Category Archives: Decommissioning

Toxic Relationship – How refineries affect climate change and racial and economic injustice

East Bay Express, by Jean Tepperman, July 22, 2020

BURNT: California is the biggest oil-refining center in Western North America according to Greg Karras of Communities for a Better Environment. STOCK PHOTO

California should begin gradually reducing output from its oil refineries in order to avoid climate catastrophe and to make the transition to clean energy as equitable as possible. That’s the conclusion of a major new report released July 6 by Communities for a Better Environment (CBE), endorsed by more than 40 environmental and social justice organizations.

While most people agree on the need to use less fossil fuel, many fear that requiring refineries to reduce production could lead to higher gasoline prices and a big economic hit for workers and communities that depend on refineries for income. Report-author Greg Karras responded, “If we start now, doing it gradually, it will give us the time to replace refinery-dependent economics.” The report calls for cutting production 4 to 7 percent a year, starting in 2021.

California has set targets for cutting carbon emissions between now and 2050: the state’s share of global cuts needed to keep temperature increases below catastrophic levels. Because the carbon that causes climate change builds up in the atmosphere, California has a carbon “budget”—the total amount it can emit from now until 2050. According to Decommissioning California Refineries, California will have to refine much less oil per year to avoid blowing through this carbon “budget” by about 2037.

“California is the biggest oil-refining center in Western North America,” Karras said. “Oil refined here emits more carbon than all other activities in the state combined.” Even if all other sources of carbon are reduced on schedule, Karras said, “we must refine much less oil if we hope to meet the state’s carbon limit.”

“We have to break free from our toxic relationship with oil before it takes us over a cliff,” Karras said. “When you’re in a car heading toward a cliff, it matters when you start putting on the brakes.”

The sooner we start, the more likely we are to escape the worst impacts of climate change.

The issue is not just climate, said Andres Soto of CBE. He pointed out that refinery pollution is concentrated in communities like Richmond, centers of racial and economic injustice.

“Only 20 percent of Richmond is Euro-American,” he said.

And the health consequences of having a refinery as a neighbor are severe.

Rodeo, another Contra Costa refinery town, “is in the 98th percentile for asthma,” said resident Maureen Brennan, and it has high rates of skin disease, autoimmune disease and cancer—all linked to refinery-generated pollution.

Retired refinery worker Steve Garey, past president of a United Steelworkers local in Washington state, said starting now to plan for reduced refinery production could actually benefit refinery workers, since “the movement away from fossil fuels and toward renewables is going to accelerate. It’s an economic reality. Renewables are cheaper than fossil fuel and getting cheaper all the time.”

Recently when the pandemic cut demand for gasoline, Garey said, the Marathon refinery in Martinez shut down, leaving the workers and community stranded.

The current drop in oil use, Karras said, gives us a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to turn away from the cliff and build a cleaner and more equitable recovery.

Prices and Jobs

The Western States Petroleum Association (WSPA) said in a statement that requiring cuts in refinery production is a bad idea: “We believe we can support our people, our communities, our planet, and our shared prosperity without having to sacrifice one at the expense of the other. However, arbitrarily working to limit refining or production in the state will leave many Californians short of energy, without work and at a greater risk for displacement.”

The California State Building Trades Council recently joined in a partnership with WSPA to protect petroleum-industry jobs, although council President Robbie Hunter said he agrees that “dropping output in refineries is necessary. I believe we need to get rid of fossil fuels.” His unions have often lobbied for clean-energy programs like the Renewable Portfolio Standard, which requires electricity providers to use an increasing percentage of renewable energy.

But, like WSPA, Hunter opposes refinery production cuts, fearing an increase in gasoline prices that would, among other things, hurt building-trades workers such as his sons, who “sometimes drive 80 miles a day to job sites.” He argued for relying instead on programs to cut demand. “If the need goes down, I’m 100 percent in,” he said.

Contra Costa County Supervisor John Gioia represents a district that includes the Richmond Chevron refinery. He also sits on the California Air Resources Board (CARB) and the Bay Area Air Quality Management District. A longtime environmental champion, Gioia said he agrees with the report’s authors that “both demand and supply side strategies are necessary” to reduce petroleum use fast enough to meet climate goals. Last year the state legislature authorized studies to come up with strategies to reduce both supply and demand for greenhouse-gas-producing energy.

Gioia pointed to several new CARB regulations to reduce petroleum use, including a recent first-in-the-nation rule that sets a schedule for replacing diesel with electric trucks, as well as a schedule passed last year for switching to electric buses. But he said, “we have to be really thoughtful about the impact [of climate measures] on the hardest-hit communities. It’s the lowest-income Californians, communities of color, who are the most impacted by rising fuel costs and don’t always have access to public transportation.”

Karras responded to these concerns by pointing out that, as demand for petroleum products in California has fallen, refineries have not reduced their output but, instead, started exporting more of their product—now at least 20 percent and rising. So production could be cut by 20 percent or more without reducing the amount available to Californians. And, he added, “It’s a pure injustice for Black and Brown people in fence-line communities” to suffer pollution “so refineries can manufacture fuel that Californians don’t need, to export our oil dependency to other countries.”

Union leaders don’t buy that argument.

“As long as there’s a market for the product somewhere, American workers should produce it,” Garey said. For members of his union, cuts in refinery production mean “losing the best job they ever had.” In addition, many workers in construction trades depend on refineries for jobs. And, Garey said, “this is a community-wide issue.”

Refineries contribute a big share of the taxes communities rely on. And there’s what economists call a “multiplier” effect: every high-paying job creates seven to 10 other jobs providing the goods and services that refinery workers can afford to buy.

Start Planning Now

According to the Decommissioning California Refineries report, those very economic facts are the reason why it’s important to start immediately creating ambitious programs for supporting workers and communities in the switch to a clean-energy economy.

Doing that “will take state, local, and county action as well as a national plan,” said Soto of CBE. And, he added, the plan must be based on “justice for workers and the people who have paid the heaviest price of having polluters in their communities.”

Carol Zabin, who heads the Green Economy Program at the UC Labor Center, agreed. It will be necessary to “use a lot of levers of government, from direct public investment to business incentives to training and education infrastructure,” she said.

Ramping up efforts to create good jobs in a clean-energy economy is a goal environmentalists and labor advocates agree on.

“The big problem is that there are not enough other good jobs for people without a college education,” Zabin said.

Hunter, of the Building Trades Council, said his unions have been pushing for public programs that create good jobs while reducing demand for petroleum: building solar and wind energy, massive expansion and electrification of public transit, high-speed rail, housing near transit.

Zabin agreed with Karras that each community needs to “figure out in an intimate local setting” how to shift from economic dependence on refineries. “We have to plan locally with state and federal support,” Karras said.

“This is a process that requires community-wide participation,” Soto added. Workers, refinery community residents, and environmental organizations should be involved in the planning, Garey said. They all “need each other as allies – we need the biggest ‘we’ we can get.”

Supervisor Gioia said Contra Costa County should “start now having study sessions and community forums to lay out pathways for this thing that we have to do to save the planet.” He agreed that workers and residents should be part of the planning process and reported that Contra Costa has already adopted “a policy to have a more inclusive planning process—the community has to have a voice.”

“We need strategies to make California the manufacturing center of the new economy,” Gioia added. He pointed to a new factory in Los Angeles County—with good, union jobs—making the electric buses needed for the county’s clean-transportation plan.

