I composed this essay over much of 2026, as I was researching Beyond Vogtle — my new study (co-authored with James Boucher) of U.S. nuclear costs from the 1980s post-Three Mile Island reactors to the Vogtle 3 and 4 units completed earlier in this decade. It traces my journey from nuclear power doubter to proponent.

The story is both general and personal: what was changing in the wide world of nuclear power, energy policy and climate; and how I regarded those changes. I hope this mode of story-telling resonates with a wide audience and also provide a backdrop to “Beyond Vogtle.”

I’ve divided it into three parts on account of its length.

This installment begins at the big Washington rally called to mark the Three Mile Island reactor accident, and covers the subsequent withering of nuclear dread, the advent of virtually always-on reactor operation, and nuclear power’s stature as the least carbon-emitting energy supply technology. 

Installment #2 begins with the failure (to date) of carbon tax advocacy — “A Climate Cure No One Wanted” — and continues with the closure of Indian Point and the concurrent slow dissolve of my dream that renewable energy could do it all.

The third and final installment begins with a slight detour in which I contrast the appalling human damage from automobility with nuclear power’s increasingly remote dangers, and then return to energy policy with a fresh way to regard nuclear power’s potential contribution to decarbonizing U.S. grids.

Thank for reading. Also, be sure to download and read my new, richly detailed report, Beyond Vogtle: What History Tells Us About the Cost of New Nuclear, co-authored with James Boucher. It’s a fresh, empirically based way of looking at the cost to build nuclear plants in the U.S. Journalist Alexander Kaufman’s reviewed it earlier today for Heatmap in a scintillating story, Nuclear Is Cheaper Than We Think It is.

  — C.K.

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

I’m pro-nuclear power. Big time.

I don’t just want the U.S. to keep running its 95 extant reactors. I want us to build more. Lots more. Hundreds.

I’m not alone. Public opinion is shifting toward nuclear power. But I came to that conclusion after spending years arguing the other side. From the mid-1970s to the late 1980s, I published a raft of critical analyses that got a good deal of public attention ― and even some traction within the nuclear industry itself. My core argument was that the cost of building nuclear plants was rising much faster than the costs of competing sources of energy. The main driver, I said, was a cascade of safety-requirement changes triggered by widespread fears of reactor accidents.

That work earned me a speaking spot at the massive May 6, 1979 rally in Washington demanding a halt to reactor construction in the wake of the March 28 meltdown at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. In the weeks before the rally, my research was cited in hundreds of news stories. At the Capitol, I stood alongside consumer advocate Ralph Nader, the leading figure in the U.S. antinuke movement; actress Jane Fonda, whose new film, “The China Syndrome,” had eerily foretold the Three Mile Island meltdown; and folk-rock icon Jackson Browne. I told the cheering throng that nuclear power was finished.

Cost overruns and canceled reactor projects were putting billions of dollars on the line, and I spent much of the next decade in courtrooms all over the country, explaining patiently to utility regulators why investors, not customers, should bear those losses. I eventually moved on to other public policy work, sparking big-city bicycling and helping bring congestion pricing to New York. But I kept watching nuclear power and the broader energy landscape. Over time, what I saw led me to turn from skeptic to supporter. Here’s why, in eight parts.

1. Fear and Dread Recede

Ask 100 random people today what “TMI” means, and at least 90 will say “Too Much Information.” Maybe one will mention the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island.

That’s a real shift.

The 1970s were commercial nuclear power’s first decade, and the Three Mile Island accident brought it to a terrifying close. Sixty hours into the slow-unfolding crisis, as fears grew that a “hydrogen bubble” in the reactor might explode and rupture the containment dome, CBS Evening News anchor Walter Cronkite captured the nation’s dread: “The world has never known a day quite like today. It faced the considerable uncertainties and dangers of the worst nuclear power plant accident of the atomic age. And the horror tonight is that it could get much worse.”[1]

The stricken reactor was eventually stabilized. But a combination of soaring costs and public apprehension brought an end to nuclear power’s rapid expansion in the United States.

Cronkite’s warning was about Three Mile Island itself, but it seemed to foreshadow more disasters to come. Yet since 1979, the U.S. nuclear industry has accumulated nearly 20 times as much reactor operating experience as it had built up in its entire history before the meltdown, without a sequel.[2] Like the dog that didn’t bark, this quiet fadeout of reactor calamities is an overlooked shift ― and it is prompting a rethink of long-held certitudes about nuclear power.

With each passing year there are fewer people who grew up with dread from Cold War-era A-bomb drills and weapons test fallout that got bundled into nuclear power. There are more young people like Zeke, a Brooklyn high-schooler who in 2019 went to Battery Park City to greet climate activist Greta Thunberg after her sail-powered trans-Atlantic voyage, but who this past May called fears about nuclear power “over-exaggerated.”[3] (Thunberg herself has said that Germany made a mistake by phasing out its nuclear plants, since it led to a sharp rise in coal-fired electricity.)

I’ve heard the same sentiment in hundreds of casual conversations over the past decade ― at climate rallies and on Trader Joe’s checkout lines, in California and in New York. These conversations suggest that the oppositional currents that once compelled federal nuclear regulators to keep piling on costly new safety requirements are losing force.

2. Permanent Peak Performance

Even before construction costs began to soar in the 1970s, nuclear power had another Achilles heel: spotty operating performance.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the U.S. nuclear power sector struggled to maintain even a 60 percent “capacity factor” ― a measure of how much of a plant’s potential output it generates. That’s a dismal rate for equipment that’s expensive to build. I know this because I researched and wrote the first full-length study of shortfalls in U.S. nuclear plant performance, in 1976.[4]

That started to change in the mid-1980s. Plants finished safety upgrades required after Three Mile Island. The industry began sharing best practices ― and mistakes to avoid. Economic incentives helped too, as utility earnings became tied to how often plants actually ran.

The turnaround has been dramatic. Since 2000, U.S. nuclear plants have averaged 90 percent capacity factor ― a huge leap from the earlier 60 percent. In effect, downtime has dropped four-fold, from 40 percent of the time to just 10 percent. Repair jobs and retrofits that used to drag on are now precision-scheduled like the train heist in “Breaking Bad.”

The higher reliability brings a huge symbolic benefit. In the 1970s, U.S. reactors seemed to stumble from one fiasco to the next. In Alabama, a technician using a lit candle to locate an air leak started a fire that burned through a thousand cables and knocked two brand-new reactors offline for 19 months. At some ocean-cooled plants, saltwater corroded delicate heat-transfer tubes, forcing protracted repairs. Profits and industry morale took a beating, and nuclear power became a punchline on “The Simpsons.”

Those days are long past. Nuclear power, uniquely, has blossomed into both grid bulwark and climate hero. Thanks to those higher ― much higher! ― capacity factors, each nuclear plant now displaces 50 percent more carbon-emitting power generation than it used to.[5] In fact, at a 90 percent capacity factor, a kilowatt of nuclear power delivers double or triple the climate benefit of a kilowatt of wind power (which averages 30 to 40 percent capacity factor) and roughly five times that of solar (15 to 20 percent) ― a crucial distinction that’s often missing from gushing coverage of renewable energy.

3. Climate to the Fore

Nuclear power’s newfound operational mastery would matter much less but for the urgency of the climate crisis and the persistence of U.S. and global carbon emissions. Like wind and solar, nuclear power generates electricity without burning carbon.

It is true that fossil fuels are implicated in nuclear power’s supply chain. Uranium mining uses petroleum, and enriching nuclear fuel requires electricity. But even counting upstream carbon, nuclear power’s climate footprint is smaller than that of wind, solar or hydropower, according to an authoritative 2022 analysis by a multinational team for the UN Economic Commission for Europe. (Their finding matched that of the similarly comprehensive 2018 report by the UN-chartered Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.[6])

That’s another big change. In nuclear power’s early years, uranium fuel enrichment was so energy-intensive that the three U.S. “gaseous diffusion” plants were said to consume 10 percent of all electricity used by American factories. But diffusion enrichment has given way to gas centrifuges and, more recently, laser isotopic separation ― methods that use 20 times less energy to isolate fissile U-235 from U-238.

The bottom line: kilowatt-hour for kilowatt-hour, nuclear-generated electricity is at least as effective as solar and wind at cutting climate pollution. Meanwhile, Hurricane Katrina, Superstorm Sandy, “heat domes” and wildfires, and, in August, the first Himalayan glacial collapse, have made once-hypothetical climate death and disruption a daily reality. More than rising electricity demand from A.I., it’s the climate crisis that’s driving renewed interest in nuclear power.

Click here for the second installment, Why I’m Pro-Nuke Now: Centerpiece.

[1] Quoted passage is from a local (PA) news site, though the an archived Channel 2 broadcast it cited is no longer on line.

[2] The sole “near-miss,” and a major one, was the 2002 discovery by operators at the Davis-Besse nuclear plant near Toledo, OH of extensive corrosion of the reactor vessel head — a vital barrier against loss of coolant and release of radiation. The U.S. General Accounting Office sternly rebuked the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for failing to identify and prevent the corrosion. See GAO, Nuclear Regulation: NRC Needs to More Aggressively and Comprehensively Resolve Issues Related to the Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Plant’s Shutdown, GAO-04-415, May 2004.

[3] In-person conversation at People’s Policy Conference at the New School for Social Research in New York, May 2, 2026.

[4] C. Komanoff, Power Plant Performance: Nuclear and Coal Capacity Factors and Economics (15 MB pdf), Council on Economic Priorities, 1976.

[5] Dividing today’s 90% uptime by the former 60% yields 1.50, indicating 50 percent more kilowatt-hours per kW.

[6] IPCC Annex III report, Technology-Specific Cost and Performance Parameters, 2018. See table on p. 1333.

This is the second part of a three-part post. It starts with the failure of carbon tax advocacy and continues with the premature closure of Indian Point and the concurrent dissolution of my dream that renewable energy could do it all. Part I, Beginning, started with the Three Mile Island accident and covered the decline of nuclear dread, the advent of splendidly reliable reactor operation, and nuclear’s climate-hero status. A link to Part III appears at the bottom. — C.K.

4. A Climate Cure No One Wanted

Nuclear fission, wind turbines, solar panels. Each is a kind of miracle, creating electricity from sunlight, air currents, or the splitting of atoms rather than by setting things on fire. But to economists focused on decarbonization, a greater miracle would have been the widespread adoption of carbon taxes, or, as some prefer to call it, a “price on carbon” — a fee added to fossil fuels’ market price based on their carbon content. Such a tax would shift incentives across the economy away from using fossil fuels, cutting production of the main greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide.

