Sen. Elizabeth Warren benefits from the myth that she’s some sort of policy whiz, but her pledge during Wednesday night’s climate town hall to eliminate all nuclear power flies in the face of the advice of climate experts, who have argued that nuclear power needs to increase significantly to move society away from carbon-based energy and avert catastrophe.
Not only did Warren pledge to prevent the building of new power plants, but she also said she would phase out all nuclear power by 2035 and replace it with renewables.
The International Energy Agency has concluded that meeting the goal of keeping warming to no greater than 2 degrees Celsius would require doubling global nuclear energy generation capacity by 2050. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is often cited as the leading authority by liberals, reached a similar conclusion.
A 2015 article posted by Scientific American quotes Harvard’s Robert Stavins, one of the authors of the IPCC report, as saying, “It is virtually inconceivable that the 2 degree or 450 parts per million target as a cap can be achieved in this century without a variety of factors, among which are substantially greater reliance on nuclear power than current trajectories would suggest.”
In the United States, the math is pretty clear.
Nuclear power is by far the largest source of non-carbon electricity in the U.S., currently generating 19.3% of what we use. In contrast, all renewables (hyrdoelectric, wind, solar, etc.) combined to generate just 17.1%.
Any realistic path to weaning us off of carbon-based sources of energy would have to involve increasing nuclear generation. Phasing it out makes that goal significantly harder. Suddenly, instead of having to replace the remaining 63.5% of our energy sources, Warren would have to come up with a way to replace 83% of our energy sources. Essentially, renewables would have to more than double just to make up for the lost nuclear power.
What’s more, opposing nuclear power in order to pander to a faction of the Left that has an irrational fear of the energy source signals that Warren is much less concerned about the threat posed by climate change than she lets on. If it’s a true emergency, in which people are getting shamed for eating burgers and drinking out of plastic straws, then drastically increasing the most proven source of non-carbon energy should be a no-brainer.
