Green New Dealt (Michael Shellenberger) USofA

Link: https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/02/07/green-new-dealexcludes-nuclear-and-would-thus-increase-emissions-just-like-it-did-invermont/#3fd3b3e69afd Please see link above for original text, embedded hotlink and comments.

Green New Deal Excludes Nuclear And Would Thus Increase Emissions -- Just Like It Did In Vermont Michael Shellenberger February 7, 2019

Climate activist Bill McKibben, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Sen. Bernie Sanders WIKIPEDIA

The Green New Deal proposed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D) today excludes nuclear energy from the proposed mix. If it were ever actually attempted nationally, it would increase greenhouse gas emissions — just as a similar effort did in Vermont.

The written statement distributed by the office of Ocasio-Cortez says "the plan is to transition off of nuclear."

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Vermont is home to Ocasio-Cortez allies, and Green New Deal advocates, Senator Bernie Sanders and climate activist Bill McKibben. Both insist the world can be powered on renewables alone. But consider what’s actually happened in their own state.

In 2005, Vermont legislators promised to reduce emissions 25% below 1990 levels by 2012, and 50% below 1990 levels by 2028, through the use of renewables and energy efficiency only.

What’s happened since? Vermont’s emissions rose 16.3%. That’s more than twice as much as national emissions rose during the same period.

When you account for the U.S.’s far faster growth in population, Vermont’s per capita emissions rose 5% while U.S. per capita emissions declined by 17%.

Did Vermont fail to do energy efficiency, which the Green New Deal and green groups like Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) claim is the most important way to reduce emissions?

Nope. In 2018, the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy ranked Vermont among the top five states for aggressive action on energy efficiency — for the fifth year in a row.

Did Vermont’s electric utility block access to distributed renewable energy sources, like rooftop solar panels? On the contrary. The state’s main electric utility has been a pioneer in helping customers go “off-grid” with solar and batteries.

What’s going on? If Vermont did everything that Ocasio-Cortez, McKibben, Sanders, and other Green New Deal advocates wanted, why have its emissions risen so sharply?

Vermont Yankee In 2012, the operator of Vermont’s sole nuclear plant, Vermont Yankee, was trying to decide whether to keep it operating. One option was to seek a small subsidy like the kind state legislatures in Illinois and New York have awarded nuclear plants for their climate benefits. But that would have required local support.

One influential local voice loudly opposing continued operation of the nuclear plant belonged to the climate activist Bill McKibben. “I've been opposed to Vermont Yankee for a long time,” McKibben wrote in 2012. “I believe Vt. is completely capable of replacing (and far more) its power output with renewables, which is why my roof is covered with solar panels.”

Pro-nuclear environmentalists disagreed. In a highly-detailed 2010 analysis they warned that the closure of Vermont Yankee would increase emissions.

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McKibben was unmoved. In a 2013 debate at Vermont’s Middlebury College with pronuclear filmmaker Robert Stone, McKibben told the crowd, “We don’t need nuclear power.”

Vermont’s rising emissions prove that it did. Had Vermont’s utilities supplied its customers with power from Vermont Yankee instead of from out-of-state fossil electricity, nearly half of the state’s increase in emissions since 1990 could have been avoided.

I reached out to McKibben to ask if he regretted his anti-nuclear advocacy. He responded that Vermont Yankee’s closure “didn't, I think, lead to big increases in emissions from Vermont electricity.”

He pointed to a New York Times data tool, which he said showed “the state replaced the [nuclear] power by buying lots and lots more hydro from Quebec.”

But that’s not what the data actually show. In reality, Vermont’s utilities couldn’t replace with in-state generation the lost electricity from Vermont Yankee, instead turning to electricity imports from the New England power pool, primarily from natural gas.

McKibben points to rising emissions from transportation, arguing that “Vermont has done nothing to change the transportation system that is by far the main source of carbon emissions, followed by home heating.”

It’s true that emissions from transportation are the largest source of the state’s emissions. But Vermont’s emissions from transportation were higher in 2005 than in 2015 and the long distances driven by Vermonters comes with the territory in this rural state.

