Imagine industrial populations growing and spreading without limit.
Humans would consume what's left of the natural world, turning everything into more humans and more garbage.
If I discovered how to make an H-bomb out of ordinary hardware store materials I wouldn't tell anyone. If I built a working fusion power plant, Tony Stark style, I still wouldn't tell anyone.
Our species is a three year old playing with matches and we've lit the house on fire.
Global warming and overpopulation are symptoms of our civilization's immaturity, not problems that can be "solved" with increasingly powerful technologies.
We have all the tools we need today to stabilize our population at sustainable levels, and provide a good standard of living for everyone.
If we want to stop using fossil fuels now, the solution is simple: Stop using fossil fuels!
The difficult part is not finding a "replacement" source of energy, the difficult part is creating a society where we don't need more energy.
I can easily imagine a society where most people have never smelled gasoline, never driven a car, never seen a high voltage power line, yet still live in comfortable leisurely sustainable ways with good shelter, good food, appropriate medical care, and easy access to worldwide communication and transportation networks.
This can be accomplished with existing technologies. From there, who knows where we might go? But in our current society cheap fusion would simply add fuel to the house fire. We'd build more cars, mine more materials (how about those fusion powered tar sand refineries, eh?), and generally make a bigger mess of things than we already have.
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