A Bright Future: How Some Countries Have Solved Climate Change and the Rest Can Follow

Joshua Goldstein and Staffan Qvist, (Public Affairs, New York, 2019). 276 pp. ISBN 978-1-5417-2410-5.

Because of my concern about climate change, a friend thought I would want to read this book, co-authored by an Emeritus Professor of International Relations at American University and a Swedish engineer, scientist, and consultant to clean energy projects. Because the subtitle suggested that other countries had found a magic bullet to solve this problem, I readily accepted and dug in.

In the foreword I read Steven Pinker’s claim that this is the “first book on dealing with climate change that is grounded in reality,” recognizing the massive changes that need to be made as shown by the nations that have made them. In the first chapter, titled “Climate Won’t Wait,” I read the authors’ argument that carbon dioxide emissions need to be reduced to nearly zero in a few decades to keep climate change from getting out of hand. The Paris Agreement would not achieve this, they point out; and “little progress has been made on” the “climate stabilization wedges” proposed 15 years ago. What is needed, they claim, is an effort comparable to dealing with an asteroid on course to strike Earth in the same time frame.

The second chapter, titled “What Sweden Did,” cuts right to the chase. I learned that from 1970 to 1990 Sweden halved its carbon emissions while doubling its electricity generation and expanding its economy 50% by using kȁrnkraft, that its kȁrnkraft plants generate 40% of its electricity and hydro another 40%. So the “magic bullet” for “solving climate change” is kȁrnkraft! But it didn’t take me long to piece together from my knowledge of German that this is nuclear power.

Already in chapter two the cat is out of the bag! The rest of the book presents the reasons Goldstein and Qvist feel that nuclear energy is the best antidote to climate change. Their first talking point comes in chapter three, titled “What Germany Did.” In contrast to Sweden, Germany has embarked on phasing out nuclear energy. While Sweden is adding renewable energy to supplement nuclear energy, Germany is adding renewable energy to replace nuclear energy. That solar and wind are diffuse and intermittent, while nuclear is concentrated and constant, makes this difficult and leaves fossil fuels to make up the difference, thus increasing carbon dioxide emissions.

The next three chapters of the book focus on what Goldstein and Qvist call “half measures.” The first of these is energy conservation and efficiency, both of which are acknowledged to reduce energy use, but the authors point out that the trend worldwide is greater energy use, as developing countries increase their need for energy with improved living standards, and the need for worldwide decarbonization must be viewed in this context. The only energy source thus far that can scale up to decarbonize amidst increased energy use, they assert, is nuclear.

The second “half measure” that Goldstein and Qvist consider is renewable energy. “The story of using only renewables seems compelling, but the scale does not work to rapidly decarbonize the world,” they observe. Historically most renewable energy has come from hydroelectricity, whose constancy makes it suitable for baseload energy, but most sites for it have already been tapped. They add that the problem posed by the intermittency of solar and wind could be avoided if the electrical energy they produce could be stored until needed, but the resulting added cost makes these sources uncompetitive.

The third and last “half measure” is burning methane in the form of natural gas instead of coal to generate electricity. While natural gas is the cheapest energy source to generate electricity and emits half as much carbon dioxide per unit of energy as coal, Goldstein and Qvist caution that it is not free of greenhouse gases. Moreover, methane leakage from natural gas wells adds another greenhouse gas to the atmosphere, producing 25 times the effect of carbon dioxide, although methane lingers there only decades compared to centuries for carbon dioxide.

In addressing the safety of nuclear energy, Goldstein and Qvist feel that the biggest downside from the nuclear accidents at Fukushima Daichi, Chernobyl, and Three Mile Island has been the pollution from the fossil fuels burned to generate the electricity no longer generated by these nuclear plants and which would have been generated by nuclear plants never completed due to public opposition. They compare 30 deaths from generating a terawatt-hour of electricity from coal to less than a tenth for the same amount of nuclear-generated energy.

Because people are likely to perceive accidents at nuclear plants as highly memorable, Goldstein and Qvist recognize that they are perceived as disproportionately risky, and riskier than medical radiation, which is planned and controlled. But they counter that nothing is completely risk-free, and argue that government controls to make nuclear energy as risk free as possible makes nuclear energy less economically competitive than energy from fossil fuels, which is not similarly regulated.

On the subject of nuclear wastes, which I find to be the most critical problem posed by nuclear energy, I find Goldstein and Qvist to be almost cavalier. While the chemical waste from a coal-fired power plant is permanent, nuclear waste decays, they point out. They give the impression that the few years that spent fuel is kept in temporary storage are sufficient for most radioactive isotopes to decay to a level of minimal concern—but if that were so, why would this waste need to be encased at a more permanent storage site? When they do cite longer-lived isotopes, with radioactivity to linger “tens of thousands of years,” they seem to have in mind plutonium without naming it and note that it can fuel future reactor designs. One of these is the breeder reactor, which they say is operating in Russia (but say nothing about the difficulties attending breeder reactor development around the world). They leave long-lived waste storage of beyond a century to new technologies what will have evolved by then. For those concerned that nuclear energy leads to nuclear weapons, Goldstein and Qvist correctly point out the difference between the two, but they avoid discussing the nuclear rogue states for which both nuclear energy and weapons are important.

Goldstein and Qvist begin the final section of their book, titled “The Way Forward,” with a plea not to close American nuclear power plants prematurely while they tout the advantages of what are considered third and fourth “generation” nuclear power plant designs which are able to shut down automatically in case of accident. But since climate change must be addressed globally, they also focus on three other critical players on the world scene: China, Russia, and India. Although China now leads the world in carbon dioxide emissions and is a leader in building coal-burning power plants, it is also credited for its investment in nuclear and renewable energy. Russia earns more from its natural gas by exporting it than burning it, and exporting it to Germany to replace the coal they burn would reduce Germany’s carbon dioxide emissions. Furthermore, Russia is the world’s leading exporter of nuclear reactors. It is developing a fourth-generation “Breakthrough” reactor design, and hopes to increase its percentage of nuclear electricity to 50%.

India’s coal consumption is second only to China’s and growing, and its nuclear energy program is in its infancy. Goldstein and Qvist would like to see China and India join Russia in accelerating their nuclear energy programs. Their “poster child” is Ontario, which has emulated Sweden to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from its electric sector by 90% by building 16 reactors in seventeen years. However, like Sweden, Ontario needed nuclear power for only 60% of its energy because it was able to depend on plentiful hydro. Goldstein and Qvist acknowledge that attempts in the European Union, USA, and Canada to reduce carbon dioxide emissions with a cap-and-trade-based tax have had mixed results. However, they argue that it is more effective than persuasion or regulation.

Because the three main end uses of energy are electricity, heat, and transportation, the book concludes that the procedure for total decarbonization is “(1) generate electricity cleanly and (2) electrify everything.”

John L. Roeder
The Calhoun School
New York, NY
JLRoeder@aol.com

These contributions have not been peer-refereed. They represent solely the view(s) of the author(s) and not necessarily the view of APS.