Economists trace the carbon tax idea to the early 20^th century British economist Alfred Pigou and his conception of “externalities” ― social costs, like pollution, that aren’t reflected in market prices, and are dumped on communities “external to the process.” My interest dates to the early 1970s, when I was a fledgling environmental analyst in New York City government. I had a front-row seat as an ingenious “sulfur surcharge” eliminated the price advantage of dirty, high-sulfur fuel oil, foiling an eleventh-hour attempt by the oil industry to undercut a groundbreaking clean-air regulation.

Much later, in 2007, I co-founded the Carbon Tax Center, an organization built around the idea of taxing fossil fuels by their carbon content. We proposed a national carbon tax starting at $15 per ton of CO2 and rising in annual steps to $100 within a decade. Our modeling suggested that by then, the myriad changes driven by the financial rewards for burning less carbon would be cutting U.S. emissions by nearly a third ― far more than conventional energy-efficiency standards or clean-energy subsidies.

To be clear, this wasn’t an either-or choice. A carbon tax was unusual in that it reinforced nearly every other decarbonization measure rather than competing with it. But what really set carbon pricing apart was its reach. Carbon taxes would reward every action that reduced fuel use ― not just buying more fuel-efficient cars, but driving less overall; not just laws mandating energy-efficient buildings, but reforming zoning to let new homes be built in town instead of spreading into sprawl; and, in the power sector, switching from higher-carbon coal to lower-carbon gas and from gas to virtually zero-carbon solar, wind, and nuclear power.

A carbon tax would have worked something like New York’s congestion pricing program, which last year began charging drivers $9 a day to enter Manhattan south of 60^th Street. Congestion pricing hits gridlock with a one-two punch. The first punch is the price itself: faced with the toll, enough car owners find driving no longer worth it, that traffic actually drops. The second punch is the steady stream of subway improvements funded from the toll revenue — station elevators, real-time train signals, new lines — which pull still more commuters out of cars. Just so, the “stick” of a price and the “carrot” of better alternatives reinforce each other.

I took part in the 20-year campaign that pushed congestion pricing across the finish line. Its advent — and survival — in Trump’s second term is heartening. But it also highlights, by contrast, how little headway has been made toward a U.S. carbon price.

That failure constitutes a tragically missed opportunity for nuclear power, given how much a $100-per-ton carbon price could strengthen its economics. Compared with burning natural gas, the dominant source of U.S. electricity today, a $100/ton CO₂ price would give nuclear roughly the same competitive edge as shaving 40 percent off the cost to build new reactors. Or, put another way, that carbon price would be like doubling or tripling what gas-fired power plants pay for pipeline fuel — pushing prices back to pre-fracking scarcity levels.[7])

5. Losing Indian Point

In the spring of 2020, with the COVID-19 pandemic raging, my wife and I fled the city for our cabin in the Adirondacks. One morning I was outside the general store, loading groceries onto my bicycle, when my phone started buzzing. It was Dietmar Detering, someone I knew slightly as leader of the advocacy group Nuclear NY, calling from Queens. I picked up and said hello.

“You call yourself a climate activist,” Dietmar began, his voice sputtering with anger. “Indian Point is being taken apart, and you haven’t said a word to stop it. How dare you?”

I vaguely knew that a 2017 deal ― pushed by the self-proclaimed environmental group Riverkeeper and brokered by then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo ― was about to shut down the Indian Point nuclear plant, located on the Hudson River 35 miles north of midtown Manhattan. The older of its two reactors unit would (literally) get the chop within a week; its twin would follow in a year. Both reactor vessels would be cut to pieces and their radioactive components chemically dissolved. Once that process began, there’d be no turning back.

I stood there holding my phone, stunned. A near-stranger was berating me! I would have hung up, but there was something raw in his voice that I couldn’t ignore. I don’t remember exactly what I said ― probably some version of “don’t blame me.” After all, the carbon tax I’d spent years advocating would have made Indian Point too valuable to shut down. Then I offered what I thought was my strongest point: soon enough, Indian Point’s carbon-free electricity would be replaced by zero-carbon wind and solar anyway, so little harm would be done.

Then Dietmar lowered the boom.

“You don’t get it, do you?,” he said, his voice now cold. “Even if all those new solar panels and wind turbines get built, they won’t displace fossil fuels. They’ll just be replacing carbon-free nuclear electricity that was already protecting the climate. They can’t do both.”

“Wait. What? Say that again.”

“Think of it this way,” Dietmar said. “When new renewables have to replace an existing power source that was already displacing fossil fuels, like Indian Point, their net climate benefit is zero. The renewables you’ve been counting on to push out fossil fuels can’t do that job as long as they’re having to take the place of nuclear plants that were already doing the decarbonizing.”

Full disclosure: those aren’t Dietmar’s exact words. They’re actually mine, drawn from articles I later wrote for Gotham Gazette and The Nation, and from a letter I co-wrote with futurist Stewart Brand, yes, the “Whole Earth Catalog” guy, urging California Gov. Gavin Newsom to halt the planned closure of the Diablo Canyon reactors along his state’s coast. But they capture Dietmar’s central point: shutting down a working nuclear power plant ― or any large source of carbon-free electricity ― nullifies the climate benefit that new replacement wind and solar projects are supposed to provide.

Six years later, Indian Point’s closure still haunts me. Why didn’t I speak up? It’s how I imagine I’d feel if a climbing partner had died because of some mistake I made. In New York, where I live, I measure every increment of renewable energy against the carbon benefit we threw away when Indian Point was shut down and dismantled.

By that gauge, wind and solar look mediocre. Take those 42-inch square “balcony solar” arrays that Germans are buying like hotcakes ― they’re a neat idea, but it would take 50 million of them to match the carbon reduction Indian Point provided, as I wrote here in June. Or consider a rooftop solar setup for the City Island boathouse where my ecologically minded physicist pal stows his sailboat ― fine on its own, but matching Indian Point’s climate value would require solarizing 600,000 similar buildings across the state.[8]

Underneath these daunting numbers is Dietmar’s deeper point: all of this new renewable capacity should have been added on top of Indian Point, not built to replace it.

6. Renewables in a Dimmer Light

Solar and wind power were guiding passions of my adult life. From the 1970s onward, I savored every news story about the latest gains in solar efficiencies and blade lengths. Wind turbines especially stirred me, with their kinetic kinship to bicycles and futuristic look.

Befitting my mathematical bent, I would calculate how much fossil fuel each new wind farm would keep in the ground. For Cape Wind, intended as the first U.S. offshore wind farm, near Cape Cod, I consulted a digest of ballpark dimensions to illustrate how much coal the project would displace each year: enough to cover the entire playing field at Boston’s Fenway Park — foul territory included — in a pile three times the height of the park’s famed “Green Monster” outfield wall.[9]

While I was playing with those numbers, a Stanford mechanical engineering professor named Mark Z. Jacobson was launching a stream of papers spelling out just how many wind turbines and solar panels ― on land, at sea, on rooftops, on farmland or rangeland ― would be required to satisfy the energy needs of different states and countries.

A table in Jacobson’s paper for New York helpfully broke down how much energy had to come from each source. Offshore wind was his largest category, charged with supplying 40 percent of New York State’s energy year-round. The number of turbines: 12,700.

That figure should have given me pause. Filling that quota meant building a hundred Cape Wind projects in the waters off Long Island, even as well-heeled locals including Riverkeeper figurehead Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (yes, that Kennedy) and Walter Cronkite (yes, that Cronkite) were NIMBYing the actual Cape Wind project to death. Ditto, wind projects proposed for the next county over from our cabin in the Adirondacks.

None of those projects were ever built — not just because of local opposition, but also because of a lack of full-throated support from environmentalists who should have championed them for their climate value. Especially in liberal Northeastern states, it seemed impossible to build anything that asked property owners to tolerate construction disruption or changed views, decarbonization be damned.

You might expect the outlook for Jacobson’s all-renewables vision for New York to be improving. Wind turbines are now so prodigious that he can propose 8,000 15-gigawatt turbines instead of 12,700 5-gigawatt ones.[10] And solar power has captured the public’s imagination in a way wind power has not — it’s no accident that climate activist (and Jacobson acolyte) Bill McKibben titled his 2025 call-to-action book, “Here Comes The Sun.”

Nevertheless, the carbon-free electricity lost when Indian Point closed has gone almost entirely unreplaced. Nearly nine-tenths of the power it generated is being made up by burning natural gas — not due to corporate chicanery but because no other source has stepped up. (See chart below.)

And dreams of an all-renewables grid still have to contend with an intrinsic fault ― one even more disabling than the NIMBY opposition sparked by the projects’ thirst for land. That weakness is intermittency: the fact that wind and solar output varies not just day to day, but moment to moment, at the mercy of the weather.

Jacobson has doggedly calculated how many megawatt-hours of wind and solar would be needed to match New York’s ― and other states’ ― total annual energy use. But neither his nor anyone else’s atmospheric models are detailed enough, meteorologically, to verify that a 100% wind-water-solar grid could keep the power on continuously ― hour by hour, year in and year out. Building in extra capacity doesn’t solve this problem. Compensating for weather’s unpredictability by deliberately oversupplying wind and solar, or backing them up with batteries, may look good on paper. But either approach would be punishingly expensive and probably insufficient as well, without ample supplies of reliable, dispatchable power such as nuclear. If there’s no wind, having twice as many turbines won’t help.[11]

In New York, the political fallout from losing Indian Point’s copious ’round-the-clock carbon-free electricity is landing on Cuomo’s successor. With the plant’s closure having pushed New York’s carbon-reduction targets out of reach, Gov. Kathy Hochul this year bowed to reality and froze a 2019 law tying New York’s climate and energy future to renewables. Forces ranging from standard-issue Democrats to grassroots greens are pillorying Hochul as a sellout to Big Oil, though her proposal to add five large reactors across the state — she dubs it her Nuclear Reliability Backbone — is almost certainly a more assured path to decarbonization than the fashionable all-renewables approach.

Click here for the final installment, Why I’m Pro-Nuke Now: Conclusion.