But not all investments in clean energy produce good, family-supporting jobs, Zabin said. “We need labor standards on all industries affected by climate policy.” There are none, she pointed out, in California’s program for building electric-vehicle charging stations. And most energy-efficiency projects “have gone low-road.”

When the Air Resources Board was creating standards for energy-efficiency work, she said, the State Building Trades Council pushed for them to include labor standards. Zabin herself submitted two reports calling for the same thing. For environmental programs to build a coalition with labor, she said, “we should put conditions on the $1.5 billion a year we spend on energy efficiency.” But CARB rejected these proposals. “It’s a question of political will,” Zabin said. Government could also create good jobs in other areas, she added, such as rebuilding infrastructure—a green New Deal.

Committing Significant Revenue

But economic development programs are not enough to meet the needs of refinery workers, Garey said. “We need to commit significant revenue, enough to support their income for an appropriate time.” He pointed to a program spelled out in an initiative that narrowly lost in his state of Washington, calling for “income insurance” for up to five years for workers who lost their jobs because of the switch from fossil fuel, as well as health insurance, a path to retirement and support for job retraining.

Building a stronger “social safety net” is necessary, not only for displaced petroleum workers, but for everyone, Karras argues: “The average gig-worker job doesn’t pay enough for rent or mortgage, health care, college.”

Especially in refinery communities like Contra Costa, Gioia said, “we need to look at more robust training programs in our community colleges—opportunities for a new generation to enter trades in a new industry.” At the same time, he added, it might be necessary to “subsidize early retirement for workers late in their career.”

The nonprofit think tank Oil Change International calls for a similar inclusive planning process on the state level, a “Statewide Just Transition Task Force—as has been done in Scotland and in Canada, for example—to facilitate the process of social dialogue and planning between employers, workers, unions, frontline communities and organizations, and local and state agencies.” [The Sky’s the Limit California, p. 10]

Calls for these ambitious programs raise the obvious question of where the money will come from. Oil Change International says the state should charge oil companies a “just transition fee based on the value of their oil production.” Karras suggests a similar principle, which could also be applied on a local or state level: “Make the polluters pay.” He pointed to a federal program that required nuclear power plants to “pay up front into a trust fund to clean up the whole mess—environmental and economic” that they would leave behind when they close.

The important thing—the reason for issuing this report—Karras said, is to “start the conversation. To say, ‘we have to do this,’ and start talking about it. We will have to figure out how.”

Coronavirus, Covid 19, Decommissioning, Ethanol, Fossil fuels, Tar sands crude, Valero Benicia Refinery

Letter from Andrés Soto: Chagrined at Valero’s alcohol diversion

April 27, 2020 Roger Straw

By Andrés Soto, April 27, 2020

As we wound down the first shelter in place Earth Day/Week, I was prodded into chuckling at the Herald’s front page story of Valero diverting some of its ethanol production to the making of hand sanitizing liquids! This is like applying antibiotic ointment to a bleeding gun shot wound. Thanks Valero.

Valero and the other fossil fuel companies have been knowingly contributing to the destruction of our atmosphere and trying to exacerbate the problem by moving into refining extreme crudes such a tar sands and fracked crude. Thanks Valero.

It is now understood that those who have been suffering the greatest health burdens over time from the fossil fuel economy are – surprise, surprise – also the most vulnerable to infection from COVID 19! Benicia and other refinery towns are on the front line with children and seniors suffering disproportionately from asthma and other auto-immune diseases. Thanks Valero.

Of course, to protect their position to profit from poison they need political support. The 2018 Benicia election saw Valero and its deep pocket “boots on the ground” building trades union allies spend an obscene amount of money to personally destroy the reputation of Planning Commissioner Kari Birdseye and and pump up the pro-polluter candidates Lionel Largaespada and Christina Strawbridge to victory. Thanks Valero.

If Valero and its fellow oil cartel members really wanted to help Benicia and Earth it would join community members, workers and city representatives in the planning of a managed decommissioning of the refinery and reduce risks to COVID 19, massive wildfires and toxic pollution. Thanks Valero.

Andres Soto
Benicia CA

Climate Change, Decommissioning, Global warming, Keeping Watch on Earth News, Nuclear power

Nuclear power IS / IS NOT the answer…

December 29, 2019 Roger Straw

[Editor: Back in the 1980s, I followed the lead of Dr. Helen Caldicott, who called for a “nuclear freeze.” My spouse and I thought it was important enough that we founded an educational program on the dangers of nuclear arms and nuclear energy. I have felt the same urgency in more recent years about the dangers of climate change and the absolute imperative of taking action to slow and reverse global warming. Recently, I’ve read a number of articles promoting the virtues of nuclear power as a cheap “non-fossil-fuel source of energy.” Below I am posting a few pro and con stories, side by side. This “balanced” approach is unusual for me – my Benicia Independent is a personal blog, and I am more likely to advocate a position than to lay out pros and cons. But this particular issue is critical for the planet, and might deserve a little study of the factors for and against a resurgence of nuclear power plants. – R.S.]

Flanked by cooling towers, a nuclear reactor is contained inside a spherical containment building. Creative Commons, Wikimedia

Climate change is scarier than nuclear power

By Jack Edmonston, Barnstable Patriot, Dec 28, 2019

While closing the aging Plymouth nuclear plant may have been a wise decision, the world’s withdrawal from nuclear power since the tragic tsunami at Fukushima in March, 2011 will likely lead to disaster.

Before Fukushima, a recent piece in The New Yorker points out, “there was serious discussion among energy experts about a nuclear ‘renaissance.’” After Fukushima, Japan shut all its nukes down. Belgium, Switzerland and Germany announced complete phaseouts of nuclear power, and France announced a major decrease.

The New Yorker reports that Pushker Kharecha, a scientist at Columbia University’s Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions Program, thinks this is a terrible mistake. “Our window of time to mitigate the climate crisis is shrinking by the day … . Given this urgency it simply makes no sense to curtail a non-fossil fuel source like nuclear power in countries that produce significant power from fossil fuels.”

If professors Steven Pinker of Harvard and Joshua Goldman of American University and Swedish nuclear engineer Staffan Qvist are correct, we need to stop closing nuclear plants and start building them as quickly as we can. In a New York Times op-ed, “Nuclear Power Can Save the World,” they argue that the only way to supply the growing global demand for electricity without fossil fuels is through a mix of renewable energy and nuclear power.

The professors believe we have to supplement the nuclear plants we have with a buildup of safer, advanced nuclear plants. While some experts assert that renewables alone can solve the problem, economic models show that at least 20% of our power has to come from a reliable, consistent, low-carbon source. And the only one we have available is nuclear power.

The risk of nuclear power is localized, visible and very low – Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and Fukushima notwithstanding. The risk of global warming is worldwide, not visible until it’s too late, and very high.

The professors tell us that “the reality is that nuclear power is the safest form of energy humanity has ever used.” “Mining accidents, hydroelectric dam failures, natural gas explosions and oil train crashes all kill people, sometimes in large numbers, and smoke from coal-burning kills them in enormous numbers, more than half a million per year.

“By contrast, in 60 years of nuclear power, only three accidents have raised public alarm,” and except for Chernobyl they didn’t kill anyone.

“Climate change is a trolley moving inexorably but slowly toward the people on the tracks,” says Steven Davis, an earth systems science professor at the University of California, Irvine. “Maybe nuclear is scarier because a person could be run down before she even sees the trolley.”

The future of nuclear power lies in “fourth-generation” reactors currently being developed by dozens of startups. They will be mass-produced with standard parts and shipped to the world, “potentially generating electricity at lower cost than fossil fuels.

