The key takeaway from MIT’s Great Climate Policy Debate
By Mitt Castor
On November 14th two teams of highly trained scientists faced off at MIT in an event hosted by the MIT Free Speech Alliance to debate the proposition:
RESOLVED: The total cost of global net-zero decarbonization by the latter half of this century is well worth the projected global benefits.
MIT’s premier climate scientist Professor Emeritus Kerry Emanuel and premiere climate economist Professor Robert Pindyck argued the affirmative. Former Caltech professor Dr. Steven Koonin, now a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, and Dr. Mark Mills the Executive Director of the National Center for Energy Analytics argued the negative. The debate was moderated by Dr. John Tomasi, President of the Heterodox Academy.
The timing couldn’t have been better, with both the COP29 UN climate conference underway in Azerbaijan and President-elect Donald Trump vowing to put an end to the climate crisis “hoax.”
What became clear early on was the unanimity among all four debaters that allowing environmental extremists to derail the nuclear energy industry 45 years ago after the Three Mile Island accident was a tragic mistake. Had the US and other developed nations followed the example of France and gone all-in on nuclear power, we would have already been well along decarbonizing our energy infrastructure, whether this proves necessary or not.
What all four also agreed on is that it’s not too late to go all-in on nuclear power now. The technology is fully developed, safe, cost-effective, sustainable, and scalable. What stands in the way is a bloated regulatory bureaucracy and protracted environmentalist litigation. These retarding forces often make the business model for deploying nuclear power untenable.
The debaters agreed on little else, expect perhaps the realization that NetZero is not going to happen any time soon, if ever.
Perhaps it’s time that the climate hoaxers, climate deniers, and everyone in between declare a truce and begin working together to finally fulfill the 70-year old promise of making nuclear power generation “too cheap to meter.”
You can watch a recording of the debate on YouTube here.
Mitt Castor is the pseudonym of an MIT educator who runs the Babbling Beaver satire website.
Imagine having access to infinite cheap energy and then purposefully putting up every road block possible to implementing it.
Interesting. My only comments is you are missing one discipline, upon which the actual answers entirely depend - engineering.