Ted Nordhaus

An anti-establishment candidate for his party’s presidential nomination proposes to scrap the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, phase out the nation’s largest source of zero-carbon power, and implement policies that will offer the nation’s dying coal industry a second life. Donald Trump, you say? Ted Cruz? Hardly. The candidate in question is Bernie Sanders, and he promises to do so with the support of some of the most prominent environmentalists in the country.

Sanders has fashioned himself a climate crusader. He has been officially endorsed by Friends of the Earth Action and is supported by 350.org founder Bill McKibben, Naomi Klein and Mark Ruffalo. Sanders talks tough on the environment, promising to investigate ExxonMobil for its crimes against the climate, keep fossil fuels in the ground, reduce America’s carbon emissions 80% by 2050 and transition the country rapidly to an electricity grid powered by wind, solar and geothermal energy.

But a careful look at Sanders' actual proposals tells a different story. He proposes to retire the nation’s nuclear reactors, which are the nation’s largest source of zero-carbon energy and generate 20% of the nation’s electricity and 60% of its zero-carbon power. Doing so would result in power sector emissions rising over 20% by 2050.

Sanders has vowed if elected to rewrite the Obama administration's Clean Power Plan (which primarily restricts coal use) to make it tougher on natural gas. Doing so would gut the rule. Regulation of carbon emissions from the power sector under provisions of the Clean Air Act depends almost entirely on the Environmental Protection Agency’s determination that cheap natural gas generation is the “best available” alternative to coal power plants.

This is unprecedented. Historically, the “best available technology” designation has been reserved for pollution control technologies, scrubbers and the like, which could be affixed to the end of a smoke stack. Designating natural gas plants as the best available technology — essentially requiring utilities to generate less electricity from coal and more from gas instead of being limited solely to requiring that coal plants operate more efficiently — has allowed the administration to establish much more ambitious emissions reduction requirements and is one of the central provisions that legal opponents have challenged.

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Were the EPA forced by the Supreme Court or a Sanders administration to treat gas plants less favorably, its ability to mandate significant carbon emissions reductions under the Clean Air Act would be severely restricted.

Even without the Clean Power Plan, coal’s share of national electricity generation has been in steep decline for over a decade, dropping from 49% in 2007 to 33% in 2015, due largely to hydraulic fracturing, which has flooded the market with cheap, lower carbon natural gas. Thanks to that development, in April of last year electric power sector emissions in the United States reached their lowest level since 1988, almost 50% off their 2007 peak at the dawn of the shale gas revolution. But Sanders would do away with that too, flatly stating in a recent debate that he opposed fracking under all circumstances (predictably, Hillary Clinton has responded with her own get-tough-on-fracking rhetoric, but her carefully parsed language suggests that she, at least, understands the importance of cheap gas to the success of the Clean Power Plan).

Sanders claims that with natural gas production scaled back dramatically, renewable energy will take up the slack. But when natural gas prices briefly spiked back in 2013, that’s not what happened. Instead, coal came back with a vengeance. From January 2012 to January 2014, coal generation increased by more than 20%.

That’s also what happened when the U.S. stopped building nuclear power plants after Three Mile Island. Anti-nuclear environmentalists said we’d get renewables and energy efficiency, but what we got instead was more coal and gas. If that seems like ancient history, it’s also what happened when Germany and Japan shuttered their nuclear plants after the Fukushima accident in 2011.

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Sanders claims that his plan will reduce emissions by establishing a revenue neutral carbon tax, eliminating subsidies for fossil fuels and increasing them for renewable energy. A carbon tax would no doubt do some good. But independent analysis by the Stanford Energy Modeling Forum suggests that Sanders' carbon tax proposal would establish a price on carbon one-third of what would be necessary to achieve the 80% reduction in emissions that he claims. Even so, what Sanders proposes would establish a price on carbon emissions above that which a heavily Democratic Senate was unable even to bring to a vote back in 2010. Political revolution or no, there is little reason to think that the Senate will be any more likely to increase taxes on America’s energy economy in 2017.

Sanders' promises with regard to fossil fuel and renewable energy subsidies are similarly empty. Eliminating fossil fuel subsidies might cut energy company profits but won’t make much of a dent in America’s dependence on fossil fuels. And wind and solar energy are already heavily subsidized, with federal, state and ratepayer subsidies picking up 50% or more of their real installed cost in many cases. Per unit of energy produced in the USA, renewable energy already gets 25 times the subsidy that fossil fuels receive, so cutting fossil fuel subsidies won't fundamentally change energy economics.

In this year of frustration with politics as usual, it is perhaps not so surprising that Sanders has seen little downside to promising his green supporters the moon. Indeed, Sanders’ implausible plans and casual disregard for the Obama administration's hard-fought progress is further evidence of the growing disconnect between our politics and reality.

Ted Nordhaus is a founder of the Breakthrough Institute and co-author of "An Ecomodernist Manifesto."

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