The good news is that Congress recently passed the Nuclear Energy Innovation and Modernization Act. Unless Donald Trump (who calls global warming a hoax) stops it, we may be on our way to a sensible answer to the problem.

Can nuclear power help save us from climate change?

The technology’s slide must be reversed, the International Energy Agency says, but significant barriers exist

Chemical & Engineering News, by Jeff Johnson, Sept. 23, 2019

Globally, nuclear power is on the skids. Its contribution to electricity generation is in a free fall, dropping from a mid-1990s peak of about 18% of worldwide electricity capacity to 10% today, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). The agency expects the downward spiral to continue, hitting 5% by 2040 unless governments around the world intervene.

The driver for that intervention would be nuclear reactors’ ability to generate energy with low greenhouse gas emission. To meet the world’s energy needs and avoid the worst effects of climate change, low-carbon electricity generation must increase from providing 36% of the world’s energy today to 85% by 2040, the IEA says.

Electricity sources

The share of electricity generated globally from low-carbon sources has been relatively flat since it peaked in the mid-1990s.

Source: International Energy Agency, “Nuclear Power in a Clean Energy System.”

“Without an important contribution from nuclear power, the global energy transition will be that much harder,” IEA executive director Fatih Birol says in a statement accompanying an IEA nuclear power report. “Alongside renewables, energy efficiency and other innovative technologies, nuclear can make a significant contribution to achieving sustainable energy goals and enhancing energy security.”

But steep barriers to a nuclear energy renaissance exist, among them aging reactors, high costs to build new ones, safety concerns, and questions about how much nuclear is needed in the world’s energy mix.

Historically, nuclear power has played its biggest role in advanced economies, where it makes up 18% of total electricity generation today. France is the most dependent on nuclear energy, with 70% of its electricity generated from nuclear reactors. By number of operating reactors, the US leads with 98 power plants capable of generating 105 GW; France is second with 58 reactors generating 66 GW of electricity.

However, many of those reactors are old. In the US, the European Union, and Russia, plants average 35 years or more in age, nearing their designed lifetimes of 40 years.

Building new nuclear power plants based on traditional designs will be nearly impossible in developed economies, IEA analysts say. The challenges include high costs and long construction times, as well as time needed to recoup costs once plants start running, plus ongoing issues with radioactive waste disposal. In addition, the competitive electricity marketplace in the US makes it hard to sell nuclear energy against that generated more cheaply through natural gas, wind, or solar. Right now, only 11 nuclear plants are under construction in developed economies—4 in South Korea and 1 each in seven other countries.

There is more potential for nuclear energy expansion in developing nations with state-controlled, centralized economies. China is the world’s third-largest nuclear generator, with 45 reactors capable of producing 46 GW of electricity. China also has the biggest plans for new power plants, with 11 at various stages of construction, the IEA says. India is building 7; Russia, 6; and the United Arab Emirates, 4, with a sprinkling of other new plants coming throughout the rest of the world. All will be state owned, the IEA says.

The nuclear industry’s main hope for future expansion lies in a new generation of small, modular reactors that generate less than 300 MW each and are amenable to assembly-line construction. These are still under development, however, with none licensed or under construction.

A middle path between new plants and no plants is lifetime extensions for existing reactors. The IEA estimates the costs for maintenance and improvements needed to continue operating an existing nuclear reactor for an additional 10–20 years would be $500 million–$1.1 billion per gigawatt, an amount the IEA says is comparable to constructing a renewable—solar or wind—system of the same size. The result would be effectively 1 GW of new, low-carbon electricity without the delays involved in siting and building a new solar field or wind farm.

In the US, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has already renewed and extended the operating licenses from 40 to 60 years for 90 of the 98 operating reactors. The industry is now focusing on renewals to operate for up to 80 years. Similarly, other countries are considering extending existing reactor operations but for shorter periods, the IEA reports.

These extensions present what the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) terms a “nuclear power dilemma.” The nonprofit organization, which advocates scientific solutions to global problems, has been a frequent nuclear industry critic.

Aging nuclear plants

Many nuclear power plants in the US, the European Union, and Russia are reaching the end of their design lifetime, while those elsewhere in Asia are much younger.

“We are very cognizant of this climate challenge and the need to act quickly to cut greenhouse gas emissions,” says Rachel Cleetus, the UCS’s climate and energy policy director. The UCS’s solution for providing energy in a warming world is to tax and cap carbon dioxide emissions and introduce a low-carbon electricity standard for all energy sources. Such measures would drive the construction and development of low-carbon energy facilities and technologies, the UCS says.

For nuclear energy in particular, the organization endorses temporary financial support for the extension of some plants, conditioned on rate protection for consumers, safety requirements, and greater investments in renewables and energy efficiency. “We can’t just give them lots of money and blanket life extensions,” Cleetus says. Scenarios and mathematical models run by the UCS show nuclear is very unlikely to grow beyond providing at most 16% of the world’s electricity generation capacity by 2050 even with aid, far short of the 85% or more of the low- or noncarbon generation needed to address global warming.

Underlying the debates about power plant costs and operating lifetimes are questions of safety and risks—real and perceived—of nuclear reactors and radioactivity. These concerns have made nuclear power unpopular in the US, Germany, Japan, and elsewhere.

The San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS), resting on the US West Coast north of San Diego, provides an example of why. Seven million people live within 80 km of the plant.

A stormy relationship between SONGS and its surrounding community goes back decades. Most recently, the facility was completely shut down in 2013 after two nearly new steam generators failed. The replacements were part of a $670 million overhaul that was supposed to provide 20 more years of life for the plant.

Then, while transferring used fuel into a storage vault last year, contractor Holtec International mishandled and nearly dropped a 50-metric-ton spent fuel canister. The NRC subsequently cited plant owner Southern California Edison for failing to properly report the incident, as well as conditions that led to it. The public learned about the slipup from a whistle-blower speaking at a community meeting. The event halted fuel transfer operations, which are just now restarting.

“Repairs and replacements could be done properly at nuclear plants,” says L. R. “Len” Hering Sr., a retired rear admiral of the US Navy who lives near SONGS and is cochair of a task force established by Rep. Mike Levin (D-CA) to address community safety concerns at the facility.

Hering bases that assessment on his navy experience. “Ships are designed to last roughly 30 years, and when the navy goes through a process of life extension, we do extensive testing and evaluation,” he says. “We make certain all components are up to snuff. In the navy, repairs are made by a focused group of individuals separate from the ship’s operators, and it is not about cost.”

He has not seen a similar level of attention and rigor at SONGS. Once a nuclear advocate, he has cooled on nuclear power because of concerns over management and regulation. “I don’t believe the NRC has the capacity to properly inspect and oversee operations or maintenance,” he says.

Meanwhile, some of the groups advocating for strong action to address climate change question whether more nuclear energy is necessary. Over the past 20 years, as nuclear power generation has declined, renewable sources have expanded by some 580 GW—more than the output of all the world’s nuclear power plants—to make up the difference. Consequently, the overall share of low-carbon electricity sources—hydropower, nuclear, solar, and wind—has stayed even at about 36%.

The IEA applauds the growth of renewables but says that it is unprecedented and not sustainable. Hence the agency’s support for nuclear power.