And it’s not true that Vermont “has done nothing” on transportation, as McKibben claims. In fact, Vermont has won awards from the United Nations and NRDC for addressing “environmental and air pollution problems spurred primarily by traffic” by putting in place “design-oriented strategies” so that it “does not rely solely on automobiles.”

Why did McKibben, who describes climate change as a grave threat to human civilization, call for the closure of the single largest source of clean energy, Vermont Yankee, in his home state?

McKibben told me that it was because its owner “misled (a polite word) the state about everything, including (the final blow) whether or not they had underground pipes carrying nuclear waste.”

I asked a former Nuclear Regulatory Commission officer who studied the issue, Chuck Casto, if that’s what happened.

Casto was the top official in charge of the U.S. government’s response to the 2011 nuclear accident in Fukushima, Japan, and someone who even anti-nuclear activists say is a straight-shooter on nuclear safety.

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According to Casto, who oversaw a major study on the issue, the pipes in question were normal pipes carrying discharge water, not “nuclear waste.” At one point, their water carried tiny amounts of tritium, a hydrogen isotope, at levels so low that the water could be safely drank (which it wasn’t).

McKibben isn’t the only Vermonter against nuclear. Senator Sanders wants to deny new licenses to nuclear plants, which would drastically increase carbon emissions in the electricity sector.

The same is true for the Sierra Club, NRDC and Environmental Defense Fund. All are actively advocating the closure of nuclear plants throughout the country, including in New York, California, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, while openly taking money from, and investing in, oil, gas, and renewable energy interests.

Together with McKibben’s 350.org, those groups sponsored a 2017 climate march that called for the closure of nuclear plants.

McKibben says he favored closing Vermont Yankee because he thought it would be replaced by renewables. “One of the reasons that it made sense to shut [Vermont Yankee] down was the promise that it would be replaced with renewable energy,” McKibben wrote.

In so saying, McKibben betrays an inconsistency — and ulterior motive. If climate change were his primary motivation then he would advocate that renewables replace fossil fuels, not nuclear.

Instead of acknowledging the reality that unreliable solar and wind can’t replace baseload nuclear, McKibben blamed the politicians. Vermont’s governor and energy regulator, he told me, “bowed to opponents of wind power, and imposed a de facto moratorium on new wind turbines. I thought that was a mistake.”

The War on Nuclear In the 1950s and 1960s, nuclear energy was hugely popular, and was supported by large majorities of the public. In response, electric utilities committed to build over 200 nuclear reactors between 1966 and 1973. As late as 1975, there were plans to build 1,000 reactors.

But, starting in the late 1960s, anti-nuclear weapons activists joined forces with misanthropic conservationists to block the deployment of America’s largest source of clean energy.

“Historically, the antinuclear movement didn’t emerge from environmental concerns, which is why arguments for nuclear’s environmental advantages often fall on deaf ears,” noted the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Richard Rhodes, in The New York Times last Sunday.

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“The movement originated out of a panic among European and American intellectuals in the 1950s and ’60s about overpopulation.”

Around the same time, as it became clear to most everyone that nations would never ban the bomb, anti-weapons groups like Union of Concerned Scientists switched their focus to halting the spread of nuclear energy.

Anti-nuclear groups had already demonized nuclear weapons as not merely dangerous but also evil and immoral. It was an easy pivot for them to demonize nuclear energy.

Psychologists described the transference of fear, anger, and hatred from one object or person to another as “displacement,” one of the ego’s defense mechanisms. We may hate the boss but he’s too powerful to confront so we kick the dog instead. Nuclear energy was the scapegoat for the persistence of weapons.

Those who most hated nuclear energy, the ultimate symbol of modernity, were those who most hated — or at least said they hated — modern life.

In 1973 a former German coal executive turned New Age guru named E.F. Schumacher published a book called Small is Beautiful, which exalted the lifestyles of destitute Indian farmers and demonized nuclear plants as “the most serious agent of pollution of the environment and the greatest threat to man’s survival on earth.”

