Thread by @ShellenbergerMD

Biden appears to have scored a major climate infrastructure victory but he didn't

In fact, he got fewer billions than Obama did in 2009, and it's a far cry from the multi-trillion Green New Deal

Why? Because of anti-nuclear Malthusian Progressives

michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/the-real-rea…

Yesterday, Biden appeared to have scored a big climate policy victory in announcing a deal with Republicans to spend hundreds of billions on new infrastructure, including $73B for new solar and wind farms and $15B for electric vehicle infrastructure and electric buses.

But the total ends up being just $88B, which is less than the “clean tech” portion of the 2009 stimulus and a far cry from the trillions progressives demanded. The total for electric cars is less than 1/10th the $177B Biden requested. And there is no Clean Electricity Standard.

Defenders of the deal say there will be another chance to spend more money on climate change in the budget reconciliation process later this year. White House aides call this a “two-step dance.”

As such, Biden told reporters at a second press conference, after the first press conference announcing the deal with Republican, that he would not sign the infrastructure legislation unless it were connected with a separate bill to pay for other infrastructure items.

But Biden’s maneuverings angered Senate Majority Mitch McConnell, who went on Fox News to denounce the two-step dance, and it is not clear if Democrats have enough support to pass additional infrastructure legislation, with or without Republican support.

Already one Republican senator has said he won’t support the bipartisan infrastructure deal without assurances that nothing additional is done in reconciliation. And nobody thinks we will see a return of the Clean Electricity Standard, or much more money for electric cars.

“The easiest way to understand today's infrastructure carousel,” noted @jimtankersley , “is that President Biden is trying to have it both ways — progressive and bipartisan — at the risk of getting neither if it all falls apart.”

“There appears to be some ... deliberate uncertainty ... about the sequencing for the two bills Biden wants. He says they need to move in tandem and that he wants them both to move as quickly as possible to his desk. So what happens if the bipartisan deal arrives first?”

Whatever happens, it’s clear that the $88B is the high point, not low point, of Biden's efforts on climate. After Obama won $90B in clean tech stimulus, Democrats had the expectation they would pass economy-wide “cap and trade” legislation. There is no such expectation today.

All of that despite four years of massive climate change protests in the U.S. and around the world, demanding radical change. Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris will continue to give apocalyptic speeches, cut ribbons, and attack Republicans as climate deniers.

Dems might get more money in the budget but there's no global treaty to negotiate, no energy breakthrough on the horizon, no sweeping proposal to reorganize the economy.

The question is thus not what’s next for climate over next 3 years but rather what’s next over next 30?

Progressive Democrats are angry at how tiny Biden’s climate mitigation investments are, but it’s their own fault. Biden attempted to dial-up support for nuclear energy in the legislation but progressives nixed even a modest lifeline for existing nuclear plants.

The underlying reason for the failure of Biden’s ambitious climate plans is that progressives remain dogmatically pro-renewables and anti-nuclear. After I and a handful of others spent much of 2019 criticizing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for her anti-nuclear Green New Deal...

she said in May of that year she would “keep the door open” on nuclear. But in October she advocated the closure of New York’s Indian Point. When the plant closed earlier this year, natural gas use and carbon emissions increased, as my colleagues and I had long predicted.

Had Biden advocated the increase of nuclear power from today’s 19 percent to 50 percent of America’s electricity by 2050, he would have won Republican support, and America would be on a path to significantly reduced emissions.

The infrastructure compromise Biden announced yesterday does so little that it will be impossible to measure any impact on the energy mix, much less overall emissions. And U.S. emissions will rise this year, thanks to the closure of Indian Point, and a booming post-COVID economy.

That’s in stark contrast to the fracking revolution, which is the source of America’s energy independence, and the main reason our pollution declined more over the last 20 years than any nation’s emissions have ever declined in recorded history.

US emissions declined 22% since 2005, which is five percentage points more than President Obama had promised to under his Clean Power Plan proposal.

The public interest case for nuclear power is obvious. Building nuclear power plants that can last 80 or 100 years is much more similar to building roads and bridges than it is to importing from China solar panels that last just 10 or 20.

And taking responsibility for the peaceful use of our most dangerous technology, the only one that truly poses an apocalyptic threat to human civilization, rather than let China and Russia control it, is obviously in America’s national security interests.

From an environmental point of view, safely managing and eventually re-using used nuclear fuel rods at the site of production is much closer to the “circular economy” vision of permanent recycling than to the reality of solar panel production and waste disposal.

It's now clear that solar waste disposal involves either dumping flimsy used solar panels on poor Africans or paying four times more for solar electricity than progressives had claimed.

michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/why-everythi…

Progressive support for nuclear has grown quickly. Two progressive & socialist science writers, Will Boisvert & @Leigh_Phillips spoke out in support of nuclear in 2013 and 2016 and in 2021 @dumbaristotle & @sunraysunray made the economic and climate cases for nuclear power.

