Fluent Essays

Opinion I Is There a Nuclear Option for Stopping Climate Change? ... https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/26/opinion/climate-change-nucl.. I of 4 gJ,t New IJorklimes https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/26/opinion/climate-change-nuclear.html SPENCER BOKAT-LINDELL Is There a Nuclear Option for Stopping Climate Change? Aug. 26, 2021 fll i\ By Spencer Bokat-l.lndell \ 'J Mr. Bokat-Lindell is a staff editor. This article is part of the Debatable newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Humanity's failure to avert the crisis of a warming climate is sometimes framed as a grand technological problem: For centuries, countries relied on fossil fuels to industrialize their economies and generate wealth, and it was only in recent years that alternative ways of powering a society, like solar and wind energy, became viable. But when it comes to electricity, at least, that story isn't true. Today, the United States gets 60 percent of its electricity from fossil fuels and just 20 percent from renewables. The final 20 percent comes from nuclear power, a technology that has existed since the 1950s, produces no carbon dioxide and has killed far fewer people than fossil fuels. Decarbonizing the electric grid is certainly not the only challenge climate change poses, but it is the central one. And the Biden administration has said the United States needs to meet it by 2035. Should nuclear power be playing a bigger role in the transition? Here's what people are saying. The case for going nuclear Its proponents often point out that nuclear power is responsible for the fastest decarbonization effort in history. In the 1970s, France embarked on a sweeping, centrally planned expansion of its nuclear power industry to break its dependence on foreign oil Over the next decade, it managed to expand its economy even as it cut its emissions at a rate that no other country has achieved since. Today, France derives 70 percent of its electricity from nuclear power. Why shouldn't the United States follow suit? "A rapid increase in nuclear energy would slash emissions from the power sector, as the French example makes clear:• The Atlantic's Robinson Meyer wrote in 2019. "Even today, France's carbon density - its carbon emissions per capita - ranks well below that of Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States." While renewable energy has made enormous strides in recent years, nuclear power still has distinct advantages. Solar and wind farms, for example, take up much more space than nuclear plants, and they provide power only as the weather allows. In part for that reason, several recent studies have found that utilities could achieve 80 percent zero- carbon electricity by 2030 using today's renewable energy technology, but cleaning up the last 20 percent will prove more difficult There are several proposed ways of solving renewable energy's storage problem - including huge battery arrays and hydrogen fuel - but those technologies aren't yet up to the task, my colleague Brad Plumer wrote last month. From a public health perspective, nuclear power is also much safer than fossll fuels, Joshua S. Goldstein, Staff an A. Qvist and Steven Pinker argued in The Times in 2019. According to one study published this year, air pollution from fossil fuels killed a staggering 8.7 million people in 2018. By contrast, Goldstein, Qvist and Pinker noted that in 60 years 8/27/2021 , 11 :15 AM Opinion j ls There a Nuclear Option for Stopping Climate Change? .. . https ://www.nytimes.com/2021 /08/26/ opinion/ climate-change-nucl ... 2 of4 of nuclear power, only three accidents have raised public alarm, and just one - Chernobyl - directly caused any deaths. What about nuclear waste, which can remain radioactive for tens of thousands of years? Compared with climate change, it's a much easier environmental problem to solve, they wrote. More than 90 percent of spent fuel can be recycled, and that which can't could be entombed in repositories deep underground, as is done in Finland. In 1987, Congress settled on plans to build a national nuclear waste repository in Nevada, but local, state and federal opposition have thwarted the project for decades. As a result, America's nuclear plants keep their waste on site in steel and concrete casks that were not intended for permanent storage. But it doesn't have to be this way. "If the American public and politicians can face real threats and overcome unfounded fears," Goldstein, Qvist and Pinker argued, "we can solve humanity's most pressing challenge and leave our grandchildren a bright future of climate stability and abundant energy." Debatable Agree to disagree, or disagree better? Broaden your perspective with sharp arguments on the most pressing issues of the week. Get it sent to Y-Ourinbox. Why nuclear power isn't