You would think it would be better not to show up at all next week in Europe for the 195-nation climate-change conference rather than to come promoting the burning of fossil fuels. But that’s exactly what the Trump regime plans to do at the latest session of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Bonn, Germany:
“It’s embarrassing,” said Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii, a Democrat. “After forfeiting international leadership on climate, the Trump White House is compounding their error with a silly stunt. Fossil fuel companies are not clean energy companies, and no amount of spin will change that.”
The “stunt” is a presentation on Nov. 13 titled “The Role of Cleaner and More Efficient Fossil Fuels and Nuclear Power in Climate Mitigation.” Featured will be speakers from Peabody Energy, previously Peabody Coal; NuScale Power, a nuclear engineering firm; and Tellurian, a liquefied natural gas exporter.
Even though the Environmental Protection Agency Chief Scott Pruitt, the Department of Energy Chief Rick Perry, and Trump himself reject the assessment of the vast majority of climate scientists that human activity is warming the planet, the U.S. message in Bonn isn’t likely to to include a flat-out denial of climate change or openly express the we-don’t-care attitude associated with Pr*@%!^#t Trump’s July trip to Europe. Unless Trump decides some Twitter jackassery is necessary.
These White House science deniers and many other paid and amateur “skeptics” of global warming keep altering the approach of their disinformation campaign. The line they appear to be ready to test in Germany is to concede that we must reduce the burning of fossil fuels but argue that we must accept these will still make up at least 40 percent of world energy use by 2050. Therefore, so their argument goes, we should stop treating them negatively and work to burn them efficiently and cleanly.
Never mind that the fossil-fuel industry has for decades fought fang-and-claw against every environmental effort to make energy extraction and use more efficient and cleaner.
Unlike fossil fuels, nuclear power has some support from environmental advocates, including from some people prominent in the climate-science field, most notably James Hansen, whose testimony in Congress nearly three decades ago was the first alert many Americans received regarding our baking of the planet. Its big advantage: zero CO2 emissions from operations. But nukes take a long time to build, have a low-risk-but-potentially-high-consequence impact from accidents, and are hugely expensive to construct and decommission.
For instance: Two reactors being built in Georgia right now could ultimately cost $27 billion before they are completed. That is versus an $11.5 billion estimate before ground was broken. Two reactors of the same model in South Carolina were abandoned this summer with construction just 40 percent complete. When building stopped, $9 billion had already been spent, and estimates put the total for completion at around $22.9 billion. This doubling of costs in both Georgia and South Carolina is one of several reasons nuclear has fallen out of favor, although there are still several plants being built, notably in China.
As my colleague Mark Sumner noted in his comprehensive look last month, the White House’s support for fossil fuels, particularly restoring the preeminence of coal, has a big problem—the market. Natural gas, with its lower (though disputed amount of) emissions, and wind and solar with their technological improvements and ever falling manufacturing and installation costs, have been digging away at coal’s dominance for nearly a decade.
Even though Germany itself has a coal problem, the Trump regime’s promotional stance is unlikely to be welcome in Bonn. Indeed, as says one of the presenters, Barry K. Worthington, executive director of the United States Energy Association, it will for him probably be a “horrible experience,” but one he says should be heard:
Saleemul Huq, director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development in Bangladesh, who helps advise the least developed countries in the United Nations climate talks, said fossil fuels were hurting, not helping, the world’s poorest nations.
“Any country or company continuing to champion further exploration for and mining of coal and even other fossil fuels from now on would be willfully carrying out a crime against humanity, and they would be held accountable,” he said.
We need an administration in Washington and in every state capital that holds these champions of lethal obsolescence accountable and supports policies that accelerate the end of the fossil-fuel era. By now, you have to be wearing thick blinders not to see that the encouraging transition to renewables is moving too slowly. And the Trump regime’s approach is worse than foot-dragging.