This Changes Everything (23 page)

Many have attributed the emissions rise to Germany’s decision to phase out nuclear power, but the facts are not nearly so simple. It’s true that in 2011, in the wake of the Fukushima disaster, the government of Chancellor
Angela Merkel—under intense pressure from the country’s powerful antinuclear movement—announced that it would phase out nuclear power by 2022, and took aggressive action to begin the process. But at the same time, the government took no similar action to phase out coal and even allowed coal companies to export power to other countries. So even though Germans have indeed been moving in ever greater
numbers to renewable energy, coal power continued to grow, with some of it displacing nuclear power, some of it displacing gas, and some of it being exported. And much of the coal in Germany is lignite, often referred to as brown coal, a low-grade variety with particularly high emissions.
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As we have already seen, the latest research on renewable energy, most notably by Mark Jacobson’s team
at Stanford, shows that a global transition to 100 percent renewable energy—“wind, water and solar”—is both technically and economically feasible “by as early as 2030.” That means lowering greenhouse emissions in line with science-based targets does not have to involve building a global network of new nuclear plants. In fact that could well slow down the transition, since renewable energy is faster
and cheaper to roll out than nuclear, critical factors given the tightness of the timeframe. Moreover, says Jacobson, in the near-term nuclear is “not carbon-free, no matter what the advocates tell you. Vast amounts of fossil fuels must be burned to mine, transport and enrich uranium and to build the nuclear plant. And all that dirty power will be released during the 10 to 19 years that it takes
to plan and build a nuclear plant. (A wind farm typically takes two to five years.)” He concludes that “if we invest in nuclear versus true renewables, you can bet that the glaciers and polar ice caps will keep melting while we wait, and wait, for the nuclear age to arrive. We will also guarantee a riskier future for us all.” Indeed, renewable installations present dramatically lower risks than either
fossil fuels or nuclear energy to those who live and work next to them. As comedian Bill Maher once observed, “You know what happens when windmills collapse into the sea? A splash.”
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That said, about 12 percent of the world’s power is currently supplied by nuclear energy, much of it coming from reactors that are old and obsolete.
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From a climate perspective, it would certainly be preferable
if governments staggered their transitions away from high-risk energy sources like nuclear,
prioritizing fossil fuels for cuts because the next decade is so critical for getting us off our current trajectory toward 4–6 degrees Celsius of warming. That would be compatible with a moratorium on new nuclear facilities, a decommissioning of the oldest plants and then a full nuclear phase-out once renewables
had decisively displaced fossil fuels.

And yet it must also be acknowledged that it was the power of Germany’s antinuclear movement that created the conditions for the renewables revolution in the first place (as was the case in Denmark in the 1980s), so there might have been no energy transition to debate without that widespread desire to get off nuclear due to its many hazards. Moreover, many
German energy experts are convinced that the speed of the transition so far proves that it is possible to phase out both nuclear and fossil fuels simultaneously. A 2012 report by the German National Center for Aerospace, Energy and Transport Research (DLR), for instance, demonstrated that 67 percent of the electicity in all of the EU could come from renewables by 2030, with that number reaching
96 percent by 2050.
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But, clearly, this will become a reality only if the right policies are in place.

For that to happen, the German government would have to be willing to do to the coal industry what it has been willing to do to the nuclear power industry: introduce specific, top-down regulations to phase it out. Instead, because of the vast political power of the German coal lobby, the Merkel
government has relied on the weak market mechanism of carbon trading, through the European emissions trading system, to try to put negative pressure on coal.
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When the European carbon market fell apart, and the price of carbon plummeted, this strategy proved disastrous. Coal was cheap, there was no real penalty to burning it, and there were no blocks on exporting coal power, and so key years
that should have been triumphs over pollution became setbacks.

Tadzio Mueller, a Berlin-based researcher and climate expert, put the problem to me like this: “German emissions are not up because nuclear power is down. They’re up because nobody told the German power companies not to burn coal, and as long as they can profitably sell the electricity somewhere, they’ll burn the coal—even if most
electricity consumed in Germany was renewable. What we need are strict rules against the extraction and burning of coal. Period.”
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It is critical for governments to put creative incentives in place so that communities around the world have tools to say yes to renewable energy. But what the German experience shows is that all that progress will be put at risk unless policymakers are willing simultaneously
to say no to the ever rapacious fossil fuel industry.

Even before I saw the giant mines, when the landscape out the window was still bright green boggy marshes and lush boreal forest, I could feel them—a catch in the back of my throat. Then, up and over a small elevation, there they were: the notorious Alberta tar sands, a parched, gray desert stretching to the horizon.
Mountains of waste so large workers joke that they have their own weather systems. Tailing ponds so vast they are visible from space. The second largest dam in the world, built to contain that toxic water. The earth, skinned alive.

Science fiction is rife with fantasies of terraforming—humans traveling to lifeless planets and engineering them into earthlike habitats. The Canadian tar sands are
the opposite: terra-deforming. Taking a habitable ecosystem, filled with life, and engineering it into a moonscape where almost nothing can live. And if this goes on, it could impact an area roughly the size of England. All to access a semisolid form of “unconventional” oil known as bitumen that is so difficult and energy-intensive to extract that the process is roughly three to four times as greenhouse
gas intensive as extracting conventional oil.
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In June 2011, I cosigned a letter drafted by author and climate activist Bill McKibben that called on people to come to Washington, D.C., “in the hottest and stickiest weeks of the summer” to get arrested protesting the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. Amazingly, more than 1,200 people did just that, making it the largest act of civil disobedience
in the history of the North American climate movement.
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For over a year, a coalition of ranchers and Indigenous people who lived along the proposed route of the pipeline had been campaigning hard against the project. But the action in Washington took the cam
paign national, and turned it into a flashpoint for a resurgent U.S. climate movement.

