous communities held a vigil at the site of two megadams—El Chepete and El Bala—that President Evo Morales plans to build in Bolivia’s Amazonian region. The protesters blocked access to the site by Geodata, the Italian firm hired by the government to study the dams’ feasibility. Twelve days later, Geodata’s engineers withdrew their equipment, announcing, “If there’s no [community] consensus, the conditions don’t exist for us to work.”

It should be a scandal that leftists-liberals paint Trump as a special threat, a war mongerer – not Obama who is the first president to be at war everyday of his eight years, who is waging seven wars at present, who dropped three bombs an hour, 24 hours a day, the entire 2016. Here is some of the worst of this anti-Trump hysteria propagated by mouthpieces for liberal Democrats — calling Republicans “fascist” is a favorite left-liberal sport.

Since the '70's, "back to the 1950's" has been the rallying cry of reactionaries. Michael Klare shows us that it is the cornerstone of Trump's proposed energy policies. The 1950's may prove hard to ressurrect however.

Immerath, 90 km away from the German city of Cologne, has become a ghost town. The local church bells no longer ring and no children are seen in the streets riding their bicycles. Its former residents have even carried off their dead from its cemetery.

Expansion of Garzweiler, an open-pit lignite mine, has led to the town’s remaining residents being relocated to New Immerath, several kilometres away from the original town site, in North Rhine-Westphalia, whose biggest city is Cologne.

The deserts of the American Southwest have come under a new assault in the last decade. The few, fragmented areas of these austere, rugged, yet delicate landscapes that had managed to survive relatively intact from mining, ranching, military use (including nuclear tests), urban encroachment and motorized recreation, are now being targeted for the development of large-scale “green” energy projects, many of them on public lands.

Five-plus years after the publication of Dickson Despommier's book The Vertical Farm: Feeding Ourselves and The World in the 21st Century, his dream—originally conceived as the production of food in the interior of tall urban buildings—is gaining momentum despite many unanswered questions about its feasibility.

Although the fanciful skyscrapers depicted in countless architectural renderings of vertical farms have never materialized in the real world, less ambitious indoor food-growing operations have been popping up in cities on every continent. And the buzz is growing even faster than the plants.

There are projections that the vertical farming market will hit $4 billion by 2020. And in a January segment of NPR's Diane Rehm Show (in which I participated), several guests argued that vertical farming could revolutionize agriculture and even supply most of our food needs. The show's guest host that day, Maria Hinojosa, declared it "something big, different, and permanent."

However, in their efforts to develop a system that sustainably supplies cities with a large share of their food, theorists and practitioners of vertical farming face insurmountable obstacles. These include the limited range of crop species that can be grown; the tiny proportion of our population's total food needs that indoor crops could supply; the elite market being targeted; and the irrelevance of indoor agriculture to the lives and diets of people living in economically stressed rural regions where the bulk of our food is grown.

Meanwhile, looming largest among the many factors that will restrict the growth of vertical gardening (a term that I believe is more apt than "vertical farming," given the potential scale and the types of food that can be produced) are its extraordinary energy requirements and heavy climate impact.

Burning daylight

No one would consider stacking photovoltaic solar panels one above the other. In such a system, only the top panel would produce electric current. The leaves of plants also need to be directly and strongly illuminated if they are to activate the photosynthesis that powers their growth.

If plants are living indoors, even if they are in a wholly glass-walled room, they can't capture enough sunlight to perform those functions. Plants nearest the windows will receive weak sideways illumination for part of the day, while interior plants will get much less than that; for both, the light intensity would be wholly inadequate to produce a significant quantity of food. 

Grown indoors, plants need much more intense artificial illumination in order to produce food than our eyes need in order to see. A real Matt Damon, for example, could not grow real potatoes indoors on any planet under a sparse lighting setup like the one depicted in the film The Martian; however, the scene was adequately lit for filming and viewing.

Based on figures in a 2013 paper published by indoor plant-growth expert Toyoki Kozai of Japan's Chiba University and on the assumption of efficient LED lighting, I estimate that plants like potato or tomato that produce a fleshy food product require about 1,200 kilowatt-hours of electricity for each kilogram of edible tissue they produce, not counting the water stored in the food.

