When discussing climate change, environmentalists appropriately highlight descriptors like apocalyptic and urgent. But policy purists and not-in-my-backyard revisionists frequently express a vastly different non-urgent ethos characterized by opposition to carbon-free energy projects because of environmental downsides.
Such machinations are anathema to the fight against climate change. They imply there is ample time to wait for perfect solutions. And they implicitly discount intimidating barriers to climate stabilization that cry out for an all-hands-on-deck response.
A 2021 Princeton University report estimates that realizing the widespread environmentalist goal of 100% renewable energy by 2050 without nuclear power would impact more than 1 million square kilometers of land — an amount roughly equal to the entire nation of Egypt. Multiple studies emphasize that a 100% renewable future requires doubling or tripling transmission-line miles.
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It cannot be known in advance if satisfying these requirements is feasible. Whether it’s impossible or merely difficult, opposing carbon free energy projects can only make it more difficult. But such opposition is common among environmental and NIMBY activists. For example:
• Because of concerns about obstructed vistas and endangered fisheries, the United States has seven offshore windmills. Europe has more than 5,300.
• A 2011 Obama administration initiative sought expedited permitting of seven major transmission lines. A decade later, two were completed, one was abandoned, one was in progress, and three were still pending.
• A 2022 paper in the journal Energy Policy evaluated 53 canceled or delayed renewable energy projects. It reported that 4,600 megawatts of carbon-free generating capacity was lost while 60% of the projects were opposed by environmental groups.
• Nearly all internally generated electricity in Vermont is renewable. But with environmentalist support, the nuclear plant that produced 70% of Vermont’s home grown electricity was closed in 2014. Vermont now imports 60% of its power, much of which is natural gas from Canada.
A 2019 energy policy paper explores larger nuclear venues by quantifying the impact of closing nuclear plants in post-Fukushima Germany and Japan.
It calculates that leaving the nukes open and closing fossil fuel plants with similar energy output instead would have prevented 28,000 air pollution deaths and 2400 megatons of carbon dioxide emissions between 2011 and 2017. If the US and Europe pursue similar nuclear plant closing policies, it predicts more than 200,000 associated deaths by 2035.
The downsides of nuclear power are indisputable, arguably insurmountable. But during more than 20,000 global plant years of operation, no known lethal incidents are associated with the unsolved waste problem. And one of the world’s two complete meltdown accidents occurred in a primitive Soviet reactor that says nothing about future risk.
Insurmountable or not, these and other nuclear perils are incalculably less consequential than climate change. Along with the urgent need to reduce carbon emissions, that risk imbalance helps elucidate tacit progressive acceptance of strongly pro-nuclear components of the Inflation Reduction Act and increasing acceptance of nukes among prominent environmentalists like Bill McKibben. They belie the still-prevalent, oxymoronic recommendation that, although climate change is an existential threat, we should dismantle the nuclear source of more carbon-free energy than wind and solar combined.
When the Princeton scientists explored multiple net-zero scenarios, they concluded that their million-square-mile land use estimate could be reduced by 75% using robust nuclear power and carbon sequestration initiatives.
To the extent that this 75% reduction ensues, there will be commensurate reductions in trees cut down, wildlife disrupted, ecosystems degraded. Reductions that would make climate stabilization immeasurably less disruptive and far more likely to succeed.
A useful read for those who reject the progenitors of that net-zero scenario is the “Say Goodbye to 1.5° C” cover story in a November 2022 issue of the Economist. Central themes are that capping global temperature increases at 1.5 degrees centigrade is no longer feasible and that the perilous last-resort of geoengineering may soon become essential.
This is the milieu within which environmental purists offend their progressive persona by discounting two axiomatic truths.
Delaying or canceling renewable energy projects attenuates carbon emission reductions. Always. When nuclear plants close, the electricity has always been partly replaced with fossil fuels and the replacement portion that is renewable substitutes by definition for what is already carbon free.
The implication is manifest. Climate stabilization requires an urgency that precludes the luxury of waiting for the pristine and hoping it will suffice. This will sometimes have undesirable environmental side effects.
But when a lethal cancer portends, you do what must be done.
Ken Schechtman is a professor at the Washington University School of Medicine and chair of the Sierra Club’s Eastern Missouri Group. The views of the author do not reflect those of the Sierra Club.