However, energy researchers at the World Resources Institute and the UCS, speaking at a recent US congressional hearing, say renewable sources will continue to expand, and major increases in energy efficiency are on the horizon. In addition, the researchers expect that as more renewable energy facilities come on line, new technologies will be developed to address the challenge of variable output from renewable energy sources, such as with solar on an overcast day.

Overreliance on nuclear might in fact stall development and installation of technologies needed for a transition to a low-carbon future, Cleetus argues. Her modeling shows that capital investment needed for renewable energy development—building high-voltage power lines, advanced batteries and other storage systems, and of course, renewable resources themselves—could be funneled off to build and retrofit more nuclear power plants. And then there are those who question whether nuclear energy can even be called low carbon if greenhouse gas emissions are considered for the full energy cycle, including plant construction, uranium mining and enrichment, fuel processing, plant decommissioning, and radioactive waste deposition.

See also The New York Times Opinion, “Nuclear Power Can Save the World” by Joshua S. Goldstein, Staffan A. Qvist and Steven Pinker, April 6, 2019

The 7 reasons why nuclear energy is not the answer to solve climate change

Mark Z. Jacobson, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Director, Atmosphere/Energy Program, Stanford University, Dicaprio Foundation, Jun 20, 2019

There is a small group of scientists that have proposed replacing 100% of the world’s fossil fuel power plants with nuclear reactors as a way to solve climate change. Many others propose nuclear grow to satisfy up to 20 percent of all our energy (not just electricity) needs. They advocate that nuclear is a “clean” carbon-free source of power, but they don’t look at the human impacts of these scenarios. Let’s do the math…

One nuclear power plant takes on average about 14-1/2 years to build, from the planning phase all the way to operation. According to the World Health Organization, about 7.1 million people die from air pollution each year, with more than 90% of these deaths from energy-related combustion. So switching out our energy system to nuclear would result in about 93 million people dying, as we wait for all the new nuclear plants to be built in the all-nuclear scenario.

Utility-scale wind and solar farms, on the other hand, take on average only 2 to 5 years, from the planning phase to operation. Rooftop solar PV projects are down to only a 6-month timeline. So transitioning to 100% renewables as soon as possible would result in tens of millions fewer deaths.

This illustrates a major problem with nuclear power and why renewable energy — in particular Wind, Water, and Solar (WWS)– avoids this problem. Nuclear, though, doesn’t just have one problem. It has seven. Here are the seven major problems with nuclear energy:

1. Long Time Lag Between Planning and Operation

The time lag between planning and operation of a nuclear reactor includes the times to identify a site, obtain a site permit, purchase or lease the land, obtain a construction permit, obtain financing and insurance for construction, install transmission, negotiate a power purchase agreement, obtain permits, build the plant, connect it to transmission, and obtain a final operating license.

The planning-to-operation (PTO) times of all nuclear plants ever built have been 10-19 years or more. For example, the Olkiluoto 3 reactor in Finland was proposed to the Finnish cabinet in December 2000 to be added to an existing nuclear power plant. Its latest estimated completion date is 2020, giving it a PTO time of 20 years.

The Hinkley Point nuclear plant was planned to start in 2008. It has an estimated completion year of 2025 to 2027, giving it a PTO time of 17 to 19 years. The Vogtle 3 and 4 reactors in Georgia were first proposed in August 2006 to be added to an existing site. The anticipated completion dates are November 2021 and November 2022, respectively, given them PTO times of 15 and 16 years, respectively.

The Haiyang 1 and 2 reactors in China were planned to start in 2005. Haiyang 1 began commercial operation on October 22, 2018. Haiyang 2 began operation on January 9, 2019, giving them PTO times of 13 and 14 years, respectively. The Taishan 1 and 2 reactors in China were bid in 2006. Taishan 1 began commercial operation on December 13, 2018. Taishan 2 is not expected to be connected until 2019, giving them PTO times of 12 and 13 years, respectively. Planning and procurement for four reactors in Ringhals, Sweden started in 1965. One took 10 years, the second took 11 years, the third took 16 years, and the fourth took 18 years to complete.

Many claim that France’s 1974 Messmer plan resulted in the building of its 58 reactors in 15 years. This is not true. The planning for several of these nuclear reactors began long before. For example, the Fessenheim reactor obtained its construction permit in 1967 and was planned starting years before. In addition, 10 of the reactors were completed between 1991-2000. As such, the whole planning-to-operation time for these reactors was at least 32 years, not 15. That of any individual reactor was 10 to 19 years.

2. Cost

The levelized cost of energy (LCOE) for a new nuclear plant in 2018, based on Lazard, is $151 (112 to 189)/MWh. This compares with $43 (29 to 56)/MWh for onshore wind and $41 (36 to 46)/MWh for utility-scale solar PV from the same source.

This nuclear LCOE is an underestimate for several reasons. First, Lazard assumes a construction time for nuclear of 5.75 years. However, the Vogtle 3 and 4 reactors, though will take at least 8.5 to 9 years to finish construction. This additional delay alone results in an estimated LCOE for nuclear of about $172 (128 to 215)/MWh, or a cost 2.3 to 7.4 times that of an onshore wind farm (or utility PV farm).

Next, the LCOE does not include the cost of the major nuclear meltdowns in history. For example, the estimated cost to clean up the damage from three Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear reactor core meltdowns was $460 to $640 billion. This is $1.2 billion, or 10 to 18.5 percent of the capital cost, of every nuclear reactor worldwide.

In addition, the LCOE does not include the cost of storing nuclear waste for hundreds of thousands of years. In the U.S. alone, about $500 million is spent yearly to safeguard nuclear waste from about 100 civilian nuclear energy plants. This amount will only increase as waste continues to accumulate. After the plants retire, the spending must continue for hundreds of thousands of years with no revenue stream from electricity sales to pay for the storage.

3. Weapons Proliferation Risk

The growth of nuclear energy has historically increased the ability of nations to obtain or harvest plutonium or enrich uranium to manufacture nuclear weapons. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recognizes this fact. They concluded in the Executive Summary of their 2014 report on energy, with “robust evidence and high agreement” that nuclear weapons proliferation concern is a barrier and risk to the increasing development of nuclear energy:

The building of a nuclear reactor for energy in a country that does not currently have a reactor allows the country to import uranium for use in the nuclear energy facility. If the country so chooses, it can secretly enrich the uranium to create weapons grade uranium and harvest plutonium from uranium fuel rods for use in nuclear weapons. This does not mean any or every country will do this, but historically some have and the risk is high, as noted by IPCC. The building and spreading of Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) may increase this risk further.

4. Meltdown Risk

To date, 1.5% of all nuclear power plants ever built have melted down to some degree. Meltdowns have been either catastrophic (Chernobyl, Russia in 1986; three reactors at Fukushima Dai-ichi, Japan in 2011) or damaging (Three-Mile Island, Pennsylvania in 1979; Saint-Laurent France in 1980). The nuclear industry has proposed new reactor designs that they suggest are safer. However, these designs are generally untested, and there is no guarantee that the reactors will be designed, built and operated correctly or that a natural disaster or act of terrorism, such as an airplane flown into a reactor, will not cause the reactor to fail, resulting in a major disaster.

5. Mining Lung Cancer Risk

Uranium mining causes lung cancer in large numbers of miners because uranium mines contain natural radon gas, some of whose decay products are carcinogenic. A study of 4,000 uranium miners between 1950 and 2000 found that 405 (10 percent) died of lung cancer, a rate six times that expected based on smoking rates alone. 61 others died of mining related lung diseases. Clean, renewable energy does not have this risk because (a) it does not require the continuous mining of any material, only one-time mining to produce the energy generators; and (b) the mining does not carry the same lung cancer risk that uranium mining does.

