https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/01/first-fight-about-democrats-climate-green-new-deal/580543/
The Green New Deal Hits Its First Major Snag
A key activist group has quietly dropped its support for carbon-capture
technology, which scientists say will be crucial to fighting global warming.
Robinson Meyer
Jan 18, 2019
Not long ago, I found myself in the south of Greenland, in a tidy
cottage at the edge of a fjord, in the company of four scientists. We
were talking about sea-level rise when one of the younger scientists
asked whether I could settle a debate: Should we keep developing nuclear
power? He thought we should. I said that I didn’t have a strong opinion,
but it seemed like a good way to produce electricity without emitting
greenhouse gases. A lot of economists seemed to think it would be
essential to fighting climate change.
The most senior scientist in the room, who had spent his life studying
the fragility of Earth’s climate, cut in. You can’t be serious, he said.
We’d learn to deal with climate change in time. But nuclear power made
nuclear waste—and that was the worst, most poisonous stuff on the planet.
I thought of that moment this week, as the behind-the-scenes battle over
the Green New Deal erupted into public view for the first time. Since
its debut last year, the Green New Deal has become remarkably popular
among Democrats, reviving progressive dreams of a muscular federal
climate policy that also improves the lives of workers.
There’s just one wrinkle: There’s not a single, official Green New Deal.
Much like “Medicare for All,” “Green New Deal” refers more to a few
shared goals than to a completed legislative package. (The original New
Deal basically worked the same way.) Now a number of environmental
groups are trying to make those goals more specific. But they’re running
into a snag: The bogeymen that haunted old progressive climate policies
are suddenly back again. And the fights aren’t just about nuclear power.
Late last week, more than 600 environmental groups published a letter
laying out an environmental agenda for the new Congress. The groups did
not explicitly describe a Green New Deal, but their sought-after
legislative program looked and quacked a lot like one. They demanded an
all-renewable power grid, an end to fossil-fuel exports, and a ban on
gas-powered cars by 2040. “If we are to keep global warming below 1.5
degrees Celsius, we must act aggressively and quickly,” the letter said.
Of the hundreds of groups that issued the demands, one stood out: the
Sunrise Movement, a new, youth-led activism corps that flung the Green
New Deal into national prominence last year. More established
organizations—including Friends of the Earth, 350.org, and the Center
for Biological Diversity—also signed.
The letter seemed like the standard collection of progressive climate
goals, but on closer inspection it veered into new and controversial
territory, especially in the places where the groups said what they
would not support. They promised to “vigorously oppose” any legislation
that promoted nuclear power, hydroelectric power, and carbon capture and
storage, a still-experimental technology that could remove carbon
dioxide directly from the atmosphere. They also forbade Congress to use
any “market-based mechanism” to administer climate policy.
The absolute nature of these demands reportedly kept a number of
established green nonprofits—including the Sierra Club, the Audubon
Society, and the Environmental Defense Fund—from signing the letter. And
the Sunrise Movement has backed off the letter somewhat. Stephen
O’Hanlon, a spokesman for the group, told me that the letter to Congress
is “not the full vision of the Green New Deal. It is a set of climate
priorities for the new Congress.”
But the demands point to a broader shift for Sunrise—particularly around
the issue of carbon capture and storage. In November, when Sunrise first
demanded that Nancy Pelosi create a Green New Deal committee, it said
that any potential plan must fund “massive investment in the drawdown
and capture of greenhouse gases.” Sunrise seemed, in other words, to
endorse carbon-capture research.
But the final version of that same document omits capture at all: It
calls only for investment in the “drawdown of greenhouse gases.” This
change has not been previously reported, and it appears to have been
made quietly. Greg Carlock, who developed a different Green New Deal
plan for the left-wing think tank Data for Progress, told me he was not
aware of the change.
“Oh my goodness,” he said. “There is no scenario produced by the IPCC or
the UN where we hit mid-century decarbonization without some kind of
carbon capture.”
Indeed, the demand to back off carbon capture is at odds with climate
science. Sunrise’s explicit goal is to keep average global temperatures
from rising by 1.5 degrees Celsius. But the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change has not produced any projection that shows us hitting
that target without massively deploying carbon-capture technology. The
same goes for a two-degree goal.