[7] The two representations in the text of carbon pricing’s boost to new reactors’ economics are derived and sourced in my Sept. 2026 paper with James Boucher, Beyond Vogtle: What History Tells Us About the Cost of New Nuclear.

[8] Comparisons in this paragraph employ: 2,028 MW capacity and 90% capacity factor for Indian Point; 220 W capacity and 15% CF for balcony solar. 17 kW capacity and 20% CF for boathouse solar. 10 MW and 40% CF for each wind turbine.

[9] Cape Wind assumptions: 130 3.6-GW turbines and 40% capacity factor yield 1,641 GWh/year. Coal assumptions: 9,800 Btu/kWh, 11,500 Btu/lb of coal, 1.32 coal specific gravity, 62.4 lb of water per cubic foot. Calculations yield 132-foot-high coal pile covering Fenway Park’s 128,000 sq ft surface (est’d from http://www.baseball-statistics.com/Ballparks/Bos/index.htm). That is 3-4x Green Monster height of 37 feet, 2 inches, per Wikipedia.

[10] While Jacobson’s new offshore wind configuration would outproduce its predecessor by nearly two to one, he has also upped his forecast for total required energy, leaving constant offshore wind’s share 40 percent share.

[11] To take a recent example: at the onset of a late June – early July 2026 heat wave, New York State’s wind farms collectively were producing less than one percent of their rated 3,000-megawatt capacity. See my “Beyond Vogtle” report (FN 46) referenced in Footnote 7.

This concludes my three-part post. Part I, Beginning, led with the Three Mile Island accident and quickly moved to the decline of nuclear dread, the advent of fabulously reliable reactor operation, and nuclear power’s climate-hero status. Part II, Centerpiece, covered the failure of carbon tax advocacy, the premature closure of Indian Point, and the dissolution of my dream that renewable energy could do it all. This final part takes antinuclear activism to task for turning a blind eye to the far more lethal harms from unrestrained automobility, and then turns to the need to redefine “least-cost” decision rules guiding electricity investment. — C.K.

7. A More-Brutal Bête Noire

On a different, but as I’ll show, related topic: I had known for some time that deaths from being struck by a motorist were shockingly common in the U.S., with 300 a year in New York City alone. I had made that fact a central element in defending bicycling against the moral panic over ― of all things ― New York’s industrious bicycle couriers during the pre-digital 1980s. And as a bicycle commuter I had long jousted with drivers. But the death of oncologist Dr. Jie Zhang in 1994 forced me to consider driver-caused traffic violence as an assault on both public health and the moral order.

A speeding driver hit and killed Dr. Jie as she stood outside New York Hospital Cornell Medical Center on Manhattan’s East Side, where she was a pediatric AIDS researcher. She was nine months pregnant. As she lay dying, her colleagues delivered her son, who survived. The newspaper ran a photo of the newborn in his father’s arms. My wife and our week-old son were safe at home. My good fortune was hard to bear.

What were the hazards of nuclear power, next to those of motorized traffic? There was and is no agreed-upon damage ratio between the two technologies. But in my eyes, the anti-nukers’ derogatory depictions of U.S. nuclear regulators seemed better suited to officials in charge of “auto safety.” In 2009, for example, after a spate of deaths in SUV rollovers, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration required that roofs on new vehicles be able to support three times their already swollen weight. That rule led to wider windshield-obstructing structural posts , badly expanding SUV drivers’ blind spots. The result, according to a recent New York Times report, was a tidal wave of crashes that killed hundreds of pedestrians and cyclists and injured thousands more.

As a young attorney in the 1960s, Ralph Nader rocketed to fame by documenting how regulatory capture made cars excessively dangerous. His subsequent pivot to opposing nuclear power initially made sense but, over time, inadvertently left American pedestrians, cyclists, and occupants of smaller vehicles vulnerable not just to “vehicle bloat” but driver distractions and the “windshield perspective” of police, prosecutors and juries.

All the while, anti-nuclear activists keep pounding their drum, willfully ignoring U.S. reactors’ splendid post-seventies safety record (see Sections 1 & 2). With few domestic miscues to flog, they leaned instead into the faraway disasters at Chernobyl (1986) and Fukushima (2011). Those disasters were real enough, but they differed from the U.S. situation not just in location but also in root cause. Soviet and Japanese officials had downplayed reactor risks, while the U.S. nuclear enterprise had built a culture dedicated to containing them.

Even reactor radioactivity, like reactor accidents, is becoming another non-barking dog. We are half-a-century into the age of large-scale deployment of nuclear power, and not a single large-scale study has emerged that credibly pins increased morbidity and/or mortality on nuclear power plant operation. Moreover, the old Rubik’s Cube problem of nuclear waste disposal is yielding to engineered solutions. The hangup was never technical. It was political.

8. By All Means, Decarbonize

For half-a-century, nuclear power and renewable energy have circled each other like wary prizefighters.

The two weren’t simply antithetical, they were incompatible — logistically as well as culturally. One couldn’t be for both; you had to pick a side. That was the gospel of physicist Amory Lovins, whose revolutionary 1976 article in Foreign Affairs magazine, “Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken,” upended energy policy debates and galvanized the antinuclear power movement.[12]

In Lovins’ influential framing, nukes epitomized “hard” energy — lumbering and brittle. Renewables — wind and solar — were “soft” — home-grown and “right-sized.” (This was before the relentless push for engineering efficiencies turned wind turbines into colossi and blanketed entire fields with solar panels.)

Fifty years on, the climate crisis has entered the ring and demanded that the rivals partner up. The choice now is carbon-burning vs. carbon-free. Further, the perilous timeline of the crisis has toppled another dictum, also traceable to Lovins: that the transition from fossil fuels must proceed under a “least-cost-first” hierarchy that turns to costlier energy sources only after first exhausting all of the less-expensive ones.

Once, that logic was persuasive. In a leisurely, decades-long transition, why not have the lowest-cost energy lead the way? Wherever a home solar array or a Great Plains wind farm could turn a profit, the thousand busy ants of capitalism could be trusted to deploy them. The climate-warping curve would bend, steadily, painlessly, bringing a more flexible and benign energy system into the bargain.

That was the idea. The reality is falling far short, as revealed by the stubborn persistence of U.S. carbon emissions.[13] The manifold causes have been touched on here; they include everything from traditional NIMBYism to viral versions built on conspiracy-mongering, along with supersized pickups, “sport utes” and the absence of robust carbon emissions pricing. The shale revolution and two Trump presidencies did their part as well, keeping fossil fuels cheap (until No. 47 made war on Iran), which added to the stock of carbon in the atmosphere and America’s stock of carbon-consuming cities and towns, farms and roadways.

In World Cup parlance, we’ve entered stoppage time. A new rule applies: nuclear power ― or any other fossil-fuel antidote ― need not pencil out as cheaper than solar or wind to merit a part in decarbonizing U.S. grids. Instead, we should pursue any energy source or energy-saving measure that displaces fossil fuel use at lesser cost than the harm caused by burning those fuels in the first place.

Think of it like the hikers’ joke about the bear: I don’t need to outrun the bear, I just need to outrun you. In the same way, new nuclear plants don’t need to be cheaper per kilowatt-hour than solar or wind. Their electricity just needs to cost less than the added climate damage that would result from burning the fossil fuels that would otherwise fill the gap. And on that test, new nuclear power plants appear likely to succeed.

Let’s break that down.

What will new U.S. reactors cost to build?

This year I applied my statistical skills and power plant knowledge to the 49 most recently built U.S. reactors. Forty-seven of them limped to completion in the dozen years following Three Mile Island. At the time, their swollen costs so ravaged U.S. electric utilities that Forbes magazine termed the U.S. nuclear power program “the largest managerial disaster in business history.”

Nevertheless, my analysis of that cost data points to a path forward. I found that even if future reactor costs track past costs, a program that builds two or more reactors at each site and uses standardized designs will allow new plants to be built for an average cost of $8,200 per kilowatt of capacity, in 2025 dollars. At that price, building and running new reactors is almost certainly a lower-cost proposition than facing the ecological and human damage from burning equivalent fossil fuels.[14]

If anything, my figure is on the pessimistic side, since it bakes in the kind of shifting regulatory requirements that drove up costs so much in the post-TMI period. Even so, it comes to just half of what it cost to build the final two reactors — Georgia Power new Vogtle 3 and 4 units ― a project that nuclear power critics dredge up at every opportunity as proof that any new U.S. nuclear plant is doomed to be uneconomical.

Just as important, the odds of future extreme overruns appear low. Using a probabilistic model, I found that the likelihood that a new twin-unit plant, built to a standardized design, will end up costing as much as Vogtle is slim ― the same odds, around 1.7%, as correctly calling six coin flips in a row.[15]

Will the long time to build new reactors undo their climate benefit?

Past nuclear plants seemed to take forever to finish. The 47 reactors whose costs I analyzed averaged nearly 12 years from initiation to completion ― a 50 percent worsening from their 1970s counterparts. Much of that added time traces back to Three Mile Island, which triggered design changes, equipment upgrades, and staffing shifts across the entire U.S. nuclear sector, each adding delays. Slowing demand for power also led some utilities to stretch out construction schedules on their own.

To nuclear power’s critics, these setbacks come with the territory. But reactors aren’t the only major infrastructure projects facing long timelines. Delays in building wind farms, transmission lines, and other accoutrements of renewable energy have prompted plenty of national hand-wringing too. Even balcony solar ― the latest face of decarbonization ― will need time to scale up. Electrical codes and fire regulations must be rewritten, and then the real challenge begins: installing roughly 25 million of these devices (at 220W each) to match the climate benefit of a single 1,000-megawatt reactor.

There’s also a déjà vu tinge to the complaint that nuclear power is too slow to help with the climate crisis. That argument easily predates Vogtle 3 and 4 ― the massive Georgia project that tested residents’ patience and wallets, but is now helping decarbonize Atlanta and hundreds of other cities. The goal isn’t to repeat Vogtle’s egregiously high cost, which doesn’t yet clear the bar set by the social cost of carbon. It’s to treat the climate fight as an ongoing effort to reduce harm by whatever effective means are available.

Balcony solar and giant nukes aren’t rivals ― they’re partners. Building Vogtle didn’t stop Georgians from putting solar panels on their roofs in 2015, and if balcony solar really is the money-saving no-brainer its supporters claim, there’s no reason it shouldn’t help rate-burdened Georgia families in 2027, too. “All hands on deck” is a cliché, but it fits here. The world has no time to wait ― it needs to decarbonize by every means available. Including nuclear power.