That requirement approximates the annual electricity consumption of the average American home refrigerator—and that's a big energy bill to produce just two and a quarter pounds of food dry matter. This kind of thing could not be scaled up very far. At that rate, producing America's annual vegetable crop (not counting potatoes) in vertical systems under lights would require well over half of the electricity this country generates every year, and that would crank out 1.3 billion metric tons of carbon emissions per year. Heating and air-conditioning would add considerably to power demand and the emissions.

Given the energy hunger of indoor cropping systems, their designers typically assume that the product will be vegetables. Fresh produce has a high value per pound, and out of each 10 pounds of product harvested, 8 to 9½ pounds is water—and light is not needed to produce water.

In practice, the choice of food crops facing indoor gardeners is even narrower. Existing indoor systems all focus on growing leafy greens or herbs, because most of those plants' weight can be sold and eaten. If potatoes, tomatoes, or green beans were being grown, much precious building space and costly electricity would go into producing inedible leaves, stems, and roots.

I suspect that much of the current interest in indoor gardening is stimulated by the success of indoor cannabis production. But that resource-intensive system, which in 2011 was already consuming as much electricity as two million American homes, is economically viable thanks to its product's $8-to-10-per-gram price. That compares with a fraction of a penny per gram for fresh vegetables or grains.

Warning: this chard is not for everyone

In Despommier's original vision for vertical food production, he was both wrong and right in his analysis of the problem to be solved. On one hand, he claimed that we are running short of rural farmland. That part is nonsense. In the United States, we produce 4,000 calories worth of food per resident daily, twice what's required. We have ample land; we just need to stop abusing the soil we have. So Despommier, recognizing that need, also presented a mostly on-target critique of industrial agriculture and the soil degradation that results. On balance, his analysis was solid, but his proposed remedy—to take most or all rural land out of food production and move crops into cities—was doomed from the start.

Don't get me wrong; I am all for urban cultivation of fresh produce. But it should be grown on sun-exposed plots of land and rooftops and “green walls” and in greenhouses. That would greatly improve the lives of urban-dwellers. But it would also leave the bulk of our 350 million acres of farmland untouched. Filling the sunlit land and rooftops in cities with crops could accommodate only a portion of U.S. vegetable production. And vegetables occupy only 3% of our total cropland.

Whether we were to use traditional or indoor gardening to urbanize food production (one consideration in making that choice: the indoor option would require tens of thousands of Empire State Buildings!), we would still leave the vast bulk of our agriculture out on the rural landscape where it happens today.

Given that, suppose vertical gardeners were to backpedal to a goal much less sweeping than the salvation of America's farmland. Consider what it would take to provide fresh produce to just 15,000 city dwellers; that would be about 2% of the population of the District of Columbia.

That was the objective of a favorable 2013 analysis of vertical gardening by a German engineering group. They estimated that the project would require a 150 x 150 square-foot building with 37 stories. It would cost a quarter billion dollars to construct and equip and would consume $7 million worth of electricity annually. Those estimates led them to conclude, “It is possible to grow only high value crops for consumers who have disposable income for such products.”

In other words, such buildings would not serve 15,000 people of modest means. Were vertical gardeners ever to venture beyond leafy greens into growing a full range of vegetables, the sky-high inputs of capital, resources (especially electricity), and labor would limit the reach of their produce to a boutique market.  

So the original aim of vertical cropping's proponents—to protect the soils of America's farm country by taking much of that land out of production­—was well-meant but futile. It also completely ignored the people who live on farms and in rural communities across rural America. They produce the bulk of the country's food but often have even less access than city dwellers to good-quality food for their own families.

Small towns and rural areas are suffering disproportionately from food insecurity. The food-bank network Feeding America estimates that while 43 percent of all U.S. counties are classified as rural, 62 percent of the counties with the worst rates of food insecurity among children are rural. The problem of poor access to affordable, nutritious food out here in flyover country is being addressed neither by the mainstream urban-food movement nor by vertical-gardening enthusiasts.  

Much could be done to protect our lands while improving access to good food for all Americans, rural and urban. As a start, we could slow or stop the degradation of the nation's soils by eliminating the feedlot system of meat production and the scores of millions of acres of corn and soybeans that supply it. The land thus spared could be converted to soil-conserving pasture, rangeland, or orchards as well as to a diverse array of food crops and cover crops that could be grown more sustainably. That could bring more income and better living conditions to rural areas while ensuring better nutrition for everyone, rural and urban. In the longer term, the replacement of annual grains and oilseeds with perennial food crops will completely eliminate soil and water degradation in agriculture.

