Lower Carbon, Higher Autonomy

T here are twin energy crises emerging on opposite sides of the country.

In New England, a dearth of pipeline infrastructure and storage makes the region dependent on natural gas delivered through less-efficient channels — and in winter, our Yankee friends are forced to rely on liquified natural gas imported from as far away as Russia, a bizarre situation for citizens of a country that is, after all, the world’s largest petroleum producer. Californians had enjoyed better pipeline service, but a recent accident on the Kinder Morgan pipeline interrupted the flow of gas from the Permian Basin, leaving them more vulnerable to market convulsions.

Spot gas and futures for January gas deliveries are trading at a premium both in the northeast and in southern California. Gas prices at New England’s major gas hub are forecast to climb more than 430 percent over last winter. Prices elsewhere in the country are expected to more than double, driving up the cost of heating homes in the cold months. Last winter, some Texans unaccustomed to severe winter weather received an unwelcome surprise in the form of radically higher utility bills; this winter, much of the country could be in for the same thing.

But let’s keep spinning that globe for a minute.

In France, President Emmanuel Macron is all-in on nuclear power. While he is frustrated by the pigheadedly anti-nuclear position of the Germans, he has big ideas for his own country, where the great majority of electricity — more than 70 percent — already comes from nuclear generation. Macron has an ambitious green agenda. And while it includes some real pie-in-the-sky stuff (low-carbon airplanes), some of it is eminently practical: building out France’s already-extensive nuclear infrastructure with new mini-reactors, which are safer and more efficient than traditional nuclear plants, and leaning on that clean electricity to produce clean fuel in the form of hydrogen.

“Energy” is a category that includes so many disparate things as to be only modestly useful. One obvious and urgent issue is that different applications demand different energy sources and fuels: Solar power is great for a lot of things (one of them is powering equipment on natural-gas wells), but it isn’t very useful for transportation. Nuclear power is a great way to provide electricity to a city, but, unless you are building a nuclear-powered military submarine (sorry about that, France!), it isn’t very useful for moving people or cargo. Nuclear can make some contribution there: If you have coal-fired power plants, then your “clean” electric car is really a coal-powered car, whereas truly clean electric cars (or clean electric home-heating, etc.) require equally clean electricity generation.

But that only goes so far.

What go a lot farther are trains and oceangoing cargo ships, both of which can be powered with hydrogen. And there are several low-carbon methods for producing hydrogen — but if you want to produce huge quantities of the stuff with little or no greenhouse-gas emissions, then nuclear power is the best way to go. The Germans prefer to get “green” hydrogen from wind farms and solar installations located at distant sites in Africa and Asia. The French would very much like to convert them to “pink hydrogen” (which is what they call the H₂ that comes via nuclear power) generated within Europe. The French position there is the more sensible one.

But, of course, what is sensible is not usually what governs energy decisions or other major economic decisions. One of the reasons New England is reliant upon natural gas imported from exotic locales is that infamous relic, the Jones Act, which gives U.S.-made ships a monopoly on port-to-port service within the United States, legally excluding 98 percent of the ships that serve U.S. trade from domestic service. We could supply New England’s natural gas on ships if not for a law protecting the people of New England from the menace of low prices and abundance.

The Biden administration is, of course, very much in favor of the Jones Act, yet another of its imbecilic continuations of Trump-era crony-capitalism. The Biden administration is against new pipelines for natural gas, even though that relatively clean source of fuel has been critical to keeping down the U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions associated with generating electricity. And the most the Biden administration can manage on the nuclear front is a halfhearted admission that shutting down our existing nuclear plants would make it impossible to meet the president’s professed climate goals.

In a less poisoned political climate, there would be fruitful opportunities here for genuine bipartisan cooperation. Progressives say they want lower greenhouse-gas emissions and big infrastructure investments. Conservatives want infrastructure projects, too — including new pipelines — and like the idea of a heavy-industry economy sustained by cheap and plentiful labor. Everybody says they want more manufacturing jobs and the high wages that go with them. And while the Europeans may talk more often and more openly about their fear of economic coercion and their desire for greater “strategic autonomy,” those concerns are also on the American radar, especially vis-à-vis China. There are some good responses to all that: Build the nuclear power plants, build the pipelines, free the ports and open up our internal trade lanes, produce the hydrogen, be the country that builds the hydrogen-powered ships and trains.

(I know, I know — but progressives love trains. Throw them a bone.)

That is what Macron hopes to do in France, and best of luck to him. But France is not the United States. We should, of course, collaborate and coordinate with our European and British allies to a very considerable extent, something the Biden administration has been catastrophically ham-fisted in attempting. But a France that goes all-in on modernized nuclear and hydrogen changes France, and maybe the European Union. A United States that does that changes the world.

In this, as in much else, the United States has been in no small part a victim of its own success. The main obstacle to developing nuclear power in the United States in the past decades has been cheap energy. With prices of hydrocarbon energy low and supplies abundant, the particular challenges of building and operating nuclear plants have made them a relatively unattractive proposition. We have neglected our ports and our supply chains for much the same reason: because we could afford to.

Or so we thought.

The Biden administration has set a goal of cutting U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions by 50 percent by 2030. That probably isn’t going to happen. But we could, if we were so inclined, get more than halfway there on nuclear power alone, since electricity generation produces a little more than a quarter of our current emissions. Progressives have a climate agenda, and conservatives have a prosperity-and-autonomy agenda.

In a sane world, that could be the basis of a deal — a very big deal, indeed.