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Examining Nuclear Energy as Climate Option, Part I

In the press around the IPCC’s latest report of AR5, they have claimed that “Climate change is set to inflict severe, widespread, and irreversible impacts” on people and the natural world unless carbon emissions are cut sharply and rapidly. 1 Yet as many of us know well , this sharp and rapid cutting has not yet begun yet, instead every year the globe is adding 2% more CO2 emissions to the atmosphere than we do the previous year.2 We’re going backwards.

The question I am aiming here to address–as so many others are these days–is why we’re going backwards, and what we can do about it. The obvious reason is because fossil fuels reflect 87% of global energy consumption and we are still burning 2-3% more of each of the major fossil fuels every year.3,4 If there is a global energy transition underway, the results haven’t kicked in yet.

That isn’t to say that countries aren’t developing policies to try to manage this situation. About 59 countries currently have voluntary commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions,5 though some countries have been backtracking on those targets (Japan, Australia) and at least half a dozen others are showing indications of not meeting them (Canada, Mexico, US, Korea).6 Finally, it has been proposed that even if all the emissions reductions commitments at present were met we would be on track for a 3.7 degree world by 2100.7 A vice chair of the IPCC said about two weeks ago that even the EU, which has among the strongest emissions reductions targets, “are setting targets by what appears to be politically achievable rather than what is necessary to transform the way we make and use energy as the century unfolds.”8

The IPCC vice-chair’s critique goes straight to the question of whether energy transition approaches are adequate to the task. The IPCC itself has mostly focused on renewable energy as a solution. I recently conducted a little investigation into the various positions the IPCC has taken on nuclear, and found that they have done quite a lot to push RE solutions over the years, most notably in a special report released in 2011, Renewable Energy Sources and Climate Change Mitigation (SRREN).

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