Obama’s Plan to Fight Global Warming

October 06, 2008

According to the transcript of the first presidential debate, GOP candidate John McCain was the only one to actually mention global warming as an issue — but he did so only in passing, as an additional justification for his plan to build 45 new nuclear power plants, which we discussed in last week’s blog. As McCain explained,

Nuclear power is not only important as far as eliminating our dependence on foreign oil, but it's also responsibility as far as climate change is concerned and the issue I have been involved in for many, many years and I'm proud of the work of the work that I've done there along with President Clinton.

I have to point out that while nuclear power may make sense as a measure to combat global warming, the argument that it will free us from dependence upon foreign oil is pretty much nonsensical.  According to U.S. Department of Energy data, the U.S. gets only about 50 million megawatt-hours of electricity from burning petroleum — a minuscule amount compared to the more than 2 billion megawatt-hours that are produced by burning coal, the fuel upon which we rely most heavily for electricity generation. Additionally, McCain didn't mention the estimated $315 billion cost, or how it would be funded (a hint: taxpayers may ultimately be on the hook for much of it). Or what he would do about disposing of nuclear waste, though he’s recently looked at shipping it to Siberia.

But I digress. We’re looking at Democratic candidate Barack Obama this week, and his approach to combating global warming.

Obama’s energy plan sets a goal of reducing U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by 2050, a more ambitious cutback than the 50 percent target set by the G-8 major industrial nations, which President Bush agreed to in July. Like McCain, Obama would establish a cap-and-trade system under which the government would set a ceiling on carbon emissions, and then issue permits to emit carbon. That, in turn, would allow companies to make money by reducing their emissions and then selling their permits to others. Unlike McCain, who would initially give away the permits, Obama would auction them off from the get-go, which he argues would ensure that polluters pay for every ton of emissions they release, giving them an even bigger incentive to clean up their act. Obama also would require that utility companies generate at least 10 percent of their electricity from solar, wind and geothermal sources by 2012.

McCain’s Plan for Fighting Global Warming

September 29, 2008

I know that everybody is worked up right now about the Wall Street mortgage crisis and what sort of leadership Barack Obama and John McCain will show regarding the Bush administration’s proposed $700 billion federal bailout, the cost of which will be borne by taxpayers. While that’s a pretty tall stack of deceased presidents, in my view, it’s not the campaign issue with the biggest ultimate consequences, both in terms of economics and impact on our way of life. No, that would be the issue of global warming, and what to do about it. Look at it this way. According to a Natural Resources Defense Council study, if we don’t do something to slow the rate of climate change, by the end of this century the U.S. will be spending $950 billion annually just to cope with water shortages. That’s the equivalent of taxpayers having to bail out Wall Street every single year.

Of course, the U.S. wouldn’t be the only nation to feel the pain. In a 2006 study for the British government, economist Sir Nicholas Stern forecast that in coming decades, the effects of climate change — from flooded cities to withered cropland — could cause the global economy to shrink by an astonishing 20 percent. As Stern wrote:

The evidence shows that ignoring climate change will eventually damage economic growth. Our actions over the coming few decades could create risks of major disruption to economic and social activity, later in this century and in the next, on a scale similar to those associated with the great wars and the economic depression of the first half of the 20th century. And it will be difficult or impossible to reverse these changes.

Should We Build More Nuclear Power Plants?

January 25, 2008

I have to admit that for a long time, I’ve had a lot of qualms about nuclear power as a source of electricity. I was in college in Pennsylvania during the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, and I remember being downwind as a pretty scary experience.  (The alarmist antinuclear thriller The China Syndrome, which I saw the weekend after the accident, added a bit to my anxiety, especially that line of dialogue about a nuclear meltdown’s potential to render an area the size of Pennsylvania uninhabitable.)  Fortunately, the partial core meltdown of TMI’s unit 2 reactor was brought under control before a disaster of gigantic proportions could occur. But seven years later, when a reactor suffered a steam explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the then-Soviet Union, the Soviets and their European neighbors weren’t so lucky. The accident spread radiation as far as the UK and Sweden, and a 2005 international report estimated that the area surrounding the stricken reactor will suffer as many as 4,000 additional deaths from cancer. After TMI and Chernobyl, I figured, nuclear power was pretty much dead. The only concerns left, I figured, were the problems of safely maintaining the aging nuclear power plants already in existence, and figuring out what to do with the radioactive waste building up on site at those plants.

But the rapidly developing global warming crisis has forced me — and a lot of other people, I suspect — to at least reconsider my opposition to nuclear power. Seventy percent of the electricity in the U.S. is generated by power plants that burn fossil fuels, and as a result, we’re pumping ungodly amounts of greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere. And the explosively growing nations of China and India are doing their best to burn even more coal to generate electricity than we do. Energy conservation on a massive global scale is what we really need, but good luck with convincing Americans — and everyone else across the planet who aspires to a blithely affluent U.S. lifestyle — to carpool or turn down their air conditioning in the summer, let alone unplug the appliances and electronic gadgets that turn into energy-wasting  “vampire devices” when they’re idle.

So what do we do? In 2006, one-time Greenpeace International director Patrick Moore wrote a Washington Post opinion piece advocating the building of more nuclear power plants as a way of reducing dependence upon fossil fuels and curbing climate change. Moore argued that nuclear power was a more viable source of greenhouse emissions-free power than other alternative energy sources:

"Wind and solar power have their place, but because they are intermittent and unpredictable they simply can't replace big baseload plants such as coal, nuclear and hydroelectric. Natural gas, a fossil fuel, is too expensive already, and its price is too volatile to risk building big baseload plants. Given that hydroelectric resources are built pretty much to capacity, nuclear is, by elimination, the only viable substitute for coal. It's that simple."

Moore discounted the criticisms that many opponents of nuclear power have raised. Even the horrific accident at Chernobyl, he noted, caused fewer deaths than the 5,000 deaths in coal-mining accidents worldwide each year. And as for the problem of disposing nuclear waste, he wrote that

"Within 40 years, used fuel has less than one-thousandth of the radioactivity it had when it was removed from the reactor. And it is incorrect to call it waste, because 95 percent of the potential energy is still contained in the used fuel after the first cycle. Now that the United States has removed the ban on recycling used fuel, it will be possible to use that energy and to greatly reduce the amount of waste that needs treatment and disposal. Last month, Japan joined France, Britain and Russia in the nuclear-fuel-recycling business. The United States will not be far behind."

He’s not the only one who supports building more nuclear power plants. According to this chart compiled by the environmental news and commentary Web site Grist, not only do all the remaining Republican presidential candidates support expanded use of nuclear power, but the two top Democratic contenders are at least lukewarm to the idea. (Sen. Barack Obama, whose home state of Illinois gets 40 percent of its power from nuclear plants, told CNN in November 2007 that while nuclear wasn’t his most favored option, “it has to be part of our energy mix,” while Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York  in August 2007 described herself as “agnostic” about nuclear power. (Former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards is opposed to building more plants, and congressman Dennis Kucinich of Ohio wants to dismantle existing ones.)

So what do you think? Should we build more nuclear power plants? Or should we focus harder on energy conservation and developing solar, wind and geothermal technologies instead? Express your opinion below.