6. Carbon-Equivalent Emissions and Air Pollution

There is no such thing as a zero- or close-to-zero emission nuclear power plant. Even existing plants emit due to the continuous mining and refining of uranium needed for the plant. Emissions from new nuclear are 78 to 178 g-CO2/kWh, not close to 0. Of this, 64 to 102 g-CO2/kWh over 100 years are emissions from the background grid while consumers wait 10 to 19 years for nuclear to come online or be refurbished, relative to 2 to 5 years for wind or solar. In addition, all nuclear plants emit 4.4 g-CO2e/kWh from the water vapor and heat they release. This contrasts with solar panels and wind turbines, which reduce heat or water vapor fluxes to the air by about 2.2 g-CO2e/kWh for a net difference from this factor alone of 6.6 g-CO2e/kWh.

In fact, China’s investment in nuclear plants that take so long between planning and operation instead of wind or solar resulted in China’s CO2 emissions increasing 1.3 percent from 2016 to 2017 rather than declining by an estimated average of 3 percent. The resulting difference in air pollution emissions may have caused 69,000 additional air pollution deaths in China in 2016 alone, with additional deaths in years prior and since.

7. Waste Risk

Last but not least, consumed fuel rods from nuclear plants are radioactive waste. Most fuel rods are stored at the same site as the reactor that consumed them. This has given rise to hundreds of radioactive waste sites in many countries that must be maintained and funded for at least 200,000 years, far beyond the lifetimes of any nuclear power plant. The more nuclear waste that accumulates, the greater the risk of radioactive leaks, which can damage water supply, crops, animals, and humans.

Summary

To recap, new nuclear power costs about 5 times more than onshore wind power per kWh (between 2.3 to 7.4 times depending upon location and integration issues). Nuclear takes 5 to 17 years longer between planning and operation and produces on average 23 times the emissions per unit electricity generated (between 9 to 37 times depending upon plant size and construction schedule). In addition, it creates risk and cost associated with weapons proliferation, meltdown, mining lung cancer, and waste risks. Clean, renewables avoid all such risks.

Nuclear advocates claim nuclear is still needed because renewables are intermittent and need natural gas for backup. However, nuclear itself never matches power demand so it needs backup. Even in France with one of the most advanced nuclear energy programs, the maximum ramp rate is 1 to 5 % per minute, which means they need natural gas, hydropower, or batteries, which ramp up 5 to 100 times faster, to meet peaks in demand. Today, in fact, batteries are beating natural gas for wind and solar backup needs throughout the world. A dozen independent scientific groups have further found that it is possible to match intermittent power demand with clean, renewable energy supply and storage, without nuclear, at low cost.

Finally, many existing nuclear plants are so costly that their owners are demanding subsidies to stay open. For example, in 2016, three existing upstate New York nuclear plants requested and received subsidies to stay open using the argument that the plants were needed to keep emissions low. However, subsidizing such plants may increase carbon emissions and costs relative to replacing the plants with wind or solar as soon as possible. Thus, subsidizing nuclear would result in higher emissions and costs over the long term than replacing nuclear with renewables.

Derivations and sources of the numbers provided herein can be found here.

Nuclear power is not the answer in a time of climate change

AEON, By Heidi Hutner, Stony Brook University, Erica Cirino, science photojournalist, and editor Pam Weintraub, May 28, 2019

<p>The Woolsey Fire seen from Topanga Canyon in California. <em>Photo courtesy of Peter Buschmann/USDA/Flickr</em></p> — The Woolsey Fire seen from Topanga Canyon in California. Photo courtesy of Peter Buschmann/USDA/Flickr

In November 2018, the Woolsey Fire scorched nearly 100,000 acres of Los Angeles and Ventura counties, destroying forests, fields and more than 1,500 structures, and forcing the evacuation of nearly 300,000 people over 14 days. It burned so viciously that it seared a scar into the land that’s visible from space. Investigators determined that the Woolsey Fire began at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory, a nuclear research property contaminated by a partial meltdown in 1959 of its failed Sodium Reactor Experiment, as well as rocket tests and regular releases of radiation.

The State of California’s Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC) reports that its air, ash and soil tests conducted on the property after the fire show no release of radiation beyond baseline for the contaminated site. But the DTSC report lacks sufficient information, according to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. It includes ‘few actual measurements’ of the smoke from the fire, and the data raises alarms. Research on Chernobyl in Ukraine following wildfires in 2015 shows clear release of radiation from the old nuclear power plant, calling into question the quality of DTSC’s tests. What’s more, scientists such as Nikolaos Evangeliou, who studies radiation releases from wildfires at the Norwegian Institute for Air Research, point out that the same hot, dry and windy conditions exacerbating the Woolsey Fire (all related to human-caused global warming) are a precursor to future climate-related radioactive releases.

With our climate-impacted world now highly prone to fires, extreme storms and sea-level rise, nuclear energy is touted as a possible replacement for the burning of fossil fuels for energy – the leading cause of climate change. Nuclear power can demonstrably reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Yet scientific evidence and recent catastrophes call into question whether nuclear power could function safely in our warming world. Wild weather, fires, rising sea levels, earthquakes and warming water temperatures all increase the risk of nuclear accidents, while the lack of safe, long-term storage for radioactive waste remains a persistent danger.

The Santa Susana Field Laboratory property has had a long history of contaminated soil and groundwater. Indeed, a 2006 advisory panel compiled a report suggesting that workers at the lab, as well as residents living nearby, had unusually high exposure to radiation and industrial chemicals that are linked to an increased incidence of some cancers. Discovery of the pollution prompted California’s DTSC in 2010 to order a cleanup of the site by its current owner – Boeing – with assistance from the US Department of Energy and NASA. But the required cleanup has been hampered by Boeing’s legal fight to perform a less rigorous cleaning.

Like the Santa Susana Field Lab, Chernobyl remains largely unremediated since its meltdown in 1986. With each passing year, dead plant material accumulates and temperatures rise, making it especially prone to fires in the era of climate change. Radiation releases from contaminated soils and forests can be carried thousands of kilometres away to human population centres, according to Evangeliou.

Kate Brown, a historian at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the author of Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future (2019), and Tim Mousseau, an evolutionary biologist at the University of South Carolina, also have grave concerns about forest fires. ‘Records show that there have been fires in the Chernobyl zone that raised the radiation levels by seven to 10 times since 1990,’ Brown says. Further north, melting glaciers contain ‘radioactive fallout from global nuclear testing and nuclear accidents at levels 10 times higher than elsewhere’. As ice melts, radioactive runoff flows into the ocean, is absorbed into the atmosphere, and falls as acid rain. ‘With fires and melting ice, we are basically paying back a debt of radioactive debris incurred during the frenzied production of nuclear byproducts during the 20th century,’ Brown concludes.

Flooding is another symptom of our warming world that could lead to nuclear disaster. Many nuclear plants are built on coastlines where seawater is easily used as a coolant. Sea-level rise, shoreline erosion, coastal storms and heat waves – all potentially catastrophic phenomena associated with climate change – are expected to get more frequent as the Earth continues to warm, threatening greater damage to coastal nuclear power plants. ‘Mere absence of greenhouse gas emissions is not sufficient to assess nuclear power as a mitigation for climate change,’ conclude Natalie Kopytko and John Perkins in their paper ‘Climate Change, Nuclear Power, and the Adaptation-Mitigation Dilemma’ (2011) in Energy Policy.

