It just wants a piece of linkedin's pie.

I think it would be pretty difficult to identify the "most important" part of fusion research right now. There are several critical factors to it, lack of any of which would cause failure.

Right now one of these is tech process. Another one is material science necessary. Failure in any of these would cause failure of entire project. And advantage of material science research is that unlike fusion process research, it is in fact applicable in other industries. There is a definite need for materials that can take significant heat energy input without losing their physical properties. We could significantly increase efficiency in almost all of our steam turbine based power generation if we could do this for example, as one of the main limiters on how much energy we can extract from steam is tolerance limits on turbine blades, piping and heat exchangers.

Your first sentence is factually false. If it were true, wind energy would be phenomenally profitable right now, because the main reason why it's so expensive to produce energy with wind turbines is maintenance costs. It has effectively no other costs - there's no fuel to supply it with, no operators to operate it. And yet wind energy is massively more expensive than coal which needs complex tech process that requires humans to make sure it's working correctly and fuel that needs to be paid for

Actually they don't. That's the interesting part. Much of technology improvement, and why coal is very cheap in spite of all the penalties on it due to CO2 emissive nature are because current burning process automation has progressed a lot because of computerisation. Most of the modern power plants are able to direct burning process in ways that prevent formation of most known pollutants, such as NOx and SO2 from forming, and filtering systems mainly focus on filtering particles.

The big advantage of computerization is that once the system is designed, it's cheap to implement.

Number two, as you specifically jury-rig the form of the sentence to serve the political statement, rather than reflect the reality.

Reality is, CO2 doesn't change the environment. Greehouse effect caused by extremely wide spectrum of factors, one of which is overly large emission of CO2 from burning processes does.

You really need to educate yourself on why greenhouse effect is scary. It doesn't harm the environment. It changes it in a natural cycle, which we have seen a lot of time through the history of our planet. The scary part is speed of change and our the fact that our civilization may not be able to adapt to those changes due to accelerated nature of current warming cycle. The real threat there is, once again, methane. Because we have massive amounts of methane that was in the air causing a far greater greenhouse effect during the hot periods in the past currently trapped in ocean sediment layer. Right now, it's staying there, but we're uncertain at what water temperature is will begin to escape, becoming a self-accelerating process.

Saying that greenhouse effect is harmful and comparing it to pollutants like say NOx is like saying that rain is damaging like acid rain. One of these is natural phenomenon. Other is caused purely by human activity or massive natural disasters. The political angle expressed in your number two relies on human desire to oversimplify complex issues to make them easier to understand.

So let's try it you way. Which of the following factually incorrect statements do you agree with:

1. Greenhouse effect is unnatural and destructive to nature.
2. Greenhouse effect is caused by humans.
3. Elements present in natural cycle of extraction of energy from sunlight by flora and required for maintaining current ecology are pollutants.

See? It's pretty easy to jury-rig flat, simplified statements to make those holding a complex and correct opinion on issue to look bad while looking correct to casual observer.

I am now completely convinced that you have NEVER had any contact with design/construction/building of any kind of medium or large power plant. Material science and its application forms a lion's share of what people designing it do. Building it is a lot about making sure that each pipe conforms to strict material requirements - reasons ranging from nastier stuff like maintenance people getting cut in two nice halves by invisible and deafening high pressure vapor leak to more mundane "large maintenance costs" ones. Especially if to fix it, you have to spend a couple of days stopping the main turbine and letting it cool off before you can even open it up, finding the leak due to pressure/corrosion/myriad of other reasons, then spending another couple of days getting it to spin and heat up back to work load.

Turbines themselves are another thing where material science is the main limiter of efficiency, but are not relevant to the discussion as they are typically on secondary circuit anyway.

Finally there's the problem with fusion: we do not have heat exchangers capable of withstanding forced involved with temperatures/pressures involved for the primary circuit. You may not have known, but one thing has remained largely unchanged about power generation - when we need to transform thermal energy to kinetic one so we can rotate the generator, as is done in everything from small burners to gigawatt+ nuclear power plants, we need multiple heat exchangers that can handle the temperatures and pressures involved. Take a guess at main design limiter here? Correct, material science yet again! We want water vapor as hot and as pressurized as possible for maximum efficiency.

None of my relatives work with this particular design aspect directly, but if the person works with building or designing power plants, he will be talking about material science. A lot. It's one of the main limiters on what we can and cannot do in power generation for other types of power generation as well. Before computer age, the main limitation was automation, followed by design complexity (specifically pipe work being exceptionally complex, often too complex to design by hand). Modern CAD applications solved both these problems very efficiently, and now we're mainly limited by material science and process limitations. Both are being solved through the computerization as well, but they are much more complex than making sure that those hundreds of kilometers of pipes are all of correct type and all connected correctly, such as burning process simulation in the large boiler, which requires immense and exceptionally accurate physics modeling.

For example, did you know that one of the main limiters on the size of burner plants, and the reason why modern power plants are significantly more powerful than old ones is because material science and process technology allowed for more efficient and durable heat exchangers and turbines?

Astronomical maintenance costs. Failure rates. Inability to operate beyond optimal RPM causing wind mills to not generate power when wind is too strong. Short life span that means that mill can barely pay for itself in its useful lifetime.

All of the above are the direct result of the fact that none of materials we have are strong enough to withstand forces involved for prolonged duration.

Not only is it not a footnote, but placing material research facility in Japan was the main reason why japanese agreed to give ITER to EU. It's not talked about much in the non-professional press, but there are two major investments in the fusion project: ITER reactor test site in France and material research center in Japan. Both are aimed at solving one of the two problems that fusion has in front of it: the process and the materials needed.