Some forms of sun-and-soil-supported local food production that are being practiced in and around cities could also be implemented in rural America. Gardening has always been popular out here, and there's a lot more land on which to do it—enough land that not only vegetables but also staple foods like dry beans and grains can be produced for local consumption. That could be augmented in rural areas by community gardens and farms producing for local sale, and community canning centers and greenhouses that could make local food available year-round.

No free lunch, no free salad bar

But even if funding and popular support can be found for all such good-food initiatives, the root causes of rural food insecurity will remain. Poverty, loss of family farms, the boarding up of small-town storefronts, and ecological degradation are all attributable to exploitation by agribusiness, and they can't be fixed by growing salad greens under lights.

The roots of urban food insecurity are as economic and political as those out here in farm country. Sun-fed urban gardening, fruit and vegetable cultivation close to cities, and people's food initiatives all are important and need to keep expanding, but a still more profound economic transformation is needed.

By claiming to be "revolutionary," vertical-gardening advocates are seeking to be viewed as part of such a transformation. But thanks to their hefty electric bills and limited crop range, they will have a hard time venturing beyond the elite market, let alone reducing their climate impact.

With the green façade crumbling, there is much loose talk in the vertical-gardening world about using renewable energy sources to power their grow-lights. That discussion spirals into some interesting circular logic: that we would use solar arrays and wind farms to convert sunlight's energy into electric current that would feed lamps that would convert a portion of the electrical energy into artificial sunlight to shine on plants so they can convert that light energy into food.

At each of those conversion points, there are big losses of energy and heavy infrastructure costs. It's about as wasteful as a system can be. Better to let crop plants do what they do best: capture cost-free, emissions-free sunlight for themselves, directly.

In other words, whatever source you use to power the lights for your vertical food-production system, you're giving a boost to greenhouse warming. Grow crops under lights, with climate control powered by fossil fuels, and you add directly to greenhouse emissions. Grow them under lights powered by wind turbines or solar arrays, and you consume green energy that could have been used instead to displace some of the fossil energy that's now running home refrigerators, air-conditioners, electronics, etc.

One also hears vertical enthusiasts argue, without providing any numbers, that they can compensate for the excess energy consumption required by electric lighting by growing their lettuce or basil close to markets rather than burning fuel to haul them across the country.

Reduced energy consumption for transportation is an excellent argument for urban gardening and farming within or close to cities, but it's no justification for indoor gardening. The climate impact of shipping food over long distances is significant, but the impact of energy-intensive food raising methods can be far larger than that. Dependence on artificial lighting in particular makes the impact of food production vastly larger than the impact of food transport.

Defenders of vertical gardening claim that it can produce much more food per acre of land per year than sun-and-soil agriculture. But not only are many of these comparisons exaggerated; they are also irrelevant. No matter how big the improvement in production per square foot per year, it will have no effect on the key number in vertical gardening's energy predicament: the quantity of photosynthetically active light required to produce each and every kilogram of plant tissue. That's a basic biochemical requirement. Increasing a food-production building's yield by stacking in more and more plants per floor or operating year-round only increases the demand for electric lighting. 

The energy efficiency of lamps or production systems can be improved, but not infinitely, so indoor crops will always be deeply dependent on electricity and other industrial support. That means that with every kilogram of food we produce under artificial lighting, we will have passed up an opportunity to harvest free sunlight, and will thereby contribute to the Earth's warming. 

In a country that desperately needs to achieve food justice, diversify agriculture, end soil abuse, abolish factory farming, and slash greenhouse emissions, vertical gardening will have a net negative impact. In a country whose food system, in both cities and the countryside, has been broken by our deep distortions of economic and political power, we need a broad-based political, economic, and ecological uprising—and that will neither start nor finish in high-rise vegetable factories.

Stan Cox is research coordinator at The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas. He is coauthor, with Paul Cox, of "How the World Breaks: Life in Catastrophe's Path, From the Caribbean to Siberia," coming in June from The New Press.