ATHENS — The great news about the impending shutdown of Vermont Yankee is a big victory for the home team, but one that is full of interesting ironies.
For example, the first reason that Entergy gives for shutting down VY is “a natural gas market that has undergone a transformational shift in supply due to the impacts of shale gas, resulting in sustained low natural-gas prices and wholesale energy prices.”
Shale gas, of course, which is accessed through hydrofracking, is one of the hydrocarbons that climate-change activists oppose for a number of very good reasons (pollution of groundwater, methane gas release, detrimental health effects for humans and other living beings).
But most of all, its burning only adds to our greenhouse pollution at a time when we need to be seriously reducing our reliance on fossil fuels as we move past 400 ppm in the atmosphere and closer to the 2-degree Celsius rise in temperature that most scientists agree is the absolute maximum we can tolerate without risking climate catastrophe. (Some scientists are skeptical about even 2 degrees by reminding us of the serious consequences we've already experienced with just a 0.8-degree rise.)
Additional irony: this natural-gas boom that Big Oil is experiencing right now is really going to be short-lived, like maybe 20 or 30 years.
Get ahold of a copy of Richard Heinberg's Snake Oil: How Fracking's False Promise of Plenty Imperils Our Future for further details. In a recent article, Heinberg wrote, “America's hundred years of natural gas, heralded by President Obama as a national energy game-changer, actually amounts to a mere 24 years by official estimates, even less according to unofficial but well-informed calculations.
“Before 2020, shale gas and tight oil production will top out and start to decline.”
Thank goodness the Entergy suits didn't read this before arriving at their salutary decision - they might have decided to try to hang in there a little longer!
Perhaps one of the great unintended, but welcome, results of this news might be that it will free up the energy and time of all the wonderful people been who have working to close down VY to now focus their attention on what is truly the issue of our times: climate change, and the need to resist the unchecked greed of Big Oil.