Lots of issues in a just transition to net-zero change by the week, some even more often. As technologies, policies, and economies change, we have to change our attitudes or biases to reflect those changes. In politics, elected officials tend to get punished for this, getting tarred for flip-flopping and presumed insincerity. But while that criticism is fair at times, it keeps us from double-checking our assumptions or stale impressions at others. So here’s a brief tour of some key issues where I’ve let go (or begun to let go) of an old opinion as I’ve learned more about the green transition — and at the end, an opinion I still stand by.
Nuclear
Growing up, I think I had the mainstream environmentalist stance on nuclear (at least in the US): Nuclear waste seemed like a literally and politically toxic issue, given outsized salience in the discussion by place names known to almost everyone — Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Fukushima. My misperception of the risk of active reactors and the environmental damage of spent fuels made me think nuclear was nearly as bad as fossil fuels, just not for climate reasons.
My feelings are now the opposite. Ignoring cost for a moment (which normally one shouldn’t), I might argue that no source of carbon-free energy surpasses nuclear nor stands to play a more dynamic, multi-purpose role in the energy transition. But not much has changed in the actual economics or technological options for nuclear in the past five-ish years. What’s changed is my level of information.
Nuclear is sometimes misidentified (by energy nerds) as the safest method of power generation. This is wrong; it is the second-safest, narrowly bested by solar. Why? Nuclear power is easily among the most tightly-regulated industries in the world. No reactors are built or brought on-line without extensive scrutiny from regulators, extremely precise design and construction, and vigorous ongoing supervision.
Nuclear technology is certainly in flux: Initiatives to recycle nuclear waste (using spent fuel to power different reactor designs) and new innovations in once-discarded areas like thorium molten-salt reactors could make nuclear power cheaper, even safer, less wasteful, and smaller/more flexible. Plenty of skeptics remain regarding America’s ability to actually deploy nuclear technologies, and new reactors (virtually none of which have been built in the US in the past 40+ years) invariably come in late and hugely over-budget.
But here’s why I’ve come around to seeing nuclear power as an inevitable cornerstone of the energy transition: First, nuclear already provides a tenth of global electricity generation. Not a tenth of clean electricity generation, a tenth of all generation, approximately equal to the combined generation capacity of wind and solar globally. While wind and solar are likely to blow past nuclear as they are deployed at accelerating speed in the next few years, nuclear’s established global capacity is proof of concept many times over.
Second, it is firm generation (see Topic 2). With intermittency as the primary issue holding us back from total reliance on wind and solar, we can’t pass up sources of clean, dispatchable generation if we want a zero-carbon grid. Nuclear can provide clean base load — the power that’s always running even when solar and wind cut out — in a way that only geothermal otherwise could (my misgivings about hydropower are for another installment).
Third, if, as new technologies promise, we could reduce the radioactive half-life of spent fuels to a couple hundred years after recycling use, storage would become easier and even safer. Even now, storage of nuclear waste is not the issue I once thought it was, particularly given how little fuel a reactor actually requires.
Finally, nuclear energy requires impressively little land. With the land requirements of other renewable technologies and the importance of not displacing food production, etc., generating lots of power with very little land makes a strong case for nuclear.
So it’s proven, dispatchable, safe, land-efficient, and only getting more sophisticated with time. The catches are that historically, it’s been quite expensive (per kwh), taking forever to get permitted and built, and that having lost a generation of expertise in the construction industry, we desperately need more skilled tradespeople with experience constructing new reactors. The first issue can be addressed with some regulatory reform, but the latter issue will simply take time we can’t really afford. So nuclear will and should be pivotal in the energy transition, but it’s going to be a long time coming.
Firm Generation
As discussed previously, “firm” generation is a bit of a misnomer, per Auke Hoekstra and others, but that isn’t where my mind has changed. I used to think firmness of generation was not likely to be a serious shortcoming of renewables as longer-duration batteries (some outstandingly cheap) got commercialized and deployed. Now, I think it’s not an issue at all, at least in the long-to-medium term.
