Shellenberger reported in mid-December, 2021 that the centerpiece of President Joe Biden’s legislative agenda is apparently dead. Senator Joe Manchin today announced that he could not support Biden’s “Build Back Better” legislation which consisted of $1.7 trillion in new spending and would have added $158 billion to the national debt over the next decade, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. The largest component of spending, $570 billion, was for renewables, electric cars, and other climate change investments.
Progressives, environmentalists, and Democrats are furious with Sen. Manchin, but it was their own climate and renewables dogmatism that doomed the legislation. Democratic Senators could have written legislation that expanded nuclear energy and natural gas, the two main drivers of decarbonization, which are strongly supported by Manchin, and Republicans, but instead investments went overwhelmingly to solar panels, wind turbines, and electric cars.
It’s true that there were good things in Build Back Better, and that one of the worst climate provisions, the Clean Energy Performance Program, was already removed. Build Back Better included a tax credit for existing nuclear power plants, funding for advanced nuclear fuels, funding for fusion R&D, and financial support for communities hurt by the transition to renewables. But the money for nuclear would not have made much if any difference to the operating of nuclear plans. Nuclear plants in California, Massachusetts and New York are being shut down, despite already being profitable, for ideological reasons. Legislatures in less anti-nuclear states like Illinois, New Jersey, and Connecticut step in to save their plants when they need to. And higher electricity prices due to natural gas shortages are making nuclear plants in other states even more profitable.
Of Build Back Better’s $550 billion for climate and energy, the vast majority of it was for weather-dependent renewables and their enabling infrastructure, including $29 billion for a “green bank” program to finance renewables and $10 billion for rural electric cooperatives to switch to renewables. Such subsidies were being offered despite years of false claims by many of the legislation’s sponsors and advocates that solar and wind were already cheaper than grid electricity.
Most dangerously, Build Back Better would have undermined electricity reliability, raised energy prices, and made the U.S. more dependent on foreign energy imports. Over-reliance on weather-dependent renewables in Texas and California, and under-investment in reliable, weather-independent nuclear and natural gas plants, led directly to deadly blackouts in those states.
Shellenberger testified as much to this problem to Manchin’s Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, and Sen. Manchin made clear today that the role of renewables in making electricity expensive and unreliable was one of his top concerns. “The main thing that we need is dependability and reliability,” he said this morning. “If not, you’ll have what happened in Texas and California.” In his statement, Manchin said, “If enacted, the bill will also risk the reliability of our electric grid and increase our dependence on foreign supply chains."
Adding weather-dependent energy sources can only make grids more resilient if significantly more money is spent maintaining reliable power sources to make up for their lost revenue and lost operation hours. That’s what Germany has done, deciding to burn more coal rather than continue operating its nuclear plants, which it’s shutting down, or rely too heavily on imported natural gas.
Manchin is also right that Build Back Better would increase dependence on energy imports. Over 80% of the world’s solar panels are made in China by incarcerated Uighyr Muslims living in concentration camps and against whom the Chinese government is committing “genocide,” according to the U.S. State Department. Build Back Better contained incentives for the return of solar manufacturing to the U.S., but they were far too small to compete with solar panels made by incarcerated people in China’s already-built and heavily-subsidized mega-factories. Nor did they deal with the coming solar panel waste crisis.
“We have been energy independent for the first time for the first time in 60, 70 years or more,” noted Manchin, “and we should not have to depend on other parts of the world to give us the energy, or be able to hold us hostage for the energy, or the foreign supply chains that we need for the products we need every day.”
Everywhere in the world that solar and wind are deployed at scale they increase electricity prices dramatically. California increased its electricity prices seven times more than the rest of the U.S. over the last decade. Germany has the highest electricity prices in Europe, and is breaking new records with the energy shortage caused by lack of adequate natural gas supplies globally. And now the entire world is paying the price of climate alarmism and renewables dogmatism. Climate shareholder activism and the ESG “sustainable” investment movement caused governments and private sector actors to underinvest in oil and gas production and over-invest in weather-dependent renewables. The result is historic shortages of natural gas and oil.
For the last several weeks European and Asian nations have been breaking records for the cost of electricity, due to shortages of natural gas supplies. Oil prices are set to rise to $125 per barrel next year and $150 in 2023, and U.S. winter natural gas prices will be 30% higher this year. Even nuclear-heavy France, which became over-invested in renewables and natural gas, and under-invested in nuclear, is seeing record electricity prices.
But what then, does it mean for climate change issues? And what should be done to safeguard American energy supplies going forward?