[12] Lovins’ Foreign Affairs article is available here. I recounted its momentous impact on energy policy and public discourse for The Electricity Journal in 10 Blows That Stopped Nuclear Power (Jan/Feb 1991).

[13] U.S. CO2 emissions circa averaged only 1 to 2 percent annual reductions over the period 2010-2025, a rate many times slower than needed to meaningfully address the climate crisis.

[14] See Komanoff & Boucher, “Beyond Vogtle,” op. cit., pp. 41-44.

[15] The chance of correctly calling six coin-tosses in a row is one-half raised to the sixth power, which is 1 in 64, or 1.56%, which more or less matches the 1.7% chance that a new nuclear plant will cost as much as or more than Vogtle 3 and 4. See Komanoff & Boucher, op. cit., Fig. 9.

A few months ago I went to a climate change forum at the Center for Brooklyn History. The panel I attended, “Confronting Climate Change: Understanding Deniers,” featured the prominent climate activist, Bill McKibben.

I was curious to hear McKibben’s take on climate change deniers. I don’t regard the true deniers as a big problem – they’re only 11-15% of our country, according to most polls. Rather, I wondered if McKibben would label as “climate deniers” people who agree that climate change is a significant problem but disagree with his framing and his proposed solutions. I have worked for decades on energy and climate matters as an energy lawyer. Now, more than ever, I believe that to address climate change we need to build a big tent.

In the Q&A I tested where McKibben is on this by asking if he would label as a climate denier someone who subscribes to the main tenets of climate change science yet holds that natural gas has a role to play as a bridge fuel. (Our exchange starts at 1:12:45 of the video.)

This could have been a chance for McKibben to make clear that such a view isn’t climate denialism, even if he feels it’s misguided. But he punted, saying “I don’t care whether they’re deniers or not.” For good measure, he threw in his long-standing refrain that swapping coal for natural gas makes climate change worse, despite coal’s far higher carbon content per unit of energy.

As you can hear in the recording, McKibben’s claim that gas is worse than coal draws on the work of Cornell scientist Robert Howarth. Yet McKibben didn’t mention that Howarth’s work is controversial and disputed by many scientists. The crux of the dispute is whether methane’s impact on warming should be measured with a 20-year or 100-year time frame.

Methane is a relatively short-lived greenhouse gas, with a lifetime of around 10 years, versus the 100-year life applicable to carbon dioxide. But each ton of methane is far more potent while in the atmosphere, trapping roughly 100 times as much heat as a ton of CO₂. These cross-cutting facts about atmospheric methane — shorter life but greater potency than CO₂ — have resulted in two opposing camps: one insisting on a 20-year timeframe for greenhouse gas accounting, the other adhering to the established 100-year frame. This matters because with a 20-year timeframe, generating electricity with natural gas (which, chemically speaking, is essentially all methane) is more damaging to climate than coal-fired electricity.

McKibben blew past this dispute. To hear him at the Center for Brooklyn History, one would have no inkling that there’s an active disagreement over which timeframe to use, that there are staunch climate activists who favor the 100-year time frame, and that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change  (IPCC) generally uses the 100-year timeframe.

McKibben also insisted that a discussion about natural gas’s potential role in mitigating climate change as a replacement for coal is irrelevant because solar “is now our cheapest resource.” McKibben’s claim, of course, suffuses “Here Comes the Sun,” his 2025 book that extols solar power as the cheapest solution for all of our energy needs. But this too is questionable, because it’s based on cost comparisons between solar farms and natural gas power plants (or nuclear power plants) that fail to consider that electricity supply and delivery is a complex system of wires and plants rather than individual power plants. Based on his remarks, McKibben is choosing to ignore studies such as the comprehensive 2025 report from the Clean Air Task Force that concluded that plant-level cost comparison “is a good metric to track historical technology cost evolution [but] is not an appropriate tool to use in the context of long-term planning and policymaking for deep decarbonization.” And the task force is not alone in finding that when electricity is treated as a system, solar loses its place as the cheapest low-carbon resource.

The dogmatism McKibben displayed at the Brooklyn meeting was unfortunate. We’re in a time when efforts to combat climate change are in retreat. A unified front is required to turn the tide. Instead of doubling down on absolutist positions, activists like McKibben who seem convinced that the solution to climate change is all-renewables, end of discussion, should be seeking common ground with others who want climate action but believe that nuclear power and natural gas must also play a role.

Climate change activists need to build a bigger tent, rather than call anyone who disagrees with their positions a climate change denier. It is striking that McKibben stuck to his guns after saying in the same talk that the most important goal for everyone right now is to help climate change realists win more House and Senate seats in this year’s midterms. As some have noted, an absolutist position on natural gas appears less likely to achieve that win and politicians are following that advice.

Will McKibben evolve? He has demonstrated that he knows how to build a national climate movement centered around issues like divestment. Given the current political situation, he should focus on building an even bigger tent by welcoming all of the 85% who believe that we need to address climate change but do not agree with his ideological positions.

Rich Miller is an energy lawyer who has worked for a variety of stakeholders and now gives walking tours in lower Manhattan on the history of electricity. 

First it was Plug-In Solar. Then it was Balcony Solar. Now it’s Guerrilla Solar, at least according to Inside Climate News, which yesterday proclaimed that The ‘Guerrilla Solar’ Era Has Arrived.

“It,” of course, is Modular solar panels. They’re the hot new photovoltaic solution: cheap enough to buy at Home Depot, easy to hang or prop to catch maximum rays, and small enough to fit on a balcony (if you’ve got one) and plug into your “home grid.” But, alas, too meager a generator of electricity to be more than a bit player in decarbonizing most U.S. homes.

How do I know? I’ve done the math.

A standard, lower-end 220-watt balcony solar array will produce 337 kilowatt-hours a year, or 28 kWh a month averaged over the course of a year. That’s for a 220W unit measuring 3.5 feet by 3.5 feet. (220W x 1/1000 x 17.5% x 8760 hours per year = 337 kWh. Calculation assumes a 17.5% full-year capacity factor, which is arguably generous for New York, where I live. )

A typical U.S. home consumes 10,500 kWh a year, or 28 to 29 kWh per day, says Solartech, drawing on U.S. Energy Information Administration data. That puts a home’s daily power needs on par with a balcony solar unit’s monthly output. In effect, once each month the balcony array gifts a homeowner or renter a bit more than day’s full complement of electricity. And earth’s atmosphere gets the same respite: a 3 percent reduction in carbon emissions caused by the home’s electricity usage.

(The 3 percent figure could also be calculated directly by dividing 337 kWh per year of solar production by 10,500 kWh per year to run the home. For bigger or smaller arrays, just prorate your assumed wattage by my 220W; for 440W, say, double my figures.)

Balcony Solar metrics

Why write about balcony solar if it’s so inconsequential? CTC’s mission includes puncturing would-be climate balloons before they ascend too far. In the same vein, we practice quantification to make clear what does and doesn’t move the climate needle. (More on that further below.)

The best way to depict balcony solar’s climate value is to express it in terms of tangible metrics. We’ve selected two. Both assume the basic, lower-end PV array I assumed at the top: a 3.5 foot-square array whose peak output is 220 watts.

1. It would take 50 million 220W balcony solar units (bsu’s) to restore the climate benefit we destroyed in 2020-2021 when we shut the high-performing Indian Point nuclear power plant 32 miles from Midtown Manhattan.

2. A single person cutting back their driving by a mile a day* (* = in a gasoline-powered car) would provide the same climate benefit over the course of a year as a single 220W bsu.

(Calculations in sidebar. Now you know why we led with images of an urban dweller as cyclist and balcony solar user.)

Ponder that: It would take fifty million smallish bsu’s to level up to the fossil fuel carbon emissions that Indian Point was keeping at bay by supplying the New York City area year in and year out with abundant carbon-free power. Deploying that many balcony solar units would entail 10 bsu’s for each of the 5 million households in the MTA’s service territory. (The Metropolitan Transportation Authority provides subway, bus and commuter rail transit in the five boroughs and seven suburban counties.) Or, if those same households upgraded to 1100-watt bsu’s, collectively they would still make up only half of the lost Indian Point power.

The second comparison, involving driving, is perhaps trickier to grasp but more interesting, since it relates to people’s behavior. Living differently isn’t part of public discourse, at least not in the USA, and especially when what’s being served up is using less. But “reducing,” as we might call it (remember “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle”? or, “Insulate, then Insolate”?) is just as potent for cutting emissions as switching to renewables — even more so when the reducing means driving less, considering the multitude of benefits that accrue from diminishing cars’ imprints on our communities. Still, staying on topic: driving just one fewer mile per day brings about the same shrinkage in carbon emissions as deploying one 220W solar array.

What Balcony Solar boosters are really saying

To be fair, our friends at Inside Climate News and, yes, The New York Times appear to be trying to modulate their balcony solar enthusiasm.

ICN‘s Dan Gearino, whom we cited up front, said he looked to Germany, the birthplace of balcony solar, to see if the units made sense for U.S. households. His takeaway: “It may make more sense financially to spend the cost of plug-in solar on insulation, air sealing or other basic measures to reduce energy use.” Hooray: insulate before you insolate.

Gearino helpfully interviewed renewables guru (and U.S. emigré) Craig Morris, who currently heads Germany’s plug-in solar trade association, Bundesverband Steckersolar. To Morris, balcony solar’s main advantages are that it provides power without taking up land, and that it affords people a way to “become participants in the transition to clean energy.” Behold, guerrilla solar. That, in turn, bolsters “the political consensus that supports the transition.” But Morris also made clear that widespread adoption of plug-in solar would only meet “about 2 percent of Germany’s electricity demand.”

Morris’s “about 2 percent” feels right for Germany. But not for the U.S., where widespread adoption of virtually any individual carbon alternative seems forever out of reach, and where the energy pie is so much larger — think giant fridges, freezers for beer, steroidal homes piled high with powered toys, not to mention industrial and institutional electricity use that Morris correctly excluded from his figure.

Both Gearino and Morris seem more measured than climate journalist Robinson Meyer, founding editor of Heatmap and frequent contributor to The Times, where he wrote about balcony solar in mid-June.