A key assumption here is that we’ll eventually convert the grid from load-following generation, where we make power when we need it, to generation-following load, where we consume power when it’s naturally getting supplied. (At first, I found this idea somewhere between counterintuitive and very dubious.) Switching to a grid where demand follows supply will require deployment of smart technologies at completely unprecedented scale, but I hope and expect some big policy fights in the 2030s (or better still, the late 2020s) will be around subsidies, incentives, and regulation promoting their adoption.
Why does this switch matter? And how feasible is it? First, I’d argue shifting away from demand-following generation is deeply consistent with one of the key principles of a just green transition: We will need to work with nature more after more than a century of working against or despite it.
In brief, having demand follow generation will mean we do things like charging EVs midday, when solar/renewables peak, instead of in the evenings after work (when most grids currently see peak load, bringing fossil-fired plants online to meet the surge in demand) or at night, when wind and batteries may not be enough. We’ll need to do this for many things that currently happen between 5 p.m. and 6 a.m. Since we’re not getting as much power during those hours, we need to do fewer things then, where possible.
Realistically, this is quite a ways off, particularly for the whole grid. But we need to start thinking this way now. Where there’s a process that could theoretically happen at any time, we need to adjust it as much as possible to happen when the grid is flush with renewables. To borrow a metaphor from the pandemic response, we’d be “flattening the curve” — lowering peak demand to reduce the need for new transmission infrastructure and limit our need for fossil gas peaker plants. We’d also be “curve-matching” (to coin a phrase), where we’d sync our surges in power use to the natural surges in renewable power generation.
So is this cheating a little, saying I don’t think firm generation matters just because it will matter a lot less once we’ve implemented new technologies and revolutionized the grid? Sure, probably. But I’d say that’s also how we should be thinking about the energy transition: Not on the terms and with the conceptual vocabulary of the current system, but with an imagination geared toward the solutions we need and the distinctive strengths and pressures of a mostly-renewable grid.
Hydrogen
Most days, you can find me on social media deriding hydrogen in almost all cases. And there are lots of reasons to be skeptical of hydrogen, especially for the next handful of years. So my changed mind here is about something narrow: Hydrogen probably makes sense for decarbonizing heavy industrial processes like making cement and steel.
Along with industrial heat generally, cement and steelmaking are two huge sources of carbon emissions that require very high temperatures renewables usually can’t achieve. While agriculture, transportation, and electricity generation together account for the considerable majority of carbon emissions, we can’t fully decarbonize until we decarbonize industrial processes for cement and steel. For now, hydrogen looks like it may be the most promising, efficient way to make that happen.
But here’s a partial list of things hydrogen should not be used for: Fueling cars, powering homes, grid electricity, transportation, agricultural applications, almost anything else.
In brief, hydrogen’s sins include:
Horrendous round-trip efficiency, meaning that you have to spend a lot of energy only to get back out way less than you had in the first place;
Terrible climate consequences when it leaks into the atmosphere, especially when it combines with methane, which isn’t uncommon;
Little chance of being produced with renewables in the near term, meaning most hydrogen is currently more carbon-intensive than some fossil fuels (!!!); and
Mostly adding to fossil-fuel demand right now rather than cleanly offsetting it.
So hydrogen is generally bad and getting pretty ridiculously subsidized by the Inflation Reduction Act. I would love to get back to you with a bunch of great reasons to change my mind more in a few years, but for now, hydrogen is mainly a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Cars
Arguably my evolving views on EVS are not, per se, a change in opinion, just a change in weight and emphasis, but in any case, I find myself wondering far more often: Are EVs a good thing?
From the social and economic cost of parking, to mining minerals for batteries, to rising rates of pedestrian fatalities, to the massive decarbonization benefits of urbanization, to the lower emissions of public transit, to the relatively low decarbonization benefits of EVs in the most popular segments of the US auto market (e.g. the F-150 Lightning), to how decarbonizing mass transit would accelerate overall decarbonization, there are lots of reasons we should prefer public mass transit.
Since I’ve been pretty evangelical about EVs for several years now, this is perhaps where my opinions are slowest to change, but I’d still say this about EVs: It would be a shame if the US chose to retain massive structural car dependence amid socially revolutionary changes in so many other aspects of the green transition.