Unfortunately, most news reporters remain hostile to nuclear energy, and they reach many more people. They repeat the same false claims that there is something so terribly complicated about nuclear plants that we can’t build them, even as they are built all over the world

But all infrastructure projects are over-budget. The UK-France tunnel under the English Channel was $3.6B over budget. The Space Station program is tens of billions of dollars over budget. And the Sochi Winter Olympics were $39B over budget.

While I mentioned the latter stat in Britain, while making the case for public investment in nuclear energy, one reporter quipped, “But that’s more a feature than a bug in Russia.” There’s truth in that, and it’s a funny joke.

But it’s also the case that Russia builds nuclear plants closer to their projected budget than other nations, and certainly much closer to budget than their Olympics, because Russia offers a standardized design, and the same people build its nuclear plants over and over again.

The collapse of Biden’s climate plans discredits the progressive agenda. The 100% renewable, anti-nuclear agenda reveals that the loudest climate activists care more about renewables as a path to harmony with nature through degrowth than about reducing emissions and toxic waste.

The biggest opportunity for moderate Democrats and Republicans lies not in Washington, D.C., but on the Left Coast. Progressives Democrats in California have created three simultaneous crises: electricity, forest fires, and homelessness.

This week @NPR reported Newsom “misrepresented his accomplishments & disinvested in wildfire prevention" while he was attacking Republicans as climate deniers for having correctly stated that the primary cause of high-intensity fires was forest mismanagement not higher temps.

Meanwhile, Newsom is making electricity scarce, expensive, and unreliable. California’s electricity prices rose another 7.5% in 2020, the largest price increase of any state in the country last year, notes journalist @pwrhungry .

The reason high-intensity fires & homelessness grew worse is because they are hard problems to solve. The reason the electricity grid is failing is because it is relatively easy, in a state so rich that the budget surplus this year alone is $78 billion, to subsidize solar panels

Affluence breeds arrogance. California is so rich that we thought we could just increase the price of electricity seven times faster than in the rest of the U.S. with no consequences if those price rises went to purchasing renewable energy.

But one of the consequences of spending on new renewables was that we did not spend enough money on clearing the vegetation from around electrical lines or on natural gas plants.

Affluence also breeds dogmatic romantic idealism. Newsom is pursuing a dangerous effort to shut down the state’s last nuclear plant, Diablo Canyon, which provides electricity to three million Californians, at a time of blackouts.

Why? Because he is in the grip of the Malthusianism of the NRDC, Sierra Club, and Environmental Defense Fund, who insist it can, should, and must be done.

They aren’t consciously deciding to create blackouts. But blackouts are the predictable result of an obsession with solar panels and lithium batteries that causes California regulators to ascribe to them quasi-magical properties.

The opportunity now for moderate Democrats and Republicans is to go big on nuclear. The U.S. is at this moment letting China deliver Saudi Arabia’s uranium enrichment and nuclear power program, something neither Democrats nor Republicans believe is good for American security.

The only way for the U.S. to guarantee its national security, protect its allies, and protect liberal democracy around the world, is through an organized and well-resourced nuclear power plant construction program.

A pro-nuclear climate agenda would be the muscular, pro-American alternative to made-in-China, financed-by-BlackRock, climate agenda of progressive Democrats. They will either be forced to oppose it or be exposed for favoring China-made solar panels over American nuclear workers

Policymakers squeamish about using public financing can instead create legislation that would attract financing from private funds including giant pension funds like CalPERS, as the British government may do, to build new nuclear plants.

But both parties are moving rapidly away from the neoliberal, bankers-first, globalization model that has dominated Left and Right for over 30 years.

Growing our nuclear capacity from 19% - 50% of electricity & building plants abroad is precisely the agenda that can appeal to Republicans, moderates, & progressive Millennials and Zoomers who don’t have the psychological hang-ups of their Baby Boomer and Gen X parents.

The fracking revolution resulted from the all-American marriage of the oil and gas industry, the Department of Energy, Congress, and multiple presidents, from Nixon to Clinton, as I documented a decade ago.

The fracking revolution resulted from a decades-long bipartisan consensus. As such, building a bipartisan consensus should be the highest priority of anybody who cares both about climate change and about our most important energy technology.

If such a consensus takes hold, and policymakers pursue a nuclear expansion, we might in 2050 look back on 2020 as the beginning of the end of progressive Democratic hegemony on climate change. Today, few realize that the problems facing renewables are fundamental, not temporary.

But over the next few months and years, a growing number of people will come to understand that the reason that Biden’s climate agenda failed wasn’t because it wasn’t ambitious enough. The real reason it failed is because it was anti-nuclear.

/END

Financial Times: Diesel generator sales are booming in California and Texas which face blackouts due to over-investment in weather-dependent renewables and under-investment in reliable energy

on.ft.com/3h52nzf

“Much of the increase in the diesel business has been created by the declining reliability of US electricity grids, particularly in storm-wracked coastal areas, inland tornado alleys and, recently, renewable energy-intensive California and Texas.”

“Does America really want the flickering lights, choking air and extreme social inequality of the places where the rich have private power systems to light their guardhouses and perimeter floodlights?”