“New zero-carbon power kits will allow Americans to make their own energy choices,” declares the callout to the print version of Meyer’s NYT guest essay, The Tiny Solar Panel That Could Change America. (The even more expansive print headline invites us to “Forget Roofs. Backyard Solar Is the Next Frontier.”)

Meyer is of two minds. He calls balcony solar “a small way that apartment- and condo-dwelling Americans can take ownership of their energy choices and cut down their pollution on the margins.” No quarrel there, thanks to his qualifiers “small” and “on the margins.” Earlier, though, he opines that balcony solar units “have the potential to change how Americans understand and consume energy,” But read further and you’ll again see Meyer cautioning that “Balcony solar will play one small role in [the] drama” of transiting to the new world of clean, abundant energy.

Any such caveats are welcome these days, amid widespread solar hoopla. Still, it doesn’t seem to be in Meyer’s toolkit — or that of Inside Climate News and most other climate journalists — to tutor their audiences as to the limits of balcony solar and other panaceas. Just like it wasn’t in their field of vision a decade ago to lay out the true stakes of shutting Indian Point as Riverkeeper was singing its siren song.

What’s Next for NY Balcony Solar

Meantime, as Canary Media reported recently (and helpfully), New Yorkers concerned with climate and affordability are waiting for NY Gov. Kathy Hochul to sign the recently passed SUNNY (Solar Up Now New York) Act legalizing balcony and other plug-in solar. It would be head-spinning (and politically suicidal) if she didn’t, given near-universal support ranging from Con Edison to DSA Assembly Member Emily Gallagher, who told Canary Media, “This is the most popular bill I’ve [ever] worked on.”

My guess is that Hochul is waiting for the right moment, and perhaps the right “package,” that won’t undercut her push to launch five large new nuclear power plants around the state — one to be built by the public New York Power Authority, the others to be constructed and operated privately. A little bit of math, a la what we offered here a la Indian Point, might help her out.

The governor must also manage the veritable hot potato of her deferred implementation of the landmark 2019 Community Leadership and Climate Protection Act. She might do well to consider jettisoning the act’s unwieldy cap-and-invest centerpiece and substituting a straight-up carbon tax, with the revenues distributed pro rata to the state’s households. That, far more than balcony (or guerrilla) solar, could blow open the door to the “innovations and technologies we cannot yet imagine” that Meyer fantasized about in his Times essay.

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Since the dawn of the Bill Clinton era over 30 years ago, no journalist has more incisively illuminated the confines of U.S. liberal centrism than Daniel Lazare. In books like The Frozen Republic and The Velvet Coup as well as countless articles in Jacobin, New Left Review and other outlets, Dan has plumbed America’s deep-seated Constitutional paralysis and exposed the futility of combating carbon pollution without pricing fossil fuels’ climate damage into their market price. 

The best-selling book Abundance was perfectly tailored for Dan’s scalpel, and his review last month for the Union of Radical Political Economists (URPE) does not disappoint. Rather than a polemic, Dan’s review gives Abundance its due — “In their effort to reduce environmental harms, greens have wound up hobbling production in such a way as to … undermine efforts to deal with the climate crisis in an effective and comprehensive way.” Yet as he points out, “The disease is intolerable, and so is the cure” of making polluters pay through carbon taxes.

Dan’s review from URPE is reproduced below in its entirety, with permission. The graphics are ours. Dan currently publishes at Substack.

Book Review: Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson, Abundance.

Inside Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s rather pallid bestseller is a vigorous Marxist polemic trying to get out. Abundance begins with a quote from Aaron Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism (Verso, 2019) and ends with one from the Communist Manifesto: “The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together.” Together, they serve to bookend the authors’ argument that in their effort to reduce environmental harms, greens have wound up hobbling production in such a way as to exacerbate inequality and homelessness and undermine efforts to deal with the climate crisis in an effective and comprehensive way.

Despite protests from Robert Kuttner, co-founder of The American Prospect, and other outraged liberals, the argument carries weight. From a Marxist perspective, the reasons are clear. Liberal environmentalism is an ideology of just saying no, i.e. just say no to dangerous toxins in the water supply, to filling the atmosphere with noxious fumes, to scattering trash along highways and byways, and so forth. NIMBYism adds a further fillip that if you’re going to engage in such activities or do anything else that might disturb the environmental equilibrium, even if it’s for a good cause, don’t do it here. Since there is nothing that doesn’t disturb the environment in one way or another, the result is a stand-pat philosophy whose purpose is to preserve the status quo. Zeroing in on southern California, Klein and Thompson neatly sum up the prevailing ethos: “When do Angelenos want affordable housing? Now!  Where do they want it? Not here!” The problem is that anything resembling a positive program, a way of organizing production so that it doesn’t harm the environment and in fact may even improve it, is absent.

The answer to the climate crisis is the polluter-pays principle.

The reason for this is clear as well. The answer to the climate crisis, the environmental crisis, and all the rest is to require capitalist production to bear the full cost. If a gallon of gasoline generates x amount of pollution and carbon emissions, not to mention expenditures for highway maintenance, noise abatement, and emergency services, then the simplest and most elegant solution is to incorporate the cost of x into the price of gas so that producers are forced to deal with the full consequences of their actions.

This is what’s known as PPP – the polluter-pays principle. But it’s impractical, which is to say incompatible with capitalist production, because it would wipe out profits. What would happen to the US auto industry if society were to recognize that the true cost of gasoline is not $4 or $5 a gallon, but $15, $20, or more? What would the results be for the “drill, baby, drill” crowd in both Texas and the Middle East if structurally-induced fossil-fuel consumption were to cease? Tolerance of environmental harms is a form of subsidy since it requires the state to cover costs that producers generate. Society pays them, in effect, to pollute. The long-term consequences are proving fatal as the climate crisis accelerates. Yet the short-term consequences of de-subsidization would prove fatal to bourgeois liberalism.

So bourgeois society dithers and dawdles, as Abundance describes. “In 2022, ninety countries and territories experienced often violent protests over the rising price of fuel,” Klein and Thompson recount. Subsidies must therefore continue. They quote a political scientist named Erik Voeten who notes that “people who bear the cost of climate policies increasingly flock to the far right.” So nothing can be done in terms of climate mitigation for fear of furthering rightwing polarization. The authors quote a pair of legal academics named J.B. Ruhl and James Salzman who note that property owners do not cotton to the prospect of oil pipelines or electric transmission lines running through their backyard. But “[g]uess what,” Ruhl and Salzman add, “they do not like the idea of wind turbines or solar panels in their backyard either.” Since they don’t like the problem or the solution, nothing can be done. The disease is intolerable, and so is the cure.

Abundance is highly effective in depicting how this policy snarl plays out. “In much of San Francisco,” Klein and Thompson write, “you can’t walk twenty feet without seeing a multicolored sign declaring that Black Lives Matter, Kindness Is Everything, and No Human Being Is Illegal. Those signs sit in yards zoned for single families, in communities that organize against efforts to add the new homes that would bring those values closer to reality.” San Francisco’s black population has fallen steadily since 1970 due at least in part to restrictions that force poor people in general into longer and longer commutes, if not outright homelessness.

The middle class is hypocritical, something that “progressives” would know if they ever read Flaubert, Sinclair Lewis, John Dos Passos, or Ring Lardner (which they don’t). California “is dominated by Democrats, but many of the people Democrats claim to care about most can’t afford to live there,” Abundance declares. Last year, “voters [who] were most exposed to the day-to-day realities of liberal governance” demonstrated their displeasure by casting ballots for the Republicans. “Nearly every county in California moved toward Trump, with Los Angeles County shifting eleven points toward the GOP.”

Liberalism has sown the seeds of its own destruction. 

It’s a case of liberalism sowing the seeds of its own destruction. Abundance is particularly scathing on California’s great misadventure with high-speed rail. This is the project that Governor Jerry Brown initiated in 1982 with visions of bullet trains whizzing back and forth between San Francisco and Los Angeles. After all, if Japan can do it, why not the United States? Fourteen years later, the state formed a high-speed rail authority, and in 2008 voters authorized $33 billion. That was more than a quarter of a century of doing zilch, but Californians were assured that the first segment would go on line by the year 2020. In 2009, Barack Obama offered a full-throated endorsement:

“Imagine boarding a train in the center of a city. No racing to an airport and across a terminal, no delays, no sitting on the tarmac, no lost luggage, no taking off your shoes. Imagine whisking through towns at speeds over one hundred miles an hour, walking only a few steps to public transportation, and ending up just blocks from your destination. Imagine what a great project that would be to rebuild America.”

Except that do-nothing-ism continued until the project finally collapsed. “Let’s be real,” Gavin Newsom announced in 2019. “The project, as currently planned, would cost too much and take too long. There’s been little oversight and not enough transparency. Right now, there simply isn’t a path to get from Sacramento to San Diego, let alone from San Francisco to LA. I wish there were.”

An astonishing $33 billion had gone down the drain. But why? Klein and Thompson describe how the project immediately bogged down in innumerable negotiations over property rights. “Negotiating with courts, with funders, with business owners, with homeowners, with farm owners,” they write. “Those negotiations cost time, which costs money. Those negotiations lead to changes in the route or the build or the design, which costs money.” State officials relied on expensive consultants who made matters worse: “It was one of these consultants – WSP – that estimated the system would cost only $33 billion and take only twelve years to build. But WSP was joined by Project Finance Advisory, Cambridge Systematics, Arup, TYLin, HNTB, PGH Wong Engineering, Harris & Associates, Arcadis, STV, Sener, and Parsons Corporation.” The Los Angeles Times concluded that outsourcing “proved to be a foundational error in the project’s execution – a miscalculation that has resulted in the California High-Speed Rail Authority being overly reliant on a network of high-cost consultants who have consistently underestimated the difficulty of the task.”

California officials who had no idea how to proceed relied on high-priced consultants who didn’t know either. It’s an example of a liberal polity that knows how to say no and nothing else. It knows what it shouldn’t do, but not what it should.

Klein and Thompson deserve credit for bringing all this out. But Abundance suffers from numerous analytical shortcomings. The authors tiptoe around difficult political problems and take refuge in fatuous techno-optimism.  “[T]he only way for humanity to limit climate change while fighting poverty is to invent our way to clean energy that is plentiful and cheap and then spend enough to deploy it,” they assure their readers.  “…One of the most devilish challenges in energy is how to efficiently remove CO₂ from the atmosphere. By 2050, the world will need to permanently remove 10 billion tons of carbon dioxide from the skies every year to avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change.” They open with a sci-fi vision in which future Americans drink desalinated sea water, consume lab-grown chicken and beef, get packages delivered by flying drones, and dash from New York to London in just over two hours in supersonic jetliners using low-carbon “green synthetic fuels.”