Proponents of nuclear power say that the reactors’ relative reliability and capacity make this a much clearer choice than other non-fossil-fuel sources of energy, such as wind and solar, which are sometimes brought offline by fluctuations in natural resource availability. Yet no one denies that older nuclear plants, with an aged infrastructure often surpassing expected lifetimes, are extremely inefficient and run a higher risk of disaster.

‘The primary source of nuclear power going forward will be the current nuclear fleet of old plants,’ said Joseph Lassiter, an energy expert and nuclear proponent who is retired from Harvard University. But ‘even where public support exists for [building new] nuclear plants, it remains to be seen if these new-build nuclear plants will make a significant contribution to fossil-emissions reductions given the cost and schedule overruns that have plagued the industry.’

Lassiter and several other energy experts advocate for the new, Generation IV nuclear power plants that are supposedly designed to deliver high levels of nuclear power at the lowest cost and with the lowest safety risks. But other experts say that the benefits even here remain unclear. The biggest critique of the Generation IV nuclear reactors is that they are in the design phase, and we don’t have time to wait for their implementation. Climate abatement action is needed immediately.

‘New nuclear power seemingly represents an opportunity for solving global warming, air pollution, and energy security,’ says Mark Jacobson, director of Stanford University’s Atmosphere and Energy Programme. But it makes no economic or energy sense. ‘Every dollar spent on nuclear results in one-fifth the energy one would gain with wind or solar [at the same cost], and nuclear energy takes five to 17 years longer before it becomes available. As such, it is impossible for nuclear to help with climate goals of reducing 80 per cent of emissions by 2030. Also, while we’re waiting around for nuclear, coal, gas and oil are being burned and polluting the air. In addition, nuclear has energy security risks other technologies don’t have: weapons proliferation, meltdown, waste and uranium-worker lung-cancer risks.’

Around the world, 31 countries have nuclear power plants that are currently online, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. By contrast, four countries have made moves to phase out nuclear power following the 2011 Fukushima disaster, and 15 countries have remained opposed and have no functional power plants.

With almost all countries’ carbon dioxide emissions increasing – and China, India and the US leading the pack – the small Scandinavian country of Denmark is an outlier. Its carbon dioxide emissions are decreasing despite it not producing any nuclear power. Denmark does import some nuclear power produced by its neighbours Sweden and Germany, but in February, the country’s most Left-leaning political party, Enhedslisten, published a new climate plan that outlines a path for the country to start relying on its own 100 per cent renewable, non-nuclear energy for power and heat production by 2030. The plan would require investments in renewables such as solar and wind, a smart grid and electric vehicles that double as mobile batteries and can recharge the grid during peak hours.

Gregory Jaczko, former chairman of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the author of Confessions of a Rogue Nuclear Regulator (2019), believes the technology is no longer a viable method for dealing with climate change: ‘It is dangerous, costly and unreliable, and abandoning it will not bring on a climate crisis.’

A war reporter covers “The End Of Ice” — and it will change the way you think about climate catastrophe

May 19, 2019 Roger Straw

By Elise Swain, The Intercept, May 4 2019, 6:00 a.m.

Photos: Getty Images (2); Animation: The Intercept

FOCUSING ON BREATH and gratitude, Dahr Jamail’s latest book, “The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption,” stitches together personal introspection and gut-wrenching interviews with leading climate experts. The rapidly receding glaciers of Denali National Park, home to the highest peak in North America, inspired the book’s title. “Seven years of climbing in Alaska had provided me with a front-row seat from where I could witness the dramatic impact of human-caused climate disruption,” Jamail writes.

With vividly descriptive storytelling, Jamail pushes further north into the Arctic Circle where warming is occurring at double speed. He surveys rapid changes in the Pribilof Islands, where Indigenous communities have had to contend with die-offs affecting seabirds, fur seals, fish, and more — a collapsing food web. The story continues in the fragile Great Barrier Reef, utterly ravaged by the warming ocean. South Florida is faring no better: Jamail finds that 2.46 million of the state’s acreage will be submerged within his lifetime. Experts are aghast everywhere Jamail visits. In the Amazon, rich in biodiversity, the consequences are especially enormous.

“The End of Ice” readers won’t find calls for technology-based solutions, politicians, mitigating emissions, or the Green New Deal to save us.

Describing the current state of the planet, Jamail likens it to someone in hospice care. The global mean temperature is already 1 degree Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Not half a decade ago, leading climate scientist James Hansen warned that that 1 degree would usher in a crisis of sea-level rise, melting Arctic ice, and extreme weather. He concluded that the goal of limiting global warming to only 2 degrees was “very dangerous.” Accelerated melting in the Arctic continues to surpass conservative predictions. Jamail reminds us that “as rapidly as global temperatures are increasing, so are temperature predictions. The conservative International Energy Agency has predicted a possible worst-case scenario of a 3.5°C increase by 2035.”

Little has worked to inspire action. There is perhaps no better example of climate science being disregarded than a climate change denier being elected president of the United States.

The threat of looming biosphere apocalypse is deeply troubling, panic-inducing, and this all-encompassing environmental, economic, and spiritual problem leaves one feeling helpless and grief-stricken. “The End of Ice” takes on the full weight of the catastrophe at hand. Jamail carries the reader’s emotional pain by acutely expressing his own.

end_of_ice_final-1556894251 — “The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption” by Dahr Jamail. Photo: Courtesy of The New Press

“A willingness to live without hope allows me to accept the heartbreaking truth of our situation, however calamitous it is. Grieving for what is happening to the planet also now brings me gratitude for the smallest, most mundane things,” Jamail explains. “I have found that it’s possible to reach a place of acceptance and inner peace, while enduring the grief and suffering that are inevitable as the biosphere declines.”

“This global capitalist experiment, this experiment of industrialization and burning fossil fuels rampantly is an utter, abject failure,” Jamail told The Intercept. He believes it is time to start adapting. We should act like the climate crisis has arrived and, most significantly, reconnect to the planet. Jamail spoke to The Intercept about his latest book and dealing with the grief of reporting from the frontlines of the war in Iraq to the frontlines of climate disruption. The interview that follows has been edited for clarity.

Dahr Jamail reads an excerpt from his book “The End of Ice” on the Intercepted podcast beginning at 54:57.

Your book really blindsided me in a way that I didn’t expect. I was thinking it would be another dry, hard to read, statistic-heavy work, but instead you told stories that were really rich with genuine interactions and emotions and talked about your own emotional state while you were reporting on all of this. So just tell me about that approach to writing and how you felt during these interviews with all of these scientists and researchers.

To go out and go to these frontline places like the Great Barrier Reef or Denali or St. Paul Island in the Pribilof, the Everglades down in South Florida, places that were being hit the hardest, the fastest — I knew that I would have a very personal and emotional reaction to that. And so all these places like the Great Barrier Reef and Denali and a couple of others that I have long-term intimate relationships with, I’d watch them over time. Most people aren’t going to get to go to most of these places. So it was really my effort to go try to bring that to them through my writing the best that I could.

I went out and was awestruck, completely blown away by the majesty of these places, getting these moments of: Look at this incredible planet. Look at these hanging glaciers on Denali. Look at these fish at the Great Barrier Reef. And then simultaneously, the heartbreak of going back to a glacier and the whole glacier’s just gone and feeling that gut punch.