Media-savvy activists claimed a nuclear power accident would be like Hiroshima and Nagasaki. "A nuclear accident could wipe out Cleveland and the survivors would envy the dead,” consumer advocate Ralph Nader told credulous journalists and hysterical crowds in the early 1970s.

Their efforts worked. Researchers in the mid-1970s found that “distrust of nuclear power is… rooted in the fear of nuclear weapons.”

Their explicit goal was to make nuclear expensive. "Our campaign stressing the hazards of nuclear power will supply a rationale for increasing regulation,” wrote the Sierra Club Executive Director in a 1975 memo to the board of Directors, “and add to the cost of the industry.”

Anti-nuclear campaigners managed to kill all but roughly 100 reactors. What got built in their place? Coal plants.

Had just 400 of the promised 1,000 reactors been built, the U.S. would today be producing nearly 100 percent of its electricity from zero-emissions sources, obviating the need for a climate crusade to clean up electricity.

Apocalypse Renewed In the early 1990s, the Soviet Union dissolved along with communist regimes throughout Eastern Europe. The threat of nuclear war between great powers faded.

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Environmentalists needed new justification for renewables. They found it in climate change. Those who had advocated renewables as an alternative to nuclear energy now argued for renewables as an alternative to fossil fuels.

But there was a problem. Leading climate scientists including NASA’s James Hansen started speaking out for nuclear power. By 2016, more of them were advocating the continued operation of nuclear plants than renewables.

In response, activists like McKibben distanced themselves from Hansen and instead heaped praise on a Stanford professor who claimed to have proven that the world could be powered on renewables alone.

“I’m convinced by the careful work of Mark Jacobson and others that [100% renewables] is possible,” McKibben said in 2016.

But in 2017, a major study found that Jacobson’s modeling had rested upon the false assumption that the U.S. could increase the power from its hydroelectric dams ten-fold.

Their real potential turned out to be just one percent of that.

Without all that extra dam power, Jacobson’s house of cards falls apart. That’s because there’s no other practical way to store large quantities of energy.

As a result, every time anti-nuclear climate campaigners succeed in closing a nuclear plant, whether in California, Germany, or Vermont, the burning of fossil fuels, and carbon emissions, go up.

As such, the world’s climate advocates have for 30 years misled the world into thinking their main concern is reducing emissions when in reality it is shutting down nuclear plants and scaling up renewables.

Beyond increasing pollution, the anti-nuclear agenda degrades natural environments in another way: by blanketing wild and bucolic landscapes with gigantic solar and wind farms in direct violation of their own small-is-beautiful ethos. The result is increasing grassroots environmental resistance.

Consider Vermont. The only wind farm to be built in the entire state over the last 10 years was the Deerfield Wind Project. According to Lisa Linowes of Wind Action, it took from 2009 to 2017 for the project to be completed.

Why the long delay? Because of litigation stemming from the fact that the giant wind farm “is sited in the middle of critical black bear habitat.”

Can you guess how many wind farms the size of Deerfield would be needed in order to replace the annual quantity of electricity from Vermont Yankee, one of the smallest nuclear plants remaining in the U.S. when it was closed? The answer is 59.

At the Deerfield rate of deployment, Vermont will make up for the clean energy lost from the closure of Vermont Yankee some time around the year 2491.

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Michael Shellenberger, President, Environmental Progress. Time Magazine "Hero of the Environment."

Michael Shellenberger Contributor I am a Time Magazine “Hero of the Environment,” Green Book Award Winner, and President of Environmental Progress, a research and policy organization. My writings have appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, Nature Energy, and PLOS Biology.

What life is like before the Democrats implement this take over of the energy industry:

1994 – A snowshoer pretending to be a ski jumper. Fun in beautiful winter wonderland near Joseph, Oregon. The last thing the USA needs is Bill McKibben, Alexandria OcasioCortez and Bernie Sanders ruling the nation with their environmental and energy plans.

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