All of which is either puerile or misconceived. By itself, clean energy will do nothing to solve global warming unless counter-measures such as carbon taxes are instituted to inhibit fossil-fuel consumption. The answer to the climate crisis can’t be all carrot and no stick, but must include measures aimed at fostering conservation and energy efficiency. Carbon removal is a non-starter since it invariably requires more energy than it’s worth, while desalination is beside the point in a state like California in which there is so much waste that growers use 1,900 gallons of heavily-subsidized water to produce a pound of almonds despite a deepening drought. As for lab meat, it’s hard to imagine it being more energy efficient than raising chickens and rabbits the old-fashioned way on farms or in large-scale factories. It’s equally hard to imagine flying drones replacing delivery people on bikes in communities that are compact and car-free. Tech has its place, but real energy savings begin with such low-tech modes as walking and cycling.

As for supersonic air transport, fuhgeddaboudit. Air France and British Airways retired the Concorde in 2003 not only because one had crashed in Gonesse, France, killing 113 people, but because it was a gas-guzzler that used 3.8 times as much fuel as a modern wide-body airliner while carrying substantially fewer people. Green synthetic fuels will do nothing to eliminate that disparity.

Klein and Thompson are plainly on the side of more. But more of what, exactly? More CO₂-spewing SUV’s?

But there’s more. Not only is Abundance awash with meaningless techno-optimism, but it’s silent on the political issues that are the real barriers to progress. Take consumerism. Klein and Thompson are plainly on the side of more, as is any labor organizer fighting for higher wages. But more of what, exactly? More CO₂-spewing SUV’s? More highways so immobilized by traffic that they turn into elongated parking lots? More strip malls and gated communities? The problem with more in a period of capitalist decay is that it often translates into less, which is to say less mobility, less attractive surroundings, and less freedom to bike, walk, or engage in other modest pleasures due to dangerous levels of traffic. In describing rail advocates engaged in painstaking negotiations over rights of way, the authors don’t consider whether car, highway, and energy subsidies are fostering a highly diffuse form of sprawl that crowds out high-density modes. America can have high-speed rail and the concentrated urban development it feeds into. Or it can have ultra-low-density development and the rising levels of congestion and fossil-fuel consumption it generates. But it can’t have both. It’s a conundrum that Klein and Thompson resolutely avoid confronting, no doubt because it would make Abundance less user-friendly.

Then there’s the matter of class. Abundance is about middle-class consumers struggling to protect their way of life in ways that are increasingly counterproductive. But it makes no mention of the top one percent – really, the top 0.1 percent or even 0.01 – who are the real agents of destruction. Where are the oil barons who don’t care about the climate crisis as long as profits continue to grow? What about super-rich petro-sheiks – how did America wind up in alliance with such a motley crew? And what about the 40,000 US troops in and around the Persian Gulf? What are they doing there and whose interests are they serving? For anyone truly interested in American dysfunctionality, these are the places to start. Yet Klein and Thompson steer clear of such questions because they make people uncomfortable. And if there’s one thing we know about the publishing business, it’s that people don’t buy books that make them uncomfortable.

Finally, there is no sense of America as a society in an acute political crisis. Since Abundance was released in March, it evidently went to press before Trump was elected and therefore can’t be held responsible for failing to anticipate the full nature of the breakdown that is now before us. Still, it’s not as if there weren’t plenty of warnings as gridlock intensified and politics descended into game playing and threats. Government was in decay, yet no one could think of a way out.

Abundance reflects this growing pessimism, but never asks why. It quotes a University of Chicago economist named Chad Syverson on a construction-industry regulatory process that is complicated beyond reason. “There are a million veto points,” he complains. Yet there’s no sense that the problem involves not just economic regulation, but a legislative process that also contains a million veto points thanks to hundreds of congressional committees and subcommittees, outrageous filibuster rules, a “hold” system that allows individual senators to tie up legislation for months, and so forth. If Capitol Hill is in chaos, is it any surprise that the regulatory structure it gave rise to is in chaos too?

Yet Klein and Thompson avert their eyes. Serious political analysis is beyond their scope. They complain about political paralysis in Los Angeles, but make no mention of the political fragmentation that is the real source of the difficulty. After all, LA is not a city as most people think of the term. Rather it’s a baroque agglomeration that consists of a city, a county, plus 87 other municipalities, 80 school districts, 51 police departments, 29 fire departments, and 142 special districts covering everything from sanitation to mosquito control. It’s an assemblage with one overriding goal: political stasis. Nothing gets done because the political structure won’t let it. It’s a form of institutionalized fragmentation designed to scatter concerted political action to the four winds before it can take flight. Yet not only do Klein and Thompson fail to mention that the problem is effectively unfixable – they fail to mention the problem at all. Instead, they dwell on side issues even though the effect is to distort the picture as a whole.

There is a certain unity between political paralysis at the top and regulatory paralysis below, between gridlock on Capitol Hill and gridlock among thousands of local zoning boards and planning commissions. Both undermine democracy in any meaningful sense while giving corporate interests free rein. Together, they amount to an engraved invitation for a strong man to knock down barriers and overcome restraints. Today, that strong man is Donald Trump, and the way he’s going about it is dead certain to take a bad situation and make it many times worse. The result will be the opposite of abundance in every possible respect – in terms of democracy, equality, scientific advancement, and material progress. It’s a deepening descent that mindless techno-babble will do nothing to reverse.

Once upon a time, hearing “disaster” and “Indian Point” in the same sentence probably meant that the nuke plant had just spilled radiation into the Hudson. Or maybe a whistle-blower was postulating a meltdown scenario that could trigger a lengthy shutdown, ensuring the plant’s capacity average wouldn’t surpass 50% — the generating equivalent of a ballplayer batting .200.

But that was last-century. Now nukes are climate-friendly, thanks to atomic fission’s sidestepping fossil fuels’ heat-trapping carbon emissions. Not only that, at century’s end Indian Point vanquished its on-line reliability problems. Starting in 2001, it racked up year after year of chart-topping generating performance right up to the plant’s forced demise that commenced five years ago tonight.

From a climate standpoint, the true Indian Point disaster is the plant’s closure and dismantlement. Both reactors are now kaput, their reactor cores chopped up. Unsurprisingly, the effort to decarbonize the state power grid — New York’s lowest-hanging climate fruit — is in reverse. Emissions are mounting, and in New York City and other downstate areas formerly supplied by Indian Point, electricity is getting costlier and less dependable.

Turning off Indian Point has devastated electricity decarbonization in NY State

Rarely are opposing trends as clear as the two in the chart directly below. In the five years from 2019, just before Indian Point’s closure began, the amount of electricity made by burning fossil fuels in New York State grew in tandem with the drop in nuclear generation caused by Indian Point’s absence.

Over that 5-year term, as electricity generated statewide with nuclear power fell by 17.7 TWh, electricity generated with fossil fuels (essentially fracked methane gas) rose by 15.4 TWh a year. (A TWh, or terawatt-hour (TWh), equals a billion kWh’s.)

The loss of generation from Indian Point — 16 to 17 TWh a year, based on the 2001-2019 average — was supposed to be made up with “renewables.” Shutdown proponents, led by the advocacy group Riverkeeper, practically guaranteed it. A press release that the group issued as the hours counted down on April 30, 2020 was titled Indian Point 2 shuts down; NY’s renewable energy transition, for example. (Connoisseurs of the legendary “Dewey Defeats Truman” headline should flock to that Riverkeeper web page.) Yet increases in renewables can barely be detected in 2019-2024 statewide generation changes.

Over those five years, electricity produced statewide from wind, solar and burning forest products did grow by a healthy 70 percent. But because the starting base was small, the increase in absolute terms was a modest 6.2 TWh. Hydro-electricity, moreover, fell by 2.3 TWh, cutting the net 2019-2024 boost from renewables to a measly 3.9 terawatt-hours. Virtually the entire slack from shutting Indian Point had to be taken up by increased burning of fossil fuels — not because of gas greedheads but because no other power source was available. (The various 2019-2024 generation changes meticulously compiled by the NY Independent System Operator have been distilled into a comprehensive chart created by Isuru Seneviratne, who monitors state electricity data for the advocacy group Nuclear NY.)

Renewables won’t soon make up Indian Point’s lost output

Renewable-power sources being developed for NY State can be placed in three groups.

1. 1,200 megawatts (MW) of new hydroelectric power being brought to NY State from Quebec via a new 339-mile long transmission line known as the Champlain Hudson Power Express (CHPE).
2. Wind farms in the Atlantic Ocean off Long Island, beginning with the 2,070-MW Empire Wind 1 and 2 arrays south of Long Beach (my hometown).
3. New utility-scale on-shore wind and solar in various stages of permitting and construction, comprising nearly 50 ventures totaling around 7,000 MW.

The raw megawatt figures above may appear imposing, but less so when we account for three crucial factors:

(i) Only CHPE can provide reasonably consistent electricity, with a capacity factor between 70% and 75%; the wind and solar farms are weather- and astronomically-limited to much lower annual outputs: I posit 40% (offshore wind), 33% (onshore wind) and 15% (solar).

(ii) Offshore wind is almost certainly dead in the water (sorry!), due to the U.S. president’s implacable hatred (rooted in his belief that a nearby wind-power venture would threaten the profitability of one of his Scotland golf courses). [See addendum at end of this post.]

(iii) Not all projects in the state renewables “pipeline” will prevail through permitting obstacles, local opposition and financing problems.

The bar chart at right adjusts for these factors by presenting the prospective the three categories of new carbon-free electricity alongside Indian Point in annual terawatt-hours. The green bars sum to 27 TWh, indicating total new carbon-free generation nearly two-thirds greater than that lost when the nuke plant was taken away. The more-realistic red bar sum, 13.8 TWh, is only around half of the maximum, and is less (by 14%) than Indian Point’s lost contribution.

Let’s also face that having new renewables make up for the generation lost by closing Indian Point is a pathetically low bar. New wind and solar were supposed to contribute mightily to stopping climate change by pushing fossil fuels out of the grid . . . which they cannot do at present if their output must stand in for the carbon-free output that Indian Point was prevented from providing after 2020.