That’s what it felt like. Or going back to the Great Barrier Reef: It’s a World Heritage Site. It’s this wonder of the natural world. And snorkeling over areas where all you can see is bleached white coral and knowing most of that’s going to die and having it be utterly silent, devoid of fish life, and feeling that. So it was this simultaneous experience of awe and gratitude for this planet and then heartbreak over what’s happening to it.

Explain that term you use for climate change, which was once “global warming”; you’re calling it “anthropogenic climate disruption.” So why are you making that distinction?

I use the term “human-caused or anthropogenic climate disruption” instead of climate change or global warming for a couple of different reasons. The first and foremost is, it’s the most scientifically accurate because by essentially geoengineering the climate, which is what we’ve done by injecting so much CO2 into the atmosphere, we have disrupted the climate. And then the other reason is that there was fossil fuel influence on climate change decades ago for that to become the more commonly used moniker descriptor: “change” because it’s not as alarming as climate crisis or climate disruption or climate catastrophe.

One of the things that you talk about in the book a lot is the disconnection that we as a human species are having from the planet at this point.

We can ignore it or at least pretend to ignore it and not feel like these impacts are directly affecting us. And for a lot of us still living in that bubble, we can still get away with that.

Well, it’s Western colonial society. It essentially trains us to be disconnected from the planet. It doesn’t predispose us to go and live directly in relationship with the Earth. We don’t have to go to a stream to go get our water. We don’t have to go hunt or grow our food if we don’t want to. It’s the opposite of indigenous lifestyle, traditionally. So that’s why I believe the fundamental cause of climate disruption is our inherent disconnect from the planet. “Our” being those of us living, most of us living in Western industrialized society. And the solution is first, we have to start with reconnecting. And I think that’s why we don’t see climate disruption in the headlines on a regular basis because so many of us are living in big cities, getting our food from grocery stores; our water, turn on the tap. There’s your water.

We can ignore it or at least pretend to ignore it and not feel like these impacts are directly affecting us. And for a lot of us still living in that bubble, we can still get away with that. I think that’s changing before our very eyes, but I think that really is the root cause of this crisis — is this disconnect. Because if we were living closer to the earth, like indigenous people did for thousands and thousands of years, you’re so finely attuned to the weather. And when the rains come and when the droughts come and being able to read things like that and watching what the animals do and making decisions based on that — you’re going to take a lot better care of the place where you live, if you’re living that much more closely to it. And obviously you’re going to not take as good of care of it if you’re completely disconnected from it.

So just to go back to the first book that you wrote about reporting from the frontlines in Iraq to now in this book reporting from the frontlines of climate change: Those are really tough topics to sit with and deal with for a long time.

As devastating as reporting on Iraq was to me, personally — war is an extremely hard thing to live with and figure out how to contend with and then dealing with the PTSD and all of this that comes with it. And that’s something then that I get to live with for the rest of my life and anyone who’s been in war does. It never goes away; you just learn to live with it.

But the climate crisis and this book has been that but on a deeper level because it really regularly kicks in fight or flight, for example of, “Oh my God, we’re losing 2.4 percent of our insect population, 2.4 percent of the insect biomass of the planet annually. That means on this current trajectory, assuming it doesn’t accelerate, that means no more insects within a hundred years. No more insects pretty much means no more humans.” And so that feeling that comes up knowing that there’s a fear. There’s a panic. There’s a fight or flight. Where do I go? I can’t go anywhere. This is our only planet and so all those feelings and that grief that comes up, you’re going to get to deal with that.

And so if this is what’s happening to our very planet, then there’s going to be an ongoing dance with grief that comes up of sadness, of rage at the people responsible, of this kind of internal schizophrenia of, “Yeah, and I still drive, and I still fly, and yet I’m writing this book about the climate crisis.” All of us living embedded in this Western civilization, that’s a dance that we all get to contend with on a daily basis if we really start to tease out our own feelings.

So I want to get into some of the details on different chapters in the book. Can you talk to me a little bit about the glacier melt in the Arctic regions that you were in and what sort of future we’re looking at in that ecosystem?

If we look at what’s happening to glaciers around the globe as the planet has warmed up considerably, we are losing ice at ever accelerating rates. And so one of the things I did is, I went out on the Gulkana Glacier in the Alaska range with the U.S. Geological Survey crew who do an annual mass balance survey. They basically go out on the ice and dig pits and take measurements and plant stakes and use radar and measure how much ice is being lost on an annual basis. There’s several of these around North America that they measure and, in that way, have a very, very accurate chronicle, statistically, of how much ice is being lost over time.

Essentially, what we know is that glaciers are on track, for example, in the contiguous 48 states that at current trajectories and current emission rates, if these continue, there will be probably no glaciers anywhere left in the contiguous 48 states by 2100. I went out into the field in Glacier National Park with Dr. Dan Fagre, and he told me that essentially Glacier National Park will have no functional glaciers by 2030. So that’s less than 11 years from now.

And then if we zoom out of the Hindu Kush region of the Himalaya where it’s heavily glaciated: There’s a massive ice field. Seven of Asia’s biggest rivers are sourced there. That ice is on trajectory to go away, possibly even completely, by 2100. In which case, the 1.5 billion people that get their water for drinking and agriculture from those waters, where do they go? What do they do? What happens to the areas where they migrate because they’ll have to migrate? We can’t live someplace where there’s not potable water and water for irrigating crops. So when glaciers go away, it’s a big deal to humans. And a lot of people don’t think about this.

Can you tell me about your trip to the Great Barrier Reef and what you saw there? There’s something to be said about the coral reef phenomenon in talking about climate change because it is one of the things that people can connect to in an emotional way. Human beings hate seeing beautiful things get destroyed. We really don’t like it. So as a visual person, I think that’s an interesting way to approach climate change: Show people the coral reefs and what we’re losing.

At the risk of sounding cheesy or cliche, it’s part of that reconnection process to the planet. And you know, when I wrote this book, I hoped that if I had one goal of the book was that someone would read it and then put it down and go outside to wherever their favorite place is to connect into the Earth — whether it’s a park or a river or the ocean or the mountains or pasture or what have you — because we’ve forgotten. We have forgotten. Look at this incredible planet where we live. Just go out and look at a tree with birds in it and just watch them for a couple of minutes. Look at all of this. Nature is doing all of this by itself.

And then look at what we’ve done, and look at what our actions are causing. We have to take that in, and I think that’s where we get back into this dance of the beauty and the awe and the amazement and the love simultaneous with, “Look at how shockingly fast we’re losing it all.” I mean, because we are losing it. We have failed. This experiment, this global capitalist experiment, this experiment of industrialization and burning fossil fuels rampantly is an utter, abject failure. And all of the global governments — of course, some are doing it a little less worse than others — but at this point, all of the global governments have failed abjectly in responding to this crisis accordingly. And so again, all of that puts the onus back on each of us now. How are we individually going to respond?

I grew up in Florida, in Sarasota. It’s a coastal city on the Gulf of Mexico. And I’ve essentially had this understanding my whole life that one day, probably within my lifetime, my hometown will be completely underwater. So it’s absurd: the fact that, one, we have Donald Trump and a climate-change-denying administration, but two, on a state level, we have climate-change-denying leadership at the top in a state that will be completely, wholly affected by climate change more so maybe than any other state. But can you just tell me about what you learned in Miami and in the Everglades?

That particular chapter working on sea level rise in Florida was — to put it as clearly and bluntly as I can: It was a mindfuck.