Continuing Climate Progress
Climate change is real and, all else being equal, we should want lower rather than higher global temperature increases, but we should keep in mind that U.S. and global emissions are already flat and declining. It’s true emissions will rise this year due to increased coal use due to natural gas shortages, but global emissions actually declined slightly, over the last decade, and U.S. emissions declined more than any other nation’s between 2005 and 2020. Build Back Better would almost certainly have reduced emissions slower than either a business-as-usual situation or an expanded natural gas and nuclear scenario (more).
Consider Waxman-Markey.
That’s the name of the “cap and trade” climate legislation that passed the House but failed in the Senate in 2010. It had a climate goal of reducing U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent below 2005 levels by the year 2020. Instead, the U.S. reduced its emissions by 22 percent. Had cap and trade legislation passed in the Senate, emissions would have declined less than 22 percent, because Waxman-Markey so heavily subsidized coal and other fossil fuels. As the Los Angeles Times reported at the time, “the Environmental Protection Agency projects that even if the emissions limits go into effect, the U.S. would use more carbon-dioxide-heavy coal in 2020 than it did in 2005.”
Or consider France. Renewables increased carbon intensity in France between 2009 and 2018. After years of subsidies for solar and wind, France’s 2017 emissions of 68g/CO2 per kWh was higher than any year between 2012 and 2016. Why? Record-breaking wind and solar production did not make up for falling nuclear energy output and higher natural gas consumption.
Climate scientists agree that emissions are likely to remain flat in the near term before declining. “I personally (based on [International Energy Agency] data expect flat fossil CO2 emissions,” climate scientist, Zeke Hausfather, told me earlier this month. Hausfather authored the Carbon Brief analysis which found global emissions had actually declined slightly over the last decade. And as gas production rises over the next several decades, it will continue to replace coal in electricity generation, driving down global emissions.
Future U.S. energy legislation could accelerate that process, particularly if the process were married to an expansion of nuclear energy into communities that have been traditionally dependent on coal mining, which includes Manchin’s West Virginia. The best case for climate action is the kind that increases rather than reduces economic growth, and that can be achieved if the focus is on expanding natural gas and nuclear, not weather-dependent renewables. Cheap natural gas through fracking created jobs and results in $100 billion in annual savings for American consumers.
Legislation that was focused on expanding natural gas and nuclear energy would not need to create special welfare programs for hurt communities, like Build Back Better would have, because natural gas and nuclear expand into communities already producing gas, coal, and nuclear. And where installing Chinese solar panels on farmlands and deserts create low-wage temporary jobs, the jobs operating nuclear plants are high-wage, full-time, and life-long, since nuclear plants can operate for 80 years or longer.
Go Green Nuclear Deal
The core principles of the energy legislation that comes next should be reliability, affordability, and sustainability. Only nuclear and natural gas fit the bill. Both are produced domestically, in contrast to solar panels and wind turbines. It also has to work politically. In October, a YouGov poll found that 53% percent of those polled in West Virginia thought Build Back Better would result in higher inflation, taxes, and interest rates.
Nuclear, by contrast, is far more popular in West Virginia and other conservative rural states. Public support for nuclear was rising well before the current energy crisis. Nuclear has seen its popularity rise dramatically over the last three years, from just 37 percent in 2018 to 55 percent in 2020. But now, as energy prices rise, support for nuclear is growing around the world, with national leaders in Netherlands, France, Japan, Britain, and other nations announcing nuclear expansions.
Democrats could have saved Build Back Better by building it around nuclear energy and natural gas, which Manchin made clear, repeatedly, that he supports. “The Tennessee Valley Authority,” Manchin said, “is a model that can inform our efforts both domestically and abroad.” Manchin recognizes there is a national security case to be made. “Russia and China have made a strategic effort to supplant our nuclear leadership over recent years,” he noted. “We must push back. With the necessary policy and funding we can maintain our nuclear supply chain, create high-paying manufacturing jobs, and reassert that U.S. leadership.”
The momentous changes occurring around the world make the moment ripe for nuclear. Congress should pass Green Nuclear Deal legislation to expand nuclear energy from its current 19% today to 30% of electricity by 2030 and 50% by 2050. Such a goal is easily doable, as France, Sweden, Japan, and South Korea have all proven with their expansions of nuclear energy.
Six times over the last two years, Shellenberger urged the Senate and House to pass a Green Nuclear Deal and found strong and growing support for such a proposal from Republicans and Democrats alike, including Senator Manchin, who described nuclear energy as a way to lift people out of poverty around the world. “Nuclear energy can be part of delivering that electricity to lift people out of poverty,” he said, “and provide the opportunities that many have become accustomed to.”
Amen. The Atomic Humanist moment has arrived.
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