Lessons learned?

The outlook for decarbonizing the NY State power grid is grim, even if there’s a post-Trump world in which the U.S. government doesn’t throttle offshore wind as it has tried (unsuccessfully, thank goodness) to scuttle New York’s congestion pricing program. As the last bar chart shows, even bringing Empire Wind to fruition won’t make up half of Indian Point’s lost carbon-free output.

And this post hasn’t touched on the closure’s prospective toll on downstate electricity rates and reliability. Nor has it treated the possibility that deteriorating U.S.-Canada relations will put a crimp in (or surcharges on) hydro-electricity from CHPE whose expected commencement next year is the only bright spot on the horizon, so far as large projects are concerned. (Rooftop solar has gained a solid foothold in New York State, which ranks third in the U.S. in the number of homes with solar panels, according to Solar Insure. Yet making up for Indian Point’s lost carbon-free output would require roughly one million new solar homes in the state — a 5-fold addition to the 200,000 existing solar homes in the state at the end of 2024.)

Here are three lessons learned from the premature closure of Indian Point:

Lesson #1. A robust carbon tax might have saved Indian Point. Based on its average 2001-2019 electricity output, a tax of $100 per ton of emitted CO2 would have conferred an annual carbon-avoidance value of three-quarters of a billion dollars on the Indian Point plant. (Calculation: 16.5 TWh/year x 10^9 kWh/TWh x 0.9 lb of CO2/kWh (per EIA, reduced slightly from that source’s 0.96 lb average to weed out peaker plants) x 1/2000 tons per lb x $100/ton.) A monetary bounty of that magnitude would have made it more difficult for Riverkeeper and then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo to engineer Indian Point’s closure. (During the decade preceding closure, the actual price under the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) to emit a ton of CO2 averaged 20 times less: around $5/ton.)

Lesson #2. Self-appointed environmental-interest groups should not be the primary arbiter of the public interest in climate-critical matters. “Climate was not at the table when Indian Point’s fate was being sealed,” I wrote in May 2020, weeks after Indian Point began to be shut down. Riverkeeper was at the table, of course, supported by several other prominent environmental organizations whose institutional biases led them, in my view, to overestimate the real-world availability of wind and solar electricity, undervalue Indian Point’s carbon-free benefit, and over-emphasize the risks of the nuclear plant’s continued operation. The result was that the “climate consequences of shutting Indian Point [were] brushed aside,” as suggested in the subhead to my 2020 post.

Lesson #3: New Yorkers must consider adding more nuclear power capacity to the state grid. I’m starting to re-evaluate the proposition that New York State can achieve a zero-emissions electric grid without adding considerable nuclear power capacity. This widely held viewpoint (“article of faith” might be a more apt term) was critiqued in late 2023 by PhD physicist and policy analyst Leonard Rodberg, whose analytical acumen and probity I’ve admired since the 1970s, when we were colleagues in the safe energy movement, as it was then called. Len’s detailed analysis concluded that approximately 29 GW of new nuclear capacity — the equivalent of 15 Indian Point plants — will be required in addition to large amounts of offshore wind as well as solar and other “distributed” power — to reliably and affordably decarbonize the state grid by 2040 while satisfying load growth from electrifying much of the space heating and vehicular transportation now provided by combusting fossil fuels.

Addendum

Heatmap and other news outlets reported on May 20 that the U.S. Interior Department lifted its April 16 stop-work order indefinitely halting construction of the 810-MW Empire Wind 1 in the Atlantic Ocean south of Nassau County, NY. This hopeful development is tempered, however, not just by the Trump administration’s notorious fickleness but by the fact that if and when completed the 810-MW wind farm will offset only a sixth of the carbon benefit that was destroyed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Riverkeeper’s closure of Indian Point. See graph.

This post first appeared in The Washington Spectator, which posted it yesterday, Feb. 19. We’ve edited it slightly: swapping in a more finely-grained pie chart of trips to the zone by mode, adding a Hochul-vs-Trump graphic, and substituting excerpts from and a link to Gov. Hochul’s Grand Central Station press conference in place of an earlier quote from Reinvent Albany head John Kaehny. The remaining content is the same.

  — C.K., Feb. 20, 2024

So much winning. Unjammed bridges and tunnels. Speedier deliveries. On-time buses. Calmer, more inviting streets. Fewer traffic crashes. Repairmen getting to more jobs.

Not Donald Trump’s kind of winning, however. Trump didn’t invent congestion pricing. A Nobel economist — a Canadian, at that — worked out the theory 60 years ago, and a ragtag crew of transit lovers, car inquisitors and dyed-in-the-wool urbanists spent decades importuning New York’s political establishment to put it into practice.

The president had nothing to do with the toll plan. In fact, everything about it screams woke — or does to troglodytes too blinkered to see that congestion pricing’s biggest beneficiaries are motorists, who daily reap substantial dividends in saved travel time.

So it came as no surprise that today Trump’s transportation secretary Sean Duffy told NY Gov. Kathy Hochul that the president intends to rescind federal approvals and to terminate the toll program, which went into effect in early January.

Fortunately, officials at the state-chartered Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which operates the city’s buses, subways and major bridges, and was invested half-a-dozen years ago with legal authority to administer the congestion pricing program, were ready. Mere minutes after Duffy’s announcement, the MTA filed a 51-page complaint in federal court charging Duffy, U.S. DOT and the Federal Highway Administration with usurping their statutory authority and seeking to bar them from interfering with the tolls.

Ozempic for Cities

“Am I tripping?,” shock jock Kai Cenat asked on Hot-97 last month. “Congestion pricing might actually be working.” Self-styled housing advocate YIMBYLAND pointed to plummeting subway crime and dubbed congestion pricing “the Ozempic of urbanism,” musing, “I wonder what else it can fix.”

The answer is: quite a lot. The unmistakable takeaway thus far is that just a few fewer cars goes a long way. The drop in the number of vehicles driven into the toll zone is probably 10 percent tops (conclusive data isn’t out yet). But it feels like more. In the papers and on TV, drivers are reporting less time stuck in their cars. In a recent poll, habitual car commuters to Manhattan strongly backed congestion pricing.

The “stick” that has dialed down traffic’s manifold negatives is actually fairly modest — a $9 toll to drive into Manhattan south of 60th Street. Compare that to  my calculation that a median car commute to and from the congestion zone slows down the other cars, trucks and buses in its gravitational field by an aggregate of minutes and seconds that equate to $100 worth of lost time. As the toll “carrot” kicks in, in the form of $15 billion worth of transit improvements that the toll revenues will bond, subway travel will get better and safer, helping shrink car use even more.

To be sure, traffic will rebound somewhat as drivers feel the allure of less-clogged roads. But unlike traffic cops or synchronous traffic lights or other traffic-taming nostrums perennially attempted in New York and other U.S. cities, congestion pricing will yield a durable drop in traffic. Sure, call it a miracle. I have. But the eased traffic is the predictable product of pricing “congestion causation” into car trips that collectively create traffic jams.

The Serpentine Road to Jan. 5

What looks straightforward in print was, in practice, anything but. In Diary of a Transit Miracle, published in The Washington Spectator last April, I traced the 50-year effort to define, scope, build support for, and legislate New York congestion pricing. The miracle, I wrote, was three-fold: “Winners will far outnumber losers; New York will be made healthier, calmer and more prosperous; and that this salutary measure is happening at all, after a half-century of setbacks.”

Soon enough, the triumphant odyssey was torpedoed in the bow. On June 5, Gov. Kathy Hochul, whose office has authority over the MTA and, thus, over congestion pricing, peremptorily and indefinitely “paused” its June 30 start — a perfidy I dissected in Hochul Murder Mystery. The outbreak of pro-congestion pricing support would persist, I predicted, returning the governor to the fold — as happened in November, after the election. Congestion pricing would go into effect on Jan. 5, though scaled back from the June 30 rates. The intended $15 peak toll was lowered to $9, with truck tolls and taxi and Uber surcharges reduced by 40 percent as well.

Even diminished, congestion pricing promised much for New York — especially if Hochul or a successor adhered to her pledge to raise the toll to $12 in 2028 and, in 2031, to the full $15. Toll supporters gladly took the win. As midnight approached on Jan. 4, we thronged Lexington Avenue and 60th Street, braving the midnight cold to count down the final seconds of life without congestion pricing.

We were festive and appreciative. “NY ♥s drivers who pay,” read my sign. “Thank you for paying the toll,” said another. “You’re making history!,” proclaimed a third. No one asked if “you” denoted the crowd, or the drivers whizzing by, or our fair city. For a bright, shining hour, it was everyone.

Why Trump Wants to Eradicate Congestion Pricing

Once upon a time, a wannabe developer looking to make a mark in Manhattan might have bet on congestion pricing. Wharton might have schooled him that prices beat queues at sorting supply and demand. He might have paid notice in the 1980s as true-life real estate titan Dick Ravitch used his pulpit as MTA honcho to hammer home that a thriving Gotham required functional transit, which in turn required robust new revenue streams. Throughout Mike Bloomberg’s mayoralty, he might have listened as Kathy Wylde, chief of the blue-ribbon business group Partnership for New York City, repeatedly decried region-wide traffic gridlock as a $20 billion a year tax on residents and businesses.

Meanwhile, of course, Donald Trump did none of those things. From time to time he fulminated against congestion pricing, though more as a nuisance like, say, water-saving flush toilets. As president he escalated his rhetoric. In a Feb. 8 interview with the New York Post, Trump called the tolls “horrible” and “destructive to New York.” Ignoring mounting evidence like January’s big year-on-year uptick in attendance at Broadway shows, he dismissed the reductions in traffic jams, rationalizing that “Traffic is way down because people can’t come into Manhattan and it’s only going to get worse.”

That’s your standard “windshield perspective” at work, oblivious to the reality that barely one-fifth of folks coming to the Manhattan congestion zone arrived in a private vehicle prior to congestion pricing. (See chart.) True enough, a few days after Trump’s Post interview, local news sources reported a rise in Manhattan foot traffic in congestion pricing’s first month compared to the year before.

Still, the Trumpian brain gazing at congestion pricing sees not a respite from traffic gridlock but oil barons’ birthright squandered on mass transit and climate. Ironically, the tolls’ direct hit to petroleum and carbon will be relatively modest; by design, congestion pricing applies just to a sliver of city driving.

