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Op-Ed Contributor

How Not to Deal With Climate Change

Credit...Patrick Hruby

Berkeley, Calif. — CALIFORNIA has a reputation as a leader in battling climate change, and so when Pacific Gas & Electric and environmental groups announced a plan last week to close the state’s last nuclear plant, Diablo Canyon, and replace much of the electricity it generates with power from renewable resources, the deal was widely applauded.

It shouldn’t have been. If the proposal is approved by the state’s Public Utilities Commission, California’s carbon dioxide emissions will either increase or decline far less than if Diablo Canyon’s two reactors, which generated about 9 percent of the state’s electricity last year, remained in operation. If this deal goes through, California will become a model of how not to deal with climate change.

While Pacific Gas & Electric asserts Diablo Canyon would be replaced with other forms of clean, low-carbon power, nothing in the proposal would require the company to go that far. Instead, the plan, according to my organization’s calculations, would require the company only to invest in energy efficiency and renewables programs equivalent to about one-fifth of Diablo Canyon’s electricity output. Anything beyond that would be voluntary.

Nearly every time a nuclear plant has been closed, its energy production has been replaced almost entirely with fossil fuels, including in California. In 2012, when the San Onofre nuclear plant closed, natural gas became the main replacement power source, creating emissions of carbon dioxide equivalent to putting two million cars on the road.

Indeed, the energy market research organization PIRA found that natural gas use could rise by 34 percent in northern California from 2023 to 2026, the year after Diablo Canyon would be completely closed, even when taking into account the company’s renewable-energy goals.

Diablo Canyon is essentially being forced to close by state renewable energy policies that discriminate against nuclear power. The state wants Pacific Gas & Electric to generate 50 percent of its power from renewables, a category specifically defined to exclude nuclear power, even though nuclear energy produces electricity with no more carbon emissions than solar, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

But California already has more solar power than it can use. This is one of the justifications given for closing Diablo Canyon. On sunny days, California solar farms have had to shut down, lest their added generation overwhelm the grid.

If Diablo Canyon closes, the company will still need to provide electricity, but from other fuel sources — most likely, natural gas — when the sun goes down and demand for electricity rises.

California policy makers and environmentalists have insisted that both problems — too much electricity when it isn’t needed and too little when it is — would be solved by linking California’s grid to other states’, or through breakthroughs in battery storage, but neither has come to pass. California was instead forced to store large amounts of natural gas as a backup.

The risks of this approach became obvious last October when a huge natural gas storage plant near Los Angeles sprang a leak, forcing thousands to flee their homes. The escaped gas produced the emissions equivalent of adding hundreds of thousands of cars to the road for a year, and the loss of this backup power source led state officials to warn that there could be power failures this summer.

If Diablo Canyon is closed, California’s dependence on natural gas is likely to become dangerously high. The share of power that California generated in-state from natural gas rose to 60 percent, from 45 percent, between 2011 and 2015, partly because of the closing of the San Onofre nuclear plant, and could easily rise further without Diablo Canyon.

Environmental groups insist more energy-efficiency measures will reduce consumption, but achieving such reductions is by no means guaranteed. For California to meet its 2030 emissions target, for instance, one scenario calls for three million to eight million electric vehicles, which would significantly increase electricity demand.

Even if by some miracle California did manage to replace 100 percent of Diablo Canyon’s output with renewables, why would a state ostensibly concerned with climate change turn away from its largest single source of clean energy? The answer, as is perhaps obvious, is the ideological insistence on renewables and an irrational fear of nuclear power.

The only countries that have successfully moved from fossil fuels to low-carbon power have done so with the help of nuclear energy. And the backlash against antinuclear policies is growing. Increasingly, scientists and conservationists in the United States are speaking out in defense of nuclear power.

If California indeed closes Diablo Canyon, emissions will either rise or fail to fall as quickly as they could, and the antinuclear agenda will be exposed as anathema to climate protection.

Michael Shellenberger is the founder and president of Environmental Progress, an environmental research and policy organization.

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A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 27 of the New York edition with the headline: How Not to Deal With Climate Change. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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