And wind and solar are not in position to act as a transitional power until they material problems are solved. It's merely a curiosity at this point, jury-rigged for power production for political reasons.

The problems they are facing are similar to those of fusion - lack of material technology that is durable enough for production. Requirements are different, and it's a whole lot easier to design and build a wind turbine than fusion reactor, but they are both pushing in the same dead end (right now) - material science.

The difference obviously being that wind mostly has the process sorted out and in phase of perfecting it, while fusion is still working on the process itself.

Politics have some fun contradictions. This situation reminds me of far right parties from all over Europe gathering for a summit a couple of years ago. I caught a glimpse of some of the footage, and it was hilarious - watching people who make their political platform to hate one another shaking hands and talking how others are right.

One last try (though I'm starting to feel I'm fighting against windmills here).

1. CO2 is but one of the factors in global warming phenomenon.
2. Much bigger problem is the actually strong greenhouse gasses such as methane.
3. Global warming is not about pollution, but a natural cyclic phenomenon. It would occur with or without extra CO2, the only difference would be speed of the process.
4. This natural phenomenon is being accelerated by many factors, one of them the increased output of CO2 by various burning processes.
5. CO2 pollutes nothing - in fact it's a necessary gas in the atmosphere for functioning of current ecosystem.
6. Global warming is a natural part of ecosystem - the only problem we're having is the speed of change which is too rapid for adaptation of some species.
7. As a result we conclude that CO2 is a natural part of ecosystem, increase in which merely acts as a catalyst for a natural process.

Conclusion: it is not a pollutant. It's a greenhouse gas that accelerates a natural process.

Example of pollutant:
SO2. Undergoes chemical reaction in the cloud layer causing rain water to turn acidic and kill plant life. Also generates severe particles that cause problems in breathing apparatus of all air-breathing mammals.
NOx. Undergoes chemical reaction in the cloud layer causing rain water to turn acidic and kill plant life.

These gasses do not cause such effects when not in massive concentrations, which only occur either through human action, or natural disaster such as forest fire or volcanic eruption. Wide area increase of acidic rain and particle presence in the atmosphere is not a natural process, not a part of a natural process and has a severe, direct negative impact on ecology.
As a result, these gasses are classified as pollutants.

To review: CO2 has none of such effects.

The point is that Germany is staking its long term electrical generation on renewables over coal. Result of this policy has been not reduction in CO2 emissions and stable power generation, but massive problems, massive coal buildup and first increase in CO2 emissions in years. Reason being that they are betting big on jury-rigging wind power in Baltic sea to be base power.

It's an excellent example of what happens when politicians make an engineering decision based on advice and ideology from people with liberal arts education. Results turn up to be the opposite of those intended, with new concepts such as "energy poverty" tacked on top of it. It's why major infrastructure engineering decisions that require in depth understanding of the issue, such as water, power and logistics should not be decided by popular vote, but by people with education and experience in the field.

Vast majority of failures can be directly or indirectly attributed to such interference, Fukushima being the prime example of it, and German Energiewende being another. If engineers had their say, Fukushima would have been long ago upgraded to be a modern, rather than first generation plant sitting on fault line, Energiewende would have been similar to French, Bristish and Finnish solution of building up solid nuclear base and then slowly building up more exotic renewable technologies as they improve and so on.

Instead we have "nuclear is bad, even upgrading it is bad, coal is bad, anything that burns is bad, in fact let's put a whole lot of windmills in the Baltic sea and use those for energy generation!" which is what happened in Germany. Results truly speak for themselves.

Spiegel has a pretty good, albeit quite rosy article on the political side of things here:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/high-costs-and-errors-of-german-transition-to-renewable-energy-a-920288.html

Reality is actually worse, but few in Germany dare to talk about it, and Germany being as wealthy as it is right now does have the money to finance the massive shortfall by building up and running coal plants in parallel to compensate.

Because at concentrations in the atmosphere, it's not a pollutant. It's not harmful to us humans at all, and about the only harm it causes is flora shift in some places due to flora capable of utilizing CO2 slightly more efficiently gets a minor evolutionary advantage.

In fact, it's necessary for current ecology to function. If you removed CO2 from circulation entirely, everything on the planet would be dead within months as first green plant life would perish, followed by a mass extinction event of everything that relies on flora to extract energy from sunlight.

What it is however, is a greehouse gas. It causes reflection of natural venting of thermal radiation into space back onto the surface in greater amounts, causing ecological shift. Ecological shift itself is in no way CO2 driven, but driven by warming of the planet as a result of more thermal energy from the sun remaining inside the atmosphere.

Similar shifts can be observed throughout planet's history, and the only thing that is special about this one is that we're apparently accelerating it more so than usual because we're dumping a number of greenhouse gasses, including CO2 into atmosphere at accelerated rate as compared to natural cycle. Also CO2 is not the main danger for this, but methane captured in sediment on sea and ocean floors. CO2 itself is a very weak greenhouse gas in comparison. The main worry is that we may push enough CO2 into atmosphere to cause methane to escape sediment and into the atmosphere so fast that our ecosystem will not have time to adapt to changes.

The point is that you're intentionally or unintentionally trying to fix the numbers. Most plumbing companies are one man or small business, so in relation to company budget, single employee would be earning a large portion of income. At large multinational like oracle, a single employee is always going to earn less in relation to company income than the single employee of one man business. Even if said business is bad and the only employee barely makes enough to earn a living.

Certainly. Mixing extremely high concentrations of CO2 and dumping them into lake bottom for example would likely destroy most of life in it for example.

Same can be applied for oxygen as well, and most other gasses. It's just that amounts would have to be extreme and concentrated in small space.