Sen. Kamala Harris speaks at
the 2019 Iowa Democratic Wing Ding in Clear Lake, Iowa, August 9, 2019. (Gage
Skidmore)
Nuclear power, clean and
carbon-free, is taboo for the major candidates
Democratic presidential
candidates argued on Wednesday evening, during a seven-hour event broadcast on
CNN, that they would stop at nothing to stop climate change.
Kamala Harris, who has faded in
the polls, set the tone during her pre-primetime appearance. The California
senator said that as president, she would somehow abolish the filibuster to
implement the Green New Deal. By 2030, Harris vowed, America will have only
electric school buses, and by 2045 we will have 100 percent zero-emission
vehicles.
Harris would change dietary
guidelines to reduce red-meat consumption. She would ban fracking. She would
ban offshore drilling. She’d even ban plastic straws.
What about increasing
production of nuclear power, which doesn’t produce carbon dioxide emissions?
“Given the existential threat
to humanity posed by global warming,” one questioner asked Harris, “do you
believe the time has come to put past nuclear-power failures into perspective
and to embrace a new and smarter generation of nuclear-power technologies given
all that has been learned and the scale of the crisis we’re confronting today?”
Well, Harris replied, she
wouldn’t do that. “The biggest issue that I believe we face in terms of nuclear
energy is the waste and what are we going to do with that.” Harris went on to
say that it would “never” dispose of nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.
Harris dodged when asked
whether she’d phase out nuclear power entirely, as Bernie Sanders has proposed.
She kept her focus on protecting states from having nuclear waste stored on
federal land within their borders, a key issue in Nevada, which happens to hold
the third nominating contest in the Democratic race.
It was the kind of calculating
response one has come to expect from Harris. One half-expects her to
reassure voters today that her Paper Straws for All plan will be phased in over
a ten-year period, and there will still be a plastic-straw option
that is heavily regulated by the federal government.
Joe Biden was his typical self:
blustery and struggling to make clear points. He wasn’t asked about nuclear
power, and he didn’t bring it up. He favors keeping the plants in operation but
not building new ones.
Surely Elizabeth Warren, who
has been surging in the Democratic race as the candidate of ideas, would take a
more serious approach than Harris to nuclear power? Nope.
Warren conceded that nuclear
power is “not carbon-based” but said that it has “a lot of risks” associated
with it, such as “the risks associated with the spent fuel rods that nobody can
figure out how we’re going to store these things for the next bazillion years.”
“In my administration, we’re
not going to build any new nuclear power plants, and we are going to start
weaning ourselves off nuclear energy and replacing it with renewable fuels. . .
. We’re going to get it all done by 2035, but I hope we’re getting it done
faster than that,” Warren said. “That’s the plan.”
Bernie Sanders was on the same
page as Warren, arguing in favor of shutting down nuclear-power plants. “I
think if you talk to the people in Japan in terms of what happened at
Fukushima, talk to the people in Russia what happened in Chernobyl, you know
what, they may not feel so comfortable with nuclear power,” Sanders said when
asked about the fact that nuclear plants safely generate 70 percent of France’s
power. “So I’m not a fear-monger here, and I wish the people in France the very
best. But I think that the way forward, the most cost-effective way
forward, the way forward that is safest is moving to sustainable energies like
wind and geothermal.”
In short, 2020 Democrats argued
that there is an existential environmental crisis, but we can’t be bothered to
find the appropriate dirt heap under which we would dump the waste of a
carbon-free energy source already in existence that actually works.
JOHN MCCORMACK is the Washington correspondent for National
Review and a fellow at the National Review Institute. @mccormackjohn
__________________
RELATED ARTICLE
Climate Change: A Convenient Excuse for Dems
to Transform the Economy
The idea that all life on this planet is in jeopardy if
America doesn’t wean itself from fossil fuels is just hyperbole.