It was so incredible to be in this place that is ground zero for sea level rise. It’s happening more intensely and faster there as it is anywhere else in the world, and you also have some of the leading sea level rise experts on the planet. They’re out of University of Miami — Ben Kirtman and Harold Wanless, both of whom I interviewed for the book. And there I am in Miami Beach going around with the then-city engineer Bruce Mowry, who’s actively working to raise several of the streets three feet, knowing that’s not enough, but, “OK, this is going to buy us enough time. We’re going to save Miami Beach. We can try to mitigate this.” Conveniently ignoring things like well, it’s actually the whole city is based on what was essentially a mangrove swamp. There’s this porous limestone underneath it that — guess what —water comes up through it.

There’s already large areas in Miami Beach and some areas of Miami that flood in the middle of a sunny day, in the middle of a drought, and people are just putting on their rubber boots and walking through it. There’s fish swimming at times literally across the roads. And so you’re living on ground zero for sea level rise with this fossil-fuel-funded leadership. Then simultaneous to that, you have scientists like Dr. Wanless who told me, “Look, I know for a fact that Marco Rubio is aware of what I’m telling you about how much sea level rise is already baked in.” It’s not out of the realm of possibility we could see 10 feet by 2050. We could see far more than that by 2100. I mean, South Florida is basically gone. All those millions of people, and all of that infrastructure, and all of those toxic sites that have to be cleaned up, and the Turkey Point nuclear plant just south of Miami at six feet elevation — all of that has to be decommissioned and moved to higher ground. All of the archives, hospitals, colleges, everything, right? And that needs to start yesterday. And instead, you have this denial. Nothing’s happening.

I want to talk about one moment in the book that completely gutted me, and I hadn’t heard this information anywhere else. You were speaking to, as you mentioned, Dr. Harold Wanless in Miami, and you write about the conversation: “In the past, atmospheric CO2 varied from roughly 180 to 280 parts per million as the Earth shifted from glacial to interglacial periods. This 100 ppm fluctuation was linked with about a 100-foot change in sea level.” And so that means we’ve gone from 280 ppm to our current level, right now, of 410 ppm of carbon in the atmosphere. So what does that mean?

That means that we have, at least in theory, 130 feet of sea level rise that’s already baked into the system. 130 feet means goodbye, Florida. Well, basically all of South Florida. That means goodbye to every major coastal city on the planet. And then where do those people go? What happens to those economies? How do we relocate all those people? I mean, this means literally a completely different planet by itself, and that’s what’s there.

And we have to remember too that in conjunction with that, there’s a NASA report that I discuss in the book that discusses how back in the Pliocene, roughly 3 million years ago when there was roughly the same amount of CO2 in the atmosphere as there is now because of us: Sea levels were minimum 20 meters higher than they are today. The average global temperature was 3 to 4°C higher than it is now, and there were parts of the globe where it was 10°C higher.

We’re seeing geologic change happening on human timescale. We’re looking at change faster than what happened during the Permian mass extinction, which up to now was the single deadliest mass extinction event in the planet’s history. 252 million years ago, 90 percent of all life on Earth went extinct, and we have injected CO2 in the atmosphere at a rate dramatically faster than what caused that mass extinction event.

PARADISE, CALIFORNIA - FEBRUARY 11: An aerial view of homes destroyed by the Camp Fire on February 11, 2019 in Paradise, California. Three months after the deadly and destructive Camp Fire, the community is beginning the rebuilding process. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images) — An aerial view of homes destroyed by the Camp Fire on Feb. 11, 2019, in Paradise, Calif. Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Let’s talk about wildfires. You wrote, “Climate disruption is already responsible for nearly half of the forest area burns across the western United States over the last 30 years.” That’s pretty shocking.

It is. I live in the Pacific Northwest. You say that, most people picture rainforests, lots of rain, wet Seattle, gray, all of this. And yet we have already, as we speak right now on Earth Day, have had 50 wildfires in Washington State, where I live. That’s normally the number we have by late August and into October, which is peak wildfire season. There are towns that are literally becoming unlivable. If you have respiratory issues, you can’t live in a town that’s completely engulfed in wildfire smoke for weeks on end.

There are towns that are literally becoming unlivable. If you have respiratory issues, you can’t live in a town that’s completely engulfed in wildfire smoke for weeks on end.

It’s truly incredible when you look at the fact that once we hit 3 degrees Celsius warming (we’re at 1.1 degrees Celsius now), many scientists tell us that if we stopped all fossil fuel emissions on a dime, we have a minimum of 3 degrees Celsius warming already baked into the system. That means a sextupling of the amount of wildfires in the American West. If you look at what’s happened to California, just as an example, over the last couple of years, multiply that by six.

So we are right there on the edge of these impacts. But one thing that I want to remind folks: It is easy to think in the United States, “Oh, well, so much of this is happening so much worse in other countries.” Well, if you live in Paradise, California, there’s no more future tense about the climate crisis to you. If you’ve just lost everything and you know someone who’s died and if you made it out of that alive, barely: You just lived through the apocalypse.

Talk about the emotional parallels of working both as a war correspondent and covering climate change. I believe you described it as a kind of grief.

There is a deep, deep grief that comes up, and the way I’ve written about it in the book is I shared a story about a dear friend of mine: Duane French, a quadriplegic man that I used to work for, as his personal assistant, up in Alaska when I first moved up there in the mid-’90s. And a few years ago, he got pneumonia, and I thought for sure, “He’s dead.” He was in the ICU for weeks on end, and none of the drugs were working, and I really believed I was in a hospice situation with him. And so all that mattered to me was to really be as present as I could and appreciate each moment that I had while he was still here.

So what can I do? Where does my motivation come from if things really do appear to be lost? That’s where I had a big conversation with a Cherokee medicine man named Stan Rushworth, actually. He reminded me of the difference between the colonial settler mindset of, “We have rights,” versus the indigenous philosophy of, “We’re all born onto the planet with obligations.” The two big ones that he shared with me are: an obligation to take care of, and be a steward of, the planet; and an obligation to serve future generations and make my decisions based on what’s going to take the best care of them. And so no matter how dire things look today, if I get up and I ask myself, “OK, how can I be of best service today to the planet and to the children?” Then I have my work cut out for me, and there is no shortage of things to do. And I am morally obliged to do everything in my power possible to try to help somehow, whatever that’s going to look like.

So at most points in these conversations about climate, the conversation turns to hope for the future at the end, but I don’t really want to talk about hope, you know, in the sense of that meaning solutions. I want to know how you’ve been dealing with the weight of this material and how you’ve personally come to define hope.

Right, I had to really tackle the hope versus hopelessness paradigm. To sum it up, upfront, I quote Vaclav Havel who said, “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something is worth doing no matter how it turns out.” With hope in the context of the climate crisis in these movements: Someone else, or some party, or some movement’s going to do something — even if I’m part of that — and then something in the future is going to happen. And I think it takes us out of ourselves, and it definitely takes us out of the present moment. And right now, in this second, in me, this is where all my agency is. So whatever actions I do right now, that’s what really, really matters, and I have to take full responsibility for that. And I think that’s what I’m getting to: accepting that we have a minimum of 3°C baked into the system. That is absolutely catastrophic. No one’s going to argue how catastrophic that is.

And yes, more is needed. And yes, it looks like all may be lost but I just have to keep coming back to that. What gets me out of bed in the morning, and what are my obligations? And when I come from that place, then I feel actually more passionately about this than ever before and certainly even before I wrote the book.

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The Benicia Independent ~ Eyes on the Environment / Benicia news & views