A guest post from Nate Loewentheil, Executive Director of The Roosevelt Institution. Nate is liveblogging from Power Shift ’09.
I’m sitting at a panel at Power Shift 2009 on “Getting to the Truth: Pulling the Curtain Back on False Solutions to Our Energy Crisis.” The panel is an overview of various myths in the environmental movement and how we can best combat them: the true cost of nuclear, the utter absurdity of claims for “clean coal” and the dark side of carbon offsets.
But there are deeper questions at stake. Most people at PowerShift would agree that climate change is urgent, action is needed and any step in the right direction is worth exploring. But some steps are better than others, and not all of them take us in the right direction. Julian Drix of Rising Tide opened the panel with a critical insight: before we know if we’re taking a step on the right path, we need to know where we’re going. And if we don’t have a destination in mind, we’re going to get mighty lost.
Some options are clearly wrong while others may appear promising; we need to think clearly of all of the costs involved in a given technology or strategy before embracing it. We can smell out these “false solutions” with five criteria, according to Drix; solutions that appear to be move us forward might be:
- Environmentally and racially unjust
- Disguised corporate strategies
- Not actually effective in reducing carbon emissions
- Not scalable
- Encouraging of destructive behavior
Nuclear energy, for example, is not as clean as it first appears—fossil fuels are used in the mining and transportation of nuclear fuel. Paul Gunter of Beyond Nuclear laid out compelling statistics about the carbon footprint of nuclear, and spoke powerfully about its impact on our natural world; nuclear waste poisons our water and our lands, radiating our most precious resources. Mary Olsen of Nuclear Information Resource Services continued on the same theme, noting that the risks of building the plants are so high that investors are categorically unwilling to invest. According to Olsen, the critical fight will happen in the next year when the nuclear industry tries to define itself as a source of sustainable energy.
Clean coal is a more obvious myth, as Rebecca Tarboton of Rainforest Action Network disclosed with no great surprise but great emotional appeal. The coal industry is in a fight for it’s life, and its pretty clear why: clean coal is a meme, an invention, a term lacking in any content. The entire notion depends on the technology of carbon capture and sequestration, which is not only undeveloped but prohibitively expensive. Even if the technology was in place, it would be completely impossible to actually sequester the carbon—if we sequestered 60% of the carbon emissions, it would exceed in volume all of the oil we extract and burn in the United States each year. We might be able to meet these technological challenges, Rebecca noted (this is America, after all!), but the impact of coal extraction itself makes the entire industry downright criminal (check out www.appalachianvoices.org).
Clean coal and nuclear energy are insidious in their simple appeal—we already do it, and we can just do it better, industry experts assure a nervous public. This nervous public wants to go green in the easiest ways possible, and this provides ample ground for corporations to step in and profit. An entire PR industry of green-washing has evolved in the last few years to lend companies an aura of environmental concern without any environmental substance. These are cynical, manipulative efforts by companies to take advantage of the collective manifestation of our collective environmental guilt.
Other efforts to assuage our social guilt are better-intentioned but equally problematic. Carbon offsets, for example: rather than change our behavior, we can just buy our way out of it. The whole theory of carbon-offsets, though, assumes that we can simply pay to reduce our carbon emissions. As Daphne Wysham of the Institute for Policy Studies lays out, this is no small claim. Carbon-offset dollars fund projects that range from the disturbing—incinerators that burn trash and destroy jobs in India, to the bizarre—companies that dump iron particles in to the ocean to encourage larger carbon-eating plankton.
While we have to fight against nuclear energy, undermine the notion of “clean coal” and question the true nature of carbon-offsets, we must also be vigilant about the well-traveled path. All of the panelists made this argument in one way or another, and it’s a message we need to hear. But the unasked question was how far the public is willing to go at this moment, and what political messages will convince our leisure-loving citizenry. How far are we willing to challenge our underlying assumptions and our social values? Are Americans willing to go beyond the green fad to true reform? These panelists implied that it wasn’t just “false solutions” we have to fight against but a false consciousness.
I must respectfully disagree with Mary Olsen and Paul Gunter. The ExternE study showed that nuclear has a low carbon footprint (a little more than wind, but much smaller than fossil fuels). If you define a “true solution” as one that has perfect justice, free of charge, free of any emissions, only built and operated by small non-profit cooperatives…well there is NO such thing.
Certainly nuclear is controversial and must be carefully managed (plutonium is NOT a breakfast food). However, it is safer than the current fossil fuel technologies and can supply 24/7 electricity in large amounts. Our low-carbon energy choices are all difficult or controversial (even putting up transmission lines for new solar and wind is meeting with political opposition). The solutions to carbon are likely to be a combination of the “false solutions” as well as the politically correct energy sources.
I’m not convinced that nuclear power can honestly be labeled a “false solution.” When weighing potential solutions, any business person would have to measure the benefits of an investment against its expenses. This is called “return on investment” or ROI. When evaluating investments on a fixed set of parameters, “true” and “false” solutions would then become self-evident.
To date, the US Government (AKA, us taxpayers) have invested a lot of money on a lot of different energy sources. I don’t have the numbers in front of me, but the vast majority of the investments have gone towards fossil fuels. There has also been significant investments in “alternative” energy sources, including wind, solar, geothermal, biofuels, nuclear fission, and nuclear fusion to name a few.
I’m not sure what calculational methods Paul Gunter is using, but checking in at 74% of the low-carbon electricity generated in this country (20% of the total electricity), and an operational cost of less than 2 cents per kw-hr, nuclear has the highest return on investment of any of the alternative energy sources to date. Nothing else comes close.
Of course, as Robert mentioned, nuclear has some issues to deal with, but when considering the much larger issue of climate change looming, these issues become reasonable. And they are certainly technically manageable, as the 435+ operational reactors in the world have been proving for nearly half a century.