The science for singling out Keystone XL was clear
enough. The pipeline would be carrying oil from the Alberta tar sands, and James Hansen, then still working at NASA, had recently declared that if the bitumen trapped in the tar sands was all dug up and burned, it would be “game over for the climate.”
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But there was also some political strategy at work: unlike so many other key climate policies, which either required approval from Congress or
were made at the state level, the decision about whether to approve the Keystone XL pipeline was up to the State Department and, ultimately, the president himself, based on whether he determined the project to be in the “national interest.” On this one, Obama would have to give his personal yes or no, and it seemed to us that there was value in extracting either answer.

If he said no, that would
be a much needed victory on which to build at a time when the U.S. climate movement, bruised from the failure to get energy legislation through Congress, badly needed some good news. If he said yes, well, that too would be clarifying. Climate activists, almost all of whom had worked to get Obama elected, would have to finally abandon the hopes they had pinned on the young senator who had proclaimed
that his election would be remembered as “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”
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Letting go of that faith would be disillusioning for many, but at least tactics could be adjusted accordingly. And it seemed we would not have to wait long for a verdict: the president would be in a position to make his decision by early September, which is why the civil
disobedience was called for the end of August.

It never occurred to us in those early strategy sessions at 350.org, the climate organization that McKibben cofounded and where I am a board member, that three years later we would still be waiting for the president’s yes or no. Three years during which Obama waffled and procrastinated, while his administration ordered more environmental reviews,
then reviews of those reviews, then reviews of those too.

A great deal of intellectual energy has been expended trying to interpret the president’s mixed signals on Keystone XL—at times he seemed to be sending a clear message that he was going to give his approval, as when he arranged for a photo op in front of a raft of metal pipeline waiting to be laid
down; other times he seemed to be suggesting
that he was leaning toward rejection, as when he declared, in one of his more impassioned speeches about climate change, that Keystone would be approved “only if this project does not significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution.”
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But whichever way the decision eventually goes (and one can hope that we will know the answer by the time you read this), the drawn-out saga made at least
one thing absolutely clear. Like Angela Merkel, Obama has a hell of a hard time saying no to the fossil fuel industry. And that’s a very big problem because to lower emissions as rapidly and deeply as required, we need to keep large, extremely profitable pools of carbon in the ground—resources that the fossil fuel companies are fully intending to extract.

That means our governments are going
to have to start putting strict limits on the industry—limits ranging from saying no to pipelines linked to expanded extraction, to caps on the amount of carbon corporations can emit, to banning new coal-fired power plants, to winding down dirty-energy extraction projects like the Alberta tar sands, to saying no to demands to open up new carbon frontiers (like the oil trapped under melting Arctic
ice).

In the 1960s and 1970s, when a flurry of environmental legislation was passed in the U.S. and in other major industrial countries, saying no to dirty industry was, though never easy, an accepted part of the balancing act of government. That is simply no longer the case, as is evident from the howls of outrage from Republicans and many Democrats over the mere suggestion that Obama might
reject Keystone XL, a moderate-sized infrastructure project that, by the president’s own admission, would create so few lasting jobs that they represent “a blip relative to the need.”
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Given how wrenchingly difficult that yes-or-no regulatory decision proved to be, it should not be at all surprising that broader, more forceful controls on how much carbon should be extracted and emitted have thus
far been entirely elusive.

Obama’s much-heralded move in June 2014 mandating emission reductions from power plants was certainly the right direction, but the measures were still much too timid to bring the U.S. in line with a safe temperature trajectory. As author and long-time climate watcher Mark Hertsgaard observed at the time, “President Obama clearly grasps the urgency of the cli
mate crisis
and has taken important steps to address it. But it is his historical fate to be in power at a time when good intentions and important steps are no longer enough. . . . Perhaps all this places an unfair burden on President Obama. But science does not care about fair, and leaders inherit the history they inherit.” And yet as Hertsgaard acknowledges, the kind of policies that would be enough “seem
preposterous to the political and economic status quo.”
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This state of affairs is, of course, yet another legacy of the free market counterrevolution. In virtually every country, the political class accepts the premise that it is not the place of government to tell large corporations what they can and cannot do, even when public health and welfare—indeed the habitability of our shared home—are
clearly at stake. The guiding ethos of light-touch regulation, and more often of active deregulation, has taken an enormous toll in every sector, most notably the financial one. It has also blocked commonsense responses to the climate crisis at every turn—sometimes explicitly, when regulations that would keep carbon in the ground are rejected outright, but mostly implicitly, when those kinds of
regulations are not even proposed in the first place, and so-called market solutions are favored for tasks to which they are wholly unequipped.

It’s true that the market is great at generating technological innovation and, left to its own devices, R&D departments will continue to come up with impressive new ways to make solar modules and electrical appliances more efficient. But at the same time,
market forces will also drive new and innovative ways to get hard-to-reach fossil fuels out of the deep ocean and hard shale—and those dirty innovations will make the green ones essentially irrelevant from a climate change perspective.

At the Heartland conference, Cato’s Patrick Michaels inadvertently made that point when he argued that, though he believes climate change is happening, the real
solution is to do nothing and wait for a technological miracle to rain down from the heavens. “Doing nothing
is
actually doing something,” he proclaimed, assuring the audience that “technologies of the future” would save the day. His proof? “Two words: Shale gas. . . . That’s what happens if you allow people to use their intellect, and their inquisitiveness, and their drive, in order to produce
new energy sources.” And of course the Heartland audience cheered earnestly for the intellectual breakthrough that
is hydraulic fracturing (aka fracking) combined with horizontal drilling, the technology that has finally allowed the fossil fuel industry to screw us sideways.
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