A Bright Future starts with a bang. “Few books can credibly claim to offer a way to save the world, but this one does,” the psychologist Steven Pinker writes in his foreword. That is a bold assertion, but by the time I had finished the book, I was half-convinced he was right. The threat from which the world needs to be saved here is catastrophic climate change, and the solution propounded is a huge expansion of nuclear power.
Authors Joshua Goldstein and Staffan Qvist argue that only a massive investment in new reactors can simultaneously allow both the reductions in greenhouse gas emissions that are needed to limit global warming and the increased access to the energy needed to raise living standards in lower-income countries. The book is a punchy polemic that spends its first four chapters making the case for nuclear; another five knocking down alternatives and any objections; and a conclusion setting out how to make the vision a reality. It is unfortunate, but probably unavoidable, that it gets progressively less convincing as it goes on.
It is a distinction of the authors’ position that they reject conventional wisdom on the political left, right and center. The determination to ignore global warming on much of the right means taking a “terrible gamble” with the planet, they suggest, while the left’s insistence on fixing the climate by fixing capitalism is divisive and counter-productive. Yet ideas that are broadly popular in the political center, including support for renewable energy and efficiency, also seem inadequate given the threats we face.
As Sherlock Holmes observes, when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. Having dismissed the other responses to the climate threat, Goldstein and Qvist are left with a proposal for large-scale construction of new reactors, perhaps at a rate of 115 a year, to make electricity generation worldwide completely fossil-fuel-free by 2050.