a silver bullet Nuclear power may be safer than the public believes, but the public's beliefs matter a great deal in a democracy. Solar and wind power are extremely popular with Americans, but nuclear power is viewed unfavorably, with more people opposing its expansion than supporting it. Part of that opposition surely owes to the fact that when nuclear does fail, it can fail spectacularly: The 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan didn't kill anyone directly, but it led to the displacement of 164,000 people, thousands of evacuation-related deaths and a decades-long cleanup operation that will cost an estimated $200 billion. After public confidence in nuclear power plummeted, Japan closed nearly all of its nuclear plants, causing its emissions to rise. Renewables pose no comparable safety risk and are therefore deemed much less vulnerable to rollback. Another major obstacle for nuclear power is its price: Nuclear plants cost billions of dollars to build, malting them one of the most expensive sources of electricity. Solar panels, by contrast, now generate the cheapest electricity in history - so cheap that new solar projects, building costs included, can now compete with existing nuclear plants. "What is remarkable about these trends," a report on the nuclear industry found last year, "is that the costs of renewables continue to fall due to incremental manufacturing and installation improvements while nuclear, despite over half a century of industrial experience, continues to see costs rising." That explains in part why France's reliance on nuclear power remains such an outlier. "No country has managed to develop a safe, successful, economically competitive nuclear power industry in a market-based environment:' Naomi Oreskes, a Harvard historian, said last year. "This tells us that nuclear power is unlikely to be successful in market- based economies. It may work in China, but it is unlikely to work in most other places." Nuclear power proponents say its economic problems can be solved. Putting a price on carbon pollution so that fossil fuels reflect their true environmental cost, for example, could help make nuclear power competitive with natural gas, as could advances in reactor designs. Last year, the Department of Energy announced that it would fund the development of two such designs, including one championed by Bill Gates. But carbon taxes have so far proved a political nonstarter in the United States, and an analysis from the Union of Concerned Scientists in March found that so-called advanced reactor designs "do not offer obvious improvements" 8/27/2021, 11:15 A~ IIUU I l:S I ncn; U 1'11 U\ilCi:U vpLlUII lUJ owpp1111, \,,11111.i:lLC \,,11'1111,C ! ... nu.p,;11www.ny11mes.com,m.lJ /Ulf.lolopm10D1clnnate-change over current technology, could pose novel safety risks and will likely take decades to achieve commercial viability. Advances in battery technology that could solve the long-duration storage problem of renewables, on the other hand, appear closer on the horizon. Perhaps most important, nuclear power plants take much longer to build than renewable energy projects. Since the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, the construction time for most reactors in the United States has exceeded 10 years. Allison Macfarlane notes in Foreign Affairs. If the United States hopes to meet its emissions reduction targets, it can't afford to wait that long. "We need strong government support of noncarbon-emitting energy technologies that are ready to be deployed today, not 10 or 20 years from now:' she writes. "We have run out of time." The case for keeping our options open A sweeping revival of nuclear power in the United States seems unlikely at the moment: Ywe of America's nuclear reactors have been scheduled for retirement this year, which would set a record, and just two new ones are under construction. Both are running years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget. But many climate experts who are not especially bullish about the future of nuclear power say that the United States should still take pains to keep its existing stock of nuclear plants up and running. Why? As Leah Stokes, a climate policy expert at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told my colleague Ezra Klein in February, in countries where nuclear power has been phased out - such as Japan, Belgium and Germany- fossil fuels tend to pick up the slack. "That is a terrible, terrible outcome," Stokes said. 3 of4 I ! I I I Dr. Leah Stokes w @leahstokes In Germany, carbon-free nuclear power will close by 2022, while extremely dirty coal plants will stay open until 2038. And many call this country a climate leader. l '\ This is why shutting down safe nuclear plants early is so , problematic. \ I. ! I I I : I I I I I \ I l I I How Hard Is It to Quit Coal? For Germany. 