this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2023
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All thermal generation will cause direct global warming via waste heat if used to excess.
Fossil fuels have an order of magnitude or two more thermal forcing via GHG, so it's largely irrelevant there, but solar can produce a couple orders of magnitude more energy than the world uses now without significant land use. As such fusion (with the exception of p-B or He3 direct conversion with no steam engine which is a bit more scifi) hits thermal limits before solar hits land limits.
Intuitively you can frame this as "a small fraction of the amount of sunlight that hits the planet is the amount of energy that changes the planet's temperature" which is basically a tautology.