Isaacs | Culture Are these year end developments in fusion and fi rearms breakthroughs or bluster?

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Fusion and fi rearms

Are these year-end developments breakthroughs or bluster?

By DEANNA ISAACS

The best we can say about 2022? It’s been transitional. If we’re lucky, the shift will be to something better. In the meantime, the war in Ukraine drags on. Predictably, unconscionably, we’ve become inured to it. Inflation rages at a pace new to most of us. The experts pushing and pulling the levers on the economy apparently never do their own grocery shopping. Racism is still a plague, as is COVID, with its alphabet soup of mutations. It has struck devastating blows to cultural and urban life. Guns are now the major cause of death for American kids, and greenhouse gases continue to ramp up global warming.

Whew. Every story is important, but looking over those I wrote this year, it’s not hard to spot the potentially most consequential subject. It’s the last one on this quagmire of a list: climate change. In one of the fi nal stories of the year, I talked with author and former Reader sta er Peter Friederici about his book, Beyond Climate Breakdown, recently published by MIT Press. It was great to reconnect with him, but what he had to say was sobering: “We can have a climate future that’s really bad . . . or less bad.” We’re already at the point where the only choice we have is “How bad do we let it get?”

A grim peek at a future we’ve already set in motion.

But then, something amazing happened. Within days of that interview appearing in the Reader, the U.S. Department of Energy announced a breakthrough at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. On December 5, after decades of trying, scientists there had succeeded at “fusion ignition.” They’d managed to get more energy out of a fusion experiment (smashing two nuclei together until they unite, releasing energy) than they’d had to use to make the fusion happen. “This fi rst-of-itskind feat . . . will provide invaluable insights

State representative Justin Slaughter (le ) and Abraham Avalos, Illinois house judiciary committee meeting, Bilandic Building, December 15, 2022 DEANNA ISAACS

into the prospects of clean fusion energy,” the announcement said.

Eureka! The process sounded orgasmic, as did some of the comments included from politicians. “This astonishing scientifi c advance puts us on the precipice of a future no longer reliant on fossil fuels,” Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said, before adding that it’ll take a lot more cutting-edge work to get there.

So, is our existential climate problem suddenly solved? Human ingenuity (let the trumpets roar) sweeping in like magic to wipe away the problem previous human ingenuity had created? Who wouldn’t rejoice at that?

I called Friederici again. “It probably does suggest great prospects for the future—the distant future,” he said. How distant? “Hard to say; there are going to be big challenges with scaling up. And we don’t have the luxury of waiting. From a climate perspective, the time for action is right now. The work we do today affects the future way more than what we might do in 20 years. It’s a matter of trajectory and tipping points—the longer that we don’t reduce emissions, the more the climate is altered in the future.”

He added, “There’s a tendency to look at climate change and say, ‘OK, it’s a problem, what’s the silver bullet?’ But there is no silver bullet. It’s a new reality that demands a multitude of responses. Maybe fusion is part of the response in the future, but it’s not a silver bullet.”

Speaking of bullets, after the Highland Park Fourth of July shooting, one of the experts TV news turned to for comment was Phil Andrew—a Chicago-area native who’s been working on the gun problem since he was the victim of a mass shooter here in 1988. He told me in July that we need to ban assault weapons, make sure that guns are kept away from young people and dangerous people, and enact and strengthen red fl ag laws.

This month, at the Bilandic Building, an Illinois house judiciary committee held a series of hearings on a bill intended to do all that. As sponsor Bob Morgan, a Democrat representing the 58th District, explained at one of those hearings last Thursday, House Bill 5855 (the Protect Illinois Communities Act) will ban the sale and manufacture of assault weapons, high-capacity magazines, and .50-caliber rifl es, while requiring registration for those who already own such weapons. It’ll also crack down on gun tra cking from other states; raise the eligibility age for a gun owner’s permit to 21 (18-year-olds can now qualify with parental approval); and allow one-year terms for “red fl ag” weapon confi scation (now limited to six months).

The committee had a live audience of only about 30 people. Supporters of 5855 included a group of red-T-shirted members of Moms Demand Action. Across an aisle from them, a smaller ad hoc clutch of 5855 opponents included Abraham Avalos of Waukegan, in a black-and-yellow Illinois Gun Owners Together shirt. Avalos testifi ed that he was present at the Highland Park parade shooting but opposes the ban because there will always be “people who obey laws and people who don’t.” That, he said, “is why I carry.”

State representative Tony McCombie (71st District Republican), speaking remotely, told the committee that “if this passes, it’s going to be ineffective and unconstitutional,” and will “take guns out of the hands of law-abiding gun owners like myself.” And Live Free Illinois organizer Artinese Myrick said her group is “in support of an assault weapons ban,” but opposes “any legislation that will further criminalize Black and Brown communities,” and is concerned that with certain aspects of this bill, more law-abiding citizens may be swept up in the system.

All of the gun owners talked about the need to defend themselves; none explained why they’d need an assault weapon to do that.

In four hours of testimony, the committee also heard supportive research and fi rsthand accounts from officials, workers in the field, and survivors like Everytown Survivor Network members Maria Pike and Marsha Lee. Both lost sons in fatal shootings. “It’s out of control; we have to make change,” Lee told them.

That left me wondering: if we can’t muster the political will to outlaw weapons whose only purpose is to kill as many people as possible as quickly as possible, what are the chances we’ll make the harder changes necessary to escape the worst of a killer climate breakdown? v

iron will. steel resolve. and the occasional

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