Weaning Americans off cars might be somewhere between a fool’s errand and a pyrrhic victory, if it’s even possible. But if we choose to spend our billions subsidizing the auto industry instead of making seismic investments in fast, efficient, reliable public transit systems, we will have wasted a huge opportunity to decarbonize more and faster than we likely will with a car-focused approach. And by growing mineral supply chains and subsidizing luxury vehicles (which, unfortunately, is much of the EV market at present), we will also have chosen a path that is probably more extractive in the Global South and subsidizes the lifestyles of affluent Americans.
So, again, are EVs a good thing? Yes, but they are not the best thing. They aren’t quite a necessary evil — particularly given that they will accelerate innovation in batteries, which will be perhaps the single most essential technology in the entire green transition — but policymakers should be very clear-eyed about the trade-offs embedded in an EV-focused approach to decarbonizing transportation.
Individual Action
Perhaps my opinions on this will shift back again, but for the moment, I’m unimpressed with a focus on personal action, which I still think matters, but far less than I used to. The concept of a “carbon footprint” is, after all, a marketing tool of the oil industry used successfully to make us believe personal consumption (and not corporate behavior) was the key driver of emissions.
Now, I think the legal, insurance, and financial industries are the ones to hold accountable. (In fact, I’ll be the Media Co-Chair for Law Students for Climate Accountability this year and would love to connect with anyone organizing pressure on climate issues in the legal industry!)
Insurers keep hiding the true risk of fossil fuel projects. Financial firms like Blackrock and Vanguard (which once made noises about taking ESG seriously) are firmly committed to passive investments in fossil fuels. And top law firms keep all the right paperwork flowing to enable an extraordinarily high volume of fossil fuel transactions and extraction.
These industries are reaping hundreds of billions of dollars from kneecapping the green transition. Until such time as they end their enabling complicity in fossil fuels, they will be the truest culprits in perpetuating our fossil fuel dependence. (After all, when was the last time you helped Exxon et al. do business worth, say, $1.36 trillion?)
Trains
Previously, I thought trains would be too expensive to pursue nationwide. Maybe that’s true. But I now emphatically think rail and other non-car, non-flight options for cross-country and intercity transportation are essential. If that involves radically modernizing, upgrading, and expanding Amtrak, great.
Where My Mind Hasn’t Changed
Degrowth — shrinking the economy (or at least disregarding economic growth) — still strikes me as a strategy that misunderstands what growth means. (The language of “size” and “growth” is also arguably an abysmal misnomer for what it means for an economy to become more prosperous; often, we are not merely consuming more goods that we then dispose of unsustainably. We are, instead, frequently adopting newer, more valuable technologies or creating new intellectual property that is accounted for as a “larger” economy but is arguably better understood as primarily a different economy that now includes some new consumption but also much technological change.)
And for those of us focused on a decolonial, equitable green transition, I would note that approximately 100% of the reduction in extreme poverty in living memory has been accomplished by economic growth, not by redistribution. Historically, we’ve only ever reduced inequality via calamitous disasters like war and plague.
Moreover, I’m very skeptical we would solve the climate crisis simply by staying at our current level of economic size. In any scenario, we’ll need an inconceivably huge turnover of capital goods and physical infrastructure to decarbonize. So the idea that we could replace one or two billion machines but manage to have an economy that has not “grown” seems like either a tragic mistake or a literal impossibility. Above all, a world in which global GDP remains the same but simply redistributes equitably from the Global North to the Global South is about as unfathomable as the end of capitalism. Whether you think such a thing would be wonderful or terrible, it seems vanishingly improbable.
Most likely, we’ll need to allocate immense resources from rich countries to fund mitigation and adaptation in the Global South as a means of protecting people and infrastructure and funding new growth there. That would equitably redistribute wealth but also surely involve more economic growth almost everywhere. On degrowth, then, I’m still a skeptic, and I think we have more promising and more just options for climate action and wealth redistribution than simply pressing pause on growing the global pie.
Personal Note
For the next several months, I’ll be doing climate mitigation research at the Georgetown Climate Center, focused particularly on the state-federal nexus of climate policy implementation. Future installments are therefore pretty likely to overlap with that work, so if you like the logistics of funding, procurement, and implementation, we’re going to have lots of fun this summer!