I spent much of my law career fighting nuclear proliferation in New Jersey. But the ongoing reliance on fossil fuels puts our state, our country and our planet in danger
By R. WILLIAM POTTER, writing in NJ Spotlight
By now, everyone but the most ardent climate-change deniers recognizes the “inconvenient truth” of global warming and climate change. But it’s more than merely a truth; it’s an “existential threat” to the planet and its 9+ billion inhabitants who have less than a decade to mend their ways and prevent the worst consequences caused by relying primarily on fossil fuels.
That threat is recounted in gruesome detail in “The Uninhabitable Earth — Life After Warming,” by journalist David Wallace-Wells. He quotes peer-reviewed studies warning that “at 2 degrees (of warming) the ice sheets (covering the poles) will begin their collapse, major cities will become unlivable and heat waves will kill thousands each summer … And this is our best-case scenario.”
What about the worst case? With continued reliance on burning fossil fuels — natural gas, coal, petroleum — the world will heat up by 6 to 8 degrees, and “the oceans would swell 200 feet higher, flooding two-thirds of the world’s major cities …” Much of New Jersey would be swallowed up by a combination of sea-level rise and land subsidence.
Climate-change deniers insist the evidence is inconclusive, despite thousands of scientists independently attesting to the looming threats. They also argue that we cannot afford to make major changes in our energy systems, such as those proposed in the Green New Deal — which they insist will lead us down the slippery slope to a Venezuelan-style socialism.
The climate-change deniers are not only wrong, but also delusional. We are in the midst of a moral equivalent of war, and each of us must pitch in and do his or her part to stave off the worst of the truly catastrophic climate-change scenarios.
The ZEC part of the puzzle
Now pending before the Board of Public Utilities — following the enactment of the “Zero Emission Certificates Act” — is a petition by the Public Service Enterprise Group to continue to charge consumers roughly $300 million a year above the market rate for electricity fueled by natural gas rather than power from PSEG’s three nuclear units. Part of their argument is that Salem 1, Salem 2 and Hope Creek emit zero greenhouse gases.
In its petition, the company asserts that the nuclear plants cannot compete with natural gas on a price-only basis. Hence, they will be shut down and decommissioned unless the BPU awards the company more zero-emission certificates (ZECs) as compensation for the myriad societal benefits conferred by continued operation of these nuclear units.
No doubt, $300 million sounds like a lot of money. But it’s worth it and well spent if it helps us avoid increased reliance on natural gas. That “cheap” alternative is pumped into the state from the fracking fields of Pennsylvania, which emit methane, a greenhouse gas that is a staggering 86 times more damaging to the environment than CO2 emissions from a coal-fired power plant — as measured over an equally staggering 20-year period.
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