If congestion pricing had a motto, it would be, “Don’t ban cars, bill them” —a mantra lost on The New York Times, which today wrote> that the tolls “aimed to discourage drivers from entering the congestion zone.” Wrong. Congestion pricing seeks to dissuade a smallish fraction of drivers — 10 to 20 percent — from doing so. The other 80 to 90 percent are meant to keep driving to ensure sufficient toll revenues to bond the promised transit investments.

Subtle truths be damned, congestion tolling is anathema to Trumpworld, where policy considerations are buried under monstrous simplification, crude disinformation, coarse slander and, most often, outright lies. Congestion pricing’s crime is that it elevates the collective interest above individual actions that threaten it. It requires drivers to Manhattan’s teeming center to either change their behavior for the common good of congestion reduction, as Paul Krugman put it recently, or to offset some of the harms from their driving by paying into a government-administered kitty — to be invested in transit betterment that will reducing congestion further.

Krugman conjectured that “hostility to New York” may be the true font of Trump’s antipathy to congestion pricing. “Many people, and Trump in particular,” Krugman wrote, “are committed to the view that [New York] is an urban hellscape. A policy that improves life in the city runs counter to that narrative and inspires visceral opposition. And Trump in particular surely wants to hurt a city that has never supported him.”

A balm for New York, if we can keep it

It’s easy to be gloomy about congestion pricing’s ability to overcome Trump’s enmity. Even if the MTA prevails over Secretary Duffy in federal court — and the Authority appears to have a strong hand — the Trump administration has myriad ways to coerce New York State into ending the program. It could slow Federal Transit Administration reimbursements to the MTA for expenditures already authorized and made. Going forward, Trump could constrict routine federal contracts to rehabilitate and build new transit. The rational choice for the state and MTA might then be to give up the toll program.

Or, Trump could hold that power in reserve as leverage to get New York City and State to fall in line or not make waves on a hundred other fronts. Not selling out congestion pricing requires Gov. Hochul to be steadfast and for Mayor Eric Adams, who began distancing himself from the tolls long before bending his knee to Trump, to leave or lose his mayoralty to a congestion pricing defender.

Hochul, for her part, is off to a rousing start. Addressing congestion pricing supporters at NY’s Grand Central Station yesterday, she said:

At 1:58 pm, President Trump tweeted, ‘Long live the king.’ I am here to say that New York hasn’t labored under a king in 250 years and we are sure as hell not going to start now… We stood up to a king and we won then. In case you do not know New Yorkers, we’re in a fight, we do not back down — not now not ever… I don’t care if you love congestion pricing or hate it, this is an attack on our sovereignty, our independence, from Washington. We are a nation of states. We are not subservient to a king or anyone else from Washington… We will not [let] the commuters of our city and our region [become] roadkill on Donald Trump’s revenge tour against New York.

But to feel the governor’s steely determination to keep congestion pricing, it’s best to hear her. This 20-minute YouTube video of her and MTA chief Janno Lieber leaves no doubt that she is more than ready to go to the mat with Trump. She sounds positively liberated.

Of one thing we can be sure: For Hochul to maintain her brave stance will require continued, sustained organizing — more of the grinding work that brought congestion pricing to life in the first place. The old saw about genius being 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration applies here.

In this trilogy’s first installment, I gave pride of place to congestion pricing theorist Bill Vickrey. So did the Times’ “Big City” columnist, in an encomium to the Nobel economist last month that implicitly treated the unceasing toil of congestion pricing’s legions of supporters over the years like so many dust bunnies.

But the Jan. 5 victory belongs not just to Vickrey and Ravitch and Wylde, or to Lieber and his relentless staff, but also to Riders Alliance, Reinvent Albany, Regional Plan Association, the Community Service Society, a revitalized Transportation Alternatives, and scores of allied organizations and associations that together coalesced into a civic force for municipal progress, good governance and improvements in our quality of life. And to the journalists who gave our labors prominence.

These organizations internalized and acted on the twin beliefs that having too many cars hurts cities, and that traffic pricing is indispensable for diminishing the automobile’s stranglehold over transportation budgets and road designs. After Hochul’s congestion pricing “pause” last June, they rose as one to block her ploy to concoct a substitute transit funding source. “We never considered it, not for a minute,” Riders Alliance senior organizer Danna Dennis told me earlier this month. “It was congestion pricing all the way.” Likewise for Liz Krueger, state senator from Manhattan’s east side, who rallied her Albany colleagues to render the governor’s gambit dead on arrival.

The result, on Jan. 5, was an epic breakthrough. For the first time in the USA, driving is being assessed a charge for some of the immense harms it wreaks on urban life. At this writing, 45 days on, the facts on the ground are everything that congestion pricing proponents dreamed of and promised. Every new day that dawns with the tolls intact puts the lie to the claims of Trump’s minions that the program is hurting New York. Sure, like Ozempic hurts the chronically obese.

It can feel unfair to have to keep on defending a program that has the force of law and is working wonders. But we must and we will.

This post is adaped from my essay yesterday on Streetsblog USA, A Lesson for NYC’s Congestion Pricing Came Last Week from Washington State. It was posted on the eve of NY Gov. Kathy Hochul’s announcement today that she has ended her June “pause” and authorized New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority to begin implementing a scaled-down but still-robust version of the original plan, beginning at midnight January 5, 2025.

The Streetsblog post was intended to steel Hochul’s courage and, as we congestion pricing advocates have demanded since June, to prod her to “flip the switch” on the Manhattan toll scheme that was set to go into effect on June 30. It was actually written last weekend with the hope of placing it in the New York Times, but they could not fulfill our request for rapid publication. No matter, the governor’s turnaround was already in the works.

The post takes a few liberties with actual events in Washington, eliding the differences between the straight-up carbon tax measure that voters rejected in 2016 and the cap-and-trade measure that also failed at the ballot in 2018, and the state’s Climate Commitment Act that was enacted into law in 2021 and backed by voters last week. This was in service of the larger point: that the conception of what is fair changes when an effective policy has been given time to work, and that if a policy is wise, politicians should stay the course, confident that public support will emerge.

We’ll have more to say in the coming weeks about the pending rollout of New York’s congestion pricing plan, arguably the first-ever large-scale application of externality pricing in the U.S. 

— C.K., Nov. 14.

The first time Donald Trump was elected president, in 2016, Washington State residents also voted down an initiative that would have created the country’s first statewide carbon tax.

The second time Trump won the presidency, last week, Washington residents flipped their 2016 stance on carbon pricing, voting to preserve the comprehensive carbon pricing program that their legislature ended up enacting. And therein lies a message for New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, who paused New York City’s Central Business District toll plan on June 5, just as it was about to go into effect after years of debate.

The message: If the policy is wise, stay the course. The facts on the ground will soon change, generating the political support to validate your policy and prepare you for the next policy battle.

Congestion pricing proponents have always known the odds. Taxes are unpopular, check. Driving is a birthright and change is hard, check. We were aware congestion pricing in London and Stockholm had only 40 percent favorability before adoption. But both cities’ experience showed that once traffic visibly lessened and transit improvements got underway, opinion flipped. Roughly 60 percent of residents now support the tolls.

The 2016 vote against Washington carbon pricing was a landslide: 59.3 percent no to 40.7 percent yes. The 2024 vote to keep the state’s carbon pricing law was a landslide in the opposite direction: 62 percent to keep it and 38 to repeal it. Hmm, looks like that 60-40 rule has legs!

A brief look at the law that Washington State voted to keep last week will demonstrate how it’s cut from the same cloth as New York’s congestion pricing.

Washington’s innovative Climate Commitment Act requires fossil fuel companies to buy permits keyed to the carbon content of their fuels. That includes oil refineries, which pass on the costs of the permits to motorists and homeowners as higher prices for gasoline and heating fuels.

The intent is to motivate industry and consumers to curb their carbon dependence, much like congestion pricing in New York would impel motorists to drive less often into gridlocked Manhattan. Sales of the emission permits in Washington are already helping finance electrification and renewable-energy substitutes for fossil fuels, just as New York’s congestion revenues would have bankrolled $15 billion in better transit.

And just as it has been in New York, the road to this decision wasn’t easy. Washington’s climate law took root after voters twice rejected ballot referendums for statewide pricing of carbon emissions by margins of around 60 to 40. (A 2018 initiative failed as well, 56.6 percent to 43.3percent.) But after Democrats won control of the legislature in 2020, Gov. Jay Inslee, a Democrat and unabashed climate champion, pushed through the Climate Commitment Act, much as New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in 2019 won legislation directing the regional transit authority to institute a congestion pricing system.

This year, however, fossil fuel backers in Washington collected enough signatures to place Initiative 2117on the Nov. 5 ballot. A “yes” vote would have repealed the legislation and discarded the emission permits — perhaps slowing energy price increases but stalling the state’s shift toward clean power.

Well, the returns are in, and supporters of the emissions permit scheme won big.

True, what was on the ballot in Washington last week — making gasoline and other fossil fuels more costly to elevate lower-emission substitutes from smaller cars to electric cars and, best of all, less driving — isn’t the same as congestion pricing. But it’s a close cousin. What stands out is that a policy rejected by nearly 60 percent of voters in 2016 and again in 2018, won with around 60 percent in 2024. Attitudes can shift when facts warrant.

What enabled the turnaround? A resolute governor stayed the course, allowing the “default” to recalibrate from cheap gas to clean power and letting the public warm to this novel policy for cutting carbon pollution. Once it did, 20 percent of voters came aboard, just like they did in London and Stockholm.

New York hasn’t been as fortunate yet. This spring, our executive gazed at the pending $15 peak congestion toll and rather than seeing less gridlock and a transformed transit system, saw a political abyss. Advocates and even her own staff tried to brace her for this “valley of political death” between congestion pricing’s initiation and its eventual acceptance. The warnings did no good. On June 5, she placed the tolls on “indefinite pause.”

There is talk that the governor will soon un-pause the tolls now that the suburban House races she feared would be swept up in a congestion pricing backlash are decided. But Gov. Hochul must move with urgency. The incoming president has made his distaste for the tolls abundantly clear. His return to power is less than 10 weeks away, with at least four of those weeks likely gobbled up by red tape. The plan’s logic that Hochul herself once articulated so well remains intact: better commutes and healthier, safer streets.

Hochul must act fast and trust the message from Washington State: with strong leadership, good policy and good politics can be one and the same.