Everybody knows President Donald Trump is bad for the climate. He said global warming was a hoax invented by the Chinese. He pulled the United States out of the United Nations climate agreement. Now he’s seeking to subsidize coal plants.
But what if what everyone thinks is wrong? What if Trump’s policy bailing out coal and nuclear plants actually result in fewer emissions than letting them close and be replaced by natural gas?
As strange as that might sound, that’s what a new Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) report suggests. Why? Because under Trump’s action, “coal-fired plants may not actually run more,” Bloomberg says.
By contrast, BNEF said, the continued operation of nuclear plants “could displace millions of tons of carbon dioxide a year.”
If nuclear plants close and are replaced by natural gas, the U.S. likely won’t be able to meet its already modest emissions reductions requirements under the United Nations climate treaty negotiated in Paris in 2015.
Why then are so many people who say they care about climate change upset with Trump’s proposed rule?
“From an emissions standpoint, there’s something unsatisfying that the dirtiest fuel will stick around longer,” BNEF’s North American Director of Analysis, Will Nelson, told me.
“But it’s widely understood,” he said, “that how often the coal fleet runs is more important than how much of it is online.”
Saving Nuclear Is More Important to the Climate than Closing Coal
Few people realize that most of the decline in coal electricity and carbon emissions over the last decade came not from closing coal plants but rather from reducing the amount of time they operated.
“People cheering for emissions reductions are too focused on retirements,” explained Nelson. They should be focused on “utilization,” or how often the plant runs during the year.
U.S. coal plants have been operating less and less as natural gas became cheaper. Last year, U.S. coal plants close to retirement operated just at 30 percent of the time.
By contrast, nuclear plants operated for over 90 percent of last year.
And while nothing will prevent closed coal plants from being restarted when natural gas prices rise, once a nuclear plant is closed, it’s gone forever and can’t be re-started, for regulatory reasons.
Today, over half of America’s nuclear plants are losing money and at serious risk of being replaced by fossil fuels, according to BNEF.
Recent nuclear plant closures in places ranging from Germany and Japan to Vermont and California demonstrate that when nuclear plants close, their electrical output is replaced almost entirely by electricity from fossil fuels, not renewables like solar and wind.
That’s because, unlike nuclear plants, solar and wind are not reliable sources of energy and always require backup power, usually in the form of fossil fuels.
Based on EPA’s most recent data, the U.S. needs to reduce its annual emissions by 221 million metric tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent from 2016 to 2020 in order to meet the commitments the U.S. made at the Paris climate talks.
An analysis by my colleagues Madison Czerwinski and Mark Nelson find that Trump’s action could prevent emissions from rising from between 20 and 100 million metric tons per year depending on how many plants are saved and whether closed nuclear plants would have been replaced by natural gas, coal, or a mix of the two.
Decarbonization vs. “Markets”
Keeping today’s nuclear plants operating is essential to preventing emissions from rising and fully decarbonizing energy over the next century.
That’s because the number of reactors at today’s nuclear plants could potentially be expanded to fully decarbonize not just electricity but also heating, cooking, and transportation.
Why, then, do people who say they care about climate change oppose keeping nuclear plants online?
In part, because most of the biggest environmental groups — including Sierra Club, Greenpeace, NRDC, and EDF — remain anti-nuclear, as do most of America’s giant environmental philanthropies.
A new study by Northeastern University’s Matthew Nisbet found that of the $500 million that big foundations like Hewlett and Packard pumped into climate advocacy between 2011 and 2015, much of it went to promote renewables — mostly solar and wind — exclusively.
“No grants were dedicated to promoting nuclear energy,” says Nisbet. However, $175,000 in grants went to opposing it.
Renewable energy promoters and advocates know that solar and wind depend on natural gas as a back-up and are working with the American Petroleum Institute, Sierra Club, and EDF to shut down nuclear plants in Ohio and Pennsylvania.
They advocate large federal subsidies for solar and wind — which in 2016 were nearly 100 times larger than the ones for nuclear — as well as state renewable energy mandates, carbon taxes, and other methods to shape markets.
The very same groups then turn around and attack proposed subsidies for nuclear as a distortion of “free markets.”
Electricity markets have long been more fake than free, for physical reasons. Electricity is what economists call a “natural monopoly.”
It would be grossly inefficient for societies to allow multiple electricity providers stringing up expensive transmission lines everywhere.
Instead, around the world, electricity is provided by government-owned utilities or, in much of the U.S., by private ones whose prices are heavily regulated.
Even in so-called “deregulated markets,” electric utilities are some of the most heavily regulated markets that exist, shaped by myriad regulations and state and federal policies that reward renewables and, to a much lesser extent, nuclear, for being clean energy.
Nor is using old regulations to solve new problems out of the ordinary when it comes to energy policy. When President Barack Obama used the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon dioxide, Republicans called it an abuse of the law, much as Democrats are now saying the same of Trump’s proposed bail-out of nuclear plants.
That’s not to say Trump’s action will work, or last. But whatever courts or future presidents do, the nuclear bail-out could prove to be — however ironic and unintended — the key to meeting the commitments President Obama made to reduce carbon emissions in Paris.
Michael Shellenberger, President, Environmental Progress. Time Magazine “Hero of the Environment.”
Read more at Forbes Blogs
Sorry, but the article implies that fossil fuel use affects Earth’s climate negatively.
It does expose the pretzel logic of the environmental conspirators.
The article also implies that we should try to meet Obama’s goals in the Paris Treaty. This is not true. Without the endorsement of the Senate the treaty is not binding to the US. In addition, there are many indications that carbon dioxide is not a major influence on temperature. There is poor correlation between the two and the climate models are failing.
We need to remember one of the motivations behind the climate change movement is to force de-industrialization by making energy scarce and expensive. To do that they must not only force a drastic reduction in fossil fuel use, but make sure nuclear power doesn’t replace it.