18 Years and U4 Billion (Publi ... I The 18-year time frame sllows how costly and politically complicated it i5 \ to leave the wor1d's dirtiest fossil fuel In the ground. l <9 nytimes.com - ----- -- -- -- - - --·- .. I 12:11 PM • Jan 17, 2020 CD I I O 1 .2K O 60 8 Copy link to Tweet ( ________ ....:1'..:..:.weet=--::..:..;yo:...:..u_ r_rep..:..l..:..y ____ __ ~ ) 8/27/2021, 11:15 Al\ Opinion I Is There a Nuclear Option for Stopping Climate Change? ... https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/26/opinion/clirnate-clumge-nuc Theoretically, the United States could try to phase out nuclear power and fossil fuels at once, as Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren proposed during their presidential campaigns. But doing so before 2035 would make a monumental challenge even harder: According to one estimate, decarbonizing America's electric grid would cost about half a trillion dollars more if nuclear power is abandoned. Such complications explain why many climate experts decline to take a hard stance on nuclear power. "It's absurd to be 'pronuclear' or 'antinuclear' on an ideological/identity basis," David Roberts, an energy and climate journalist. said last year. "The world should build whatever carbon-free options are fastest and (with all costs considered) cheapest Nuclear doesn't currently fit that bill, but new reactor designs might change that If so, build them; if not. don't" Do .YOU have a point of view we missed? Email us at [email protected] Please note your name, age and location in your response, which may be included in the next newsletter. Is one of your favorite places In your country being affected by climate change? Describe that place - a beloved campsite, the levee you run on, a local market, the woods you explored as a child - and tell us in a brief voice mall why you love it by calling 1-405-804-1422. What does this place mean to you, how is it changing and how do you feel seeing it reshaped by environmental issues? We are interested in hearing from the global community. Please include your country code with your phone number In your message so that we can reach you with any questions. We may use a portion of your message in a future article. READ MORE "Should America Go Nuclear?" [The New York Times] "Indian Point Is Shutting Down. That Means More Fossil Fuel." [The New York Times] "Environmentalists and Nuclear Power? It's Complicated" [The New York Times] "Laser Fusion Experiment Unleashes an Energetic Burst of Optimism" [The New York Times] "'Advanced' Nuclear Reactors? Don't Hold Your Breath" [Scientific American] Spencer Bokat-Lindell is a staff editor In the Opinion section. @bokatllndell 8/2 7/2 02 1, 11 : 15 M pinion I What Covid Vaccine Supply Tells Us About International... https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/06/opinion/covid-vaccine-suppl. Qtbc New ff ork Qtimcs https :/ /www.nytimes.com/2021/08/ 06/ opinion/ covid-vaccine- supply-chai n-bown-bollyky. html I of7 Wonking Out: What Vaccine Supply Tells Us About International Trade rt By Paul Krugman Opinion columnist Aug.6,2021 This article is a wonky edition of Paul Krugman's free newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it. Paul Krugman Get a better understanding of the economy - and an even deeper look inside Paul's mind. Get it sent to your inbox· For many of us, Chad Bown of the Peterson Institute for International Economics - a boutique think tank specializing in, duh, international economics - has become the go-to guy for current developments in trade policy. His work tracking the evolution of Donald Trump's trade war was invaluable. Now he has a highly informative new paper with Thomas Bollyky on the vaccine supply chain. I won't lie: There's a lot of detail, and the paper is fairly heavy going. But it's full of useful details, and it also, I'd argue, tells us some interesting things about the nature of world trade in the 21st century. 8/8/2021. I :53 PM )pinion I What Covid Vaccine Supply Tells Us About International... https:/ /www.nytimes.com/202 l/08/06/opinion/covid-vaccine-suppl.. One thing that caught my eye - probably not the most important thing, but one close to my heart - is that the story of global vaccine production demonstrates the continuing relevance of the so-called New Trade Theory, or as some now call it, the "old New Trade Theory." Background: Here's a sample graphic from Bown and Bollyky, showing what's involved in the production of the Pfizer vaccine: b. Partners and facilities involved in Pflzer/BloNTech vaccine production as of June 30, 2021 ; Lipid production ; Drug substance and ; FIii and finish ; Dellvery US firms Avanti Polar lipids, Alabama AMRI, New York Pfizer, Connecticut European firms Croda. Snaith. UK Polyrnun, Klosterneuburg. Austria Evonik, Hanau, Germany Evonik, Dossenheim. Germany Merck