Climate change is an existential crisis,” Senator
Elizabeth Warren declared Tuesday, unveiling her plan to fight climate change
in advance of CNN’s interminable townhall event on the topic with ten
Democratic presidential candidates.
The use of the term “existential crisis” is ironic. No
doubt, they mean “existential threat,” i.e. that global warming threatens to
end life on earth. It doesn’t. But we’ll get back to that in a second.
The term “existential crisis” comes from psychology or
philosophy, not environmental science. An existential crisis is when you’re
overcome with panic or dread about your place in the world or your purpose in
the universe. If you’re depressed and ask “What’s it all about?” you might be
having an existential crisis.
A giant asteroid barreling toward earth is an existential
threat, midlife adultery is a sign of an existential crisis.
The irony is that concern over climate change — which is
a real and legitimate concern — seems derived more from an existential crisis
than from an existential threat.
At the CNN event, many of the Democratic candidates
insisted that life on earth was at stake. Warren said climate change is an
“existential threat” that “threatens all life on this planet.” According
to Senator Bernie Sanders, “We are dealing with what the scientists call
an existential threat to this planet, and we must respond aggressively; we must
listen to the scientists. That is what our plan does.”
That’s not true. Our quality of life on earth might be
threatened, but our existence isn’t. Now, of course, something can come up far
short of an extinction-level event and still be really, really bad. But the
idea that all life on this planet is in jeopardy if America doesn’t wean itself
from fossil fuels is just hyperbole. And even if America did exactly that,
there’s little reason to believe the rest of the world would follow suit.
Still, if we take them literally, not just seriously,
they’re saying we’re doomed if we don’t implement some version of the Green New
Deal — a sweeping, wildly expensive hodgepodge of proposals first unveiled by
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, that aims to eliminate carbon
emissions inside of twelve years.
And yet, both Sanders and Warren (and others) are against
using nuclear power to reduce carbon emissions. “In my administration, we won’t
be building new nuclear plants,” Warren declared. “We will start weaning
ourselves off nuclear and replace it with renewables,” by 2035. Sanders called
nuclear power a “false solution” and vowed to end it.
It’s an odd argument. Sanders says we must “listen to the
scientists,” but there are scads of scientists who think nuclear-waste storage
is eminently manageable, including the National Academies of Sciences,
Engineering, and Medicine. They report that the “consensus” is that safe
geological storage is entirely feasible.
More importantly, if you honestly believe that climate
change is an existential threat, akin to an impending asteroid strike, why
would you rule out one of the only proven tools to combat it? It’s a bit like
refusing to use a firehose on a burning orphanage because you’re afraid of the
subsequent water damage.
There are plenty of people who despise nuclear weapons
and want to see them eradicated. But it would be hard to take such people
seriously if they argued against sending nuclear missiles into deep space to
head off an extinction-level asteroid impact.
All the Green New Deal proposals are sold as huge
economic bonanzas, offering lavish subsidies for displaced workers, socialized
medicine, and other improvements to our quality of life.
And this is what I mean by the existential crisis
underlying the alleged existential threat of climate change.
According to the Washington Post, in July,
Saikat Chakrabarti, who then was Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff, admitted that
“the interesting thing about the Green New Deal is it wasn’t originally a
climate thing at all.” The Post reported that, in a meeting
with Governor Jay Inslee (D., Wash.), Chakrabarti said, “Do you guys think of
it as a climate thing? Because we really think of it as a
how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.”
Climate change is not the hoax that some claim it is. But
to the extent that it’s a crisis, people like Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, and
Warren want to use it as an excuse to radically transform the American economy
and political system along lines that have less to do with climate change and
much to do with their ideological animosity to the status quo.
And when the fight against climate change conflicts with
their fight for “social justice,” it’s climate change that takes a backseat.
The existential threat is the excuse for fixing the
existential crisis of the American Left.
JONAH
GOLDBERG holds
the Asness Chair in Applied Liberty at the American Enterprise Institute. @jonahnro