Despite its scientific necessity, carbon-capture technology does not yet
exist at any real industrial scale. Yet research into carbon capture is
sporadic and poorly supported, especially in the academy. Because very
few tenured professors study carbon capture, very few graduate students
pursue it as a dissertation topic. This leads to a curious allocation of
resources. If I want to talk to an expert about Europe’s climatic
conditions in the 1650s, I could choose from any of several dozen
people. But if I want to talk to an authority on carbon capture, there
are only a small handful of respected experts.
Sunrise confirmed the change in a statement. “We want to ensure that the
Green New Deal doesn’t continue the practice of placing fossil-fuel
infrastructure in working-class communities and communities of color. We
want to strive toward forms of energy that don’t exacerbate these
inequities,” O’Hanlon said. “As it is defined right now, it is not clear
whether carbon capture and storage would do so.”
This new skepticism tracks with the views of other progressive groups.
Many see carbon capture as a way for oil companies to escape blame for
climate change and remain in business. President Donald Trump himself
has used the excuse of so-called clean coal to repeal EPA policies, even
though those facilities can still produce toxic air pollution. There’s
also real confusion (and overlap) between technology that sucks carbon
out of coal-fired smokestacks and technology that could scrub it from
the atmosphere. But this is why Sunrise’s original support was
intriguing: It seized the mantle of carbon capture for the left. It is
rare to see nearly the entire official scientific apparatus, in the
United States and around the world, call for the same policy—yet it has
done so about carbon capture. As long as Sunrise demanded “massive
investment” in carbon capture, it could accurately claim that its policy
took the side of science.
Sunrise says a more comprehensive plan will come out soon. If that plan
also opposes carbon capture, it will represent the left’s abdication of
a key battlefield. The American public should be arguing about who
should invent and control carbon-capture technology: private industry?
the federal government? the IPCC? Instead, the debate will be stuck on
the less practical question of whether it should exist at all.
The same goes for the letter’s other absolute demands. The ban on market
rules may make sense as a goal for this coalition: The Green New Deal,
after all, is supposed to represent the most anti-neoliberal climate
policy possible. But as David Roberts has written at Vox, the nuclear
and hydroelectric ban are more head-scratching. A wide range of research
suggests that Sunrise’s 1.5-degree goal is not possible with wind and
solar energy alone. It will require other “no carbon” forms of energy.
“It is firmly understood that going 100 percent renewable in 10 years is
technically impossible—like, physically and engineering-wise, it is
impossible,” Carlock told me. “You will make decisions you will later
regret.” If the goal is to tackle carbon emissions, then it can be
counterproductive to take other forms of no-carbon energy out of the
mix, he added, since there’s evidence it is replaced by fossil fuels.
Climate policy always comes down to two things: how you think an economy
should be run, and how important you think it is to fight climate
change. The Green New Deal excited young progressives because it told a
big, happy, forcefully pro-government story of an ideal economy—and then
it put fighting climate change at the very center of that story. Ruling
out anything but wind and solar energy moves the climate out of that
spotlight. It suggests activists are willing to trade carbon emissions
for other, local environmental risks.
There was one last reason it felt strange to see Sunrise reject other
forms of low-carbon energy: It is a youth movement, after all. Many
older environmentalists, raised on The China Syndrome and the Reagan-era
‘No Nukes’ campaign, have opposed nuclear power reflexively all their
lives. Climate-concerned Millennials, meanwhile, have been more willing
to grant its risks as preferable to a ruined climate. They have been
joined by some, but not all, mainstream green groups.
And this is why I thought of that moment in Greenland. The Green New
Deal gives the left an opportunity to put the urgency of climate change
at the absolute center of a social-democratic society. It gives the
public a chance to have new debates—about who should own carbon-capture
technology, about who should pay for the costs of climate change, and
about who should control the energy system writ large. If Millennial-led
groups automatically adopt the old fights of environmental Boomers, the
next few decades of climate policy could be doomed to look a lot like
the last few.