KGaA, ' Darmstadt. Germany , drug product formulation I (Firms handle different parts or production process) us firms Pfizer Pfizer Missouri Massachusetts Exelead Pfizer Indiana Michigan European firms BioNTech Mainz, Germany BloNTech Marburg, Germany Pfizer Puurs, Belgium Pfizer, Dublin, Ireland Dermapharm, I Dermapharm, Brehna, R.einbek, Germany Germany AGC Biologics, Heidelberg, Germany US firms Pfizer, Michigan Pfizer. Kansas European firms Pfizer, Puurs, Belgium Siegfried, Hameln, Germany Delpharm, Saint-Remy, France Sanofl, Frankfurt, Germany Novartis, Stein, Switzerland Thermo Fisher, Monza, Italy I Source: Constructed by the authors based on firm announcements and media reports. See table A.l In the appendix for timing. The shots made round the world. Peterson Institute for International Economic Distribution Producing these vaccines is evidently a complicated process, involving facilities in many locations, presumably implying a lot of cross-border shipments of vaccine ingredients. Notably, in Pfizer's case all these facilities are in the United States and Western Europe, which is typical across pharma firms, although other companies have a few facilities in Brazil and India. So where do vaccine supply chains fit into the theory of international trade? inion l What Covid Vaccine Supply Tells Us About International... https://www.nytimes.com/2021 /08/06/opinion/covid-vaccine-suppl ... of7 If you've ever taken an economics course, you probably learned about the theory of comparative advantage, which says that countries trade to take advantage of their differences. The classic original example, from the early- 19th-century economist David Ricardo, involved the exchange of English cloth for Portuguese wine. Comparative advantage is a powerful, illuminating theory - especially because it shows why countries export goods they're relatively good at producing even if they're less productive in those industries than potential competitors. Bangladesh is a low-productivity nation across the board ( although it has been improving), but its productivity disadvantage is less pronounced in apparel than in other industries, so it has become a major clothing exporter. In the 1960s and 1970s, however, a number of economists began suggesting that comparative advantage was an incomplete story. World trade had been growing over time, but much of that growth involved trade between countries that didn't seem very different - the United States and Canada, for example, or the nations of Western Europe. Furthermore, what these countries were selling to each other looked pretty similar: There was a lot of "intra-industry" trade like the large-scale, two-way trade in autos and related goods across the U.S.-Canada border. What was going on? A few economists had long noted that comparative advantage wasn't the only possible reason for international trade. Countries might also trade because production of some goods involves increasing returns - there are advantages to large-scale production, which creates an incentive to concentrate production in a few countries and export those goods to other countries. Automotive trade between the United States and Canada was a classic example: After the countries established a free-trade agreement for autos in 1965, North American car companies achieved economies of scale by limiting the range of items produced in Canada, 8/8/2021. I :53 PM 1 ion I What Covid Vaccine Supply Tells Us About International... bttps://www.nytimes.com/2021 /08/06/opinion/covid-vaccine-supi exporting these goods and importing other items from the United States. But if trade reflected increasing returns rather than country characteristics, which countries would end up producing which goods? It might be largely random, the result of accidents of history. There was, however, remarkably little economic literature on increasing- returns trade until the late 1970s. Economists don't like to talk about stuff they find hard to model, and trade models with increasing returns tended to be messy and confusing. Eventually, however, some economists came up with clever ways to cut through the confusion, in papers like this 1980 piece in the American Economic Review: , of 7 Scale Economies, Product Differentiation, and the Pattern of Trade By PAUL KrtuoMAN• For SOfllC time now there hu been oon- siderablc skepticism about the abiUty of comparative COit theory to explain the ae> tua1 pattern of international trade. Neither the oxtensive trade among the indU1trial countries. nor the prevalence in this trade of tw&Way excb•ngf'.S of differentiated prod- ucts, make much sense in tenns of standard theory. As a result, many people have oon- duded that a new framework for analyung ttade is needed.1 The main elements of such a framework-economics of scale, the pos- sibility of product differentiation. and im· perfect competition- have been discussed from trade even ir the economies have iden- tical tastes, technology, and factor Clldow• men~ This basic model or trade is pre- sented in Section I. It is clotely related to a model I have developed elsewhore; in this paper a somewhat more restrictive formula,. tion of demand is used to make the analysis in later sections easier. The rest or the paper is concerned with two extensions of the basic model. In Sec• ~on II, I examine the effect of transporta- tton cost&, and show that countries with larger domestic m.arkets will, other things equal, have higher wage rates. Section 111 Niftiness is necessary. American Economic Review (I'll note, with all due immodesty, that the journal would later name this one of the 20 top papers published in its first century of operation.) God, I was young! pinion I What Covid Vaccine Supply Tells Us About International... I https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/06/opinion/c6vid-vaccine-suppl ... 5 of 7 Anyway, history has a sense of humor. No sooner had economists come up with nifty models of trade between similar countries, driven by economies of scale, than the world economy took a hard turn away from that kind of trade toward trade between dissimilar countries driven by things like large differences in wages. World trade exploded from the mid-1980s until around 2008, a process sometimes called hyperglobalization: Merchandise trade(% of GDP) World Trade Organization, and World Bank GDP estimates. License : CC BY-4.0 0 Li ne Bar Map 'Ill Globalization gets hyper. world Bank < Share (D Details m LABEL And where trade growth in the '60s and '70s had largely involved advanced economies selling stuff to each other, hyperglobalization involved a surge in exports of manufactured goods from relatively low-wage developing 8/8/2021 , 1:53 PM Opinion I What Covid Vaccine Supply Tells Us About International... https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/06/opinion/covid-vaccine-suppl ... 6of 7 countries: 5 4 3 2 1 0 Developing country manufactures exports as% of world GDP 1985 2008 Everything old was new again. World Bank I So we had a New Trade Theory, but the new trade we were actually getting was much better explained by, well, old trade theory. So what does all this have to do with vaccine supply chains? Well, as I already noted, vaccine ingredients are mainly produced in advanced countries - countries that are very similar in their education levels, overall level of technological competence and more. So why wasn't each advanced country producing the whole ensemble of vaccine-related inputs? Here's what Bown and Bollyky say: 8/8/2 02 1. 1:53 PM )n I What Covid Vaccine Supply Tells Us About International... https :/ /www. nytim es .com/2021/08/06/ opinion/ covid-vaccine-suppl ... "The business model that much of the pharmaceutical industry had shifted toward over the previous 25 years involved fragmentation. As tariffs and other trade barriers had fallen globally, information and communications technology (I CT) developed, shipping and logistics efficiency increased, and protection of intellectual property rights steadily improved. The fact that trade could play a greater role in distributing pharmaceutical products globally meant that companies could operate fewer plants but at a larger scale." (Emphasis mine.] Hey, it's New Trade Theory in action! And it sure looks as if there was a lot of random historical contingency determining national roles in the pattern of specialization. Europe was initially very dependent on Britain's exports of lipids - but I doubt that there's something about British culture that makes the country especially good at lipids. It's just one of those accidents that play a big role in economic geography. Is there a moral to this story? There's been a lot of backlash against globalization over the past decade, to some extent justified: Advocates of free-trade agreements oversold their benefits and understated the disruptions they might cause. But the case of vaccine production illustrates a positive side of globalization we tend to forget. These miracle vaccines are incredibly complex products that would have been hard to develop and produce in any one country, even one as large as the United States. A global market made it possible to deliver all the specialized inputs that are saving thousands of lives as you read this. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: [email protected] Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and /nstagram . Paul Krugman has been an Opinion columnist since 2000 and is also a Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He won the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on international trade and economic geography. @Paul Krugman 8/8/202 1, I :53 PM [!¥ (' 'JU~t • r;, t L eh lit N MMCl&AIS f tlllLl'.-UU