Invest in "Sunbeams for Peace"

Three different stories caught my attention this past week: the fallout from the recent U.S. bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities; the ongoing efforts to revive the moribund U.S. nuclear power industry; and the twisted determination of the U.S. Congress to destroy our fledgling renewables industry. The upshot of all three, I believe, is that if we want to avoid wars with countries like Iran, we should all be investing in solar in backyards everywhere, faster. There’s a lot to explain here, so let me lay out the argument, point by point.

On Iran, I suffered through many hours of podcasts in recent days. Some, like those from the Free Press, celebrated our “obliteration” of the Iranian nuclear weapons program. Others, like Pod Save America, denounced our attack as inflaming the Mideast for tiny gains because Iran, they claimed, was not on the verge of making nuclear bombs. Both perspectives, in my view, failed to mention the root cause of Iran’s nuclear program: Us.

Iran is just the latest country in a long line—Israel, Pakistan, India, to name just a few—to use nuclear power as a cover for nuclear bomb-building. And we were the ones who started this fraud with President Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” program. The idea was that we could spread the good atom (i.e., nuclear power) without spreading the bad atom (i.e., nuclear bombs). It was, from day one, a complete scientific fabrication. The truth is that every act of spreading nuclear technology and materials brings every participating country a step closer to nuclear-weapons status. And the cover provided by nuclear energy gives bad actors just the excuse they needed to “go nuclear” without announcing it. (This superb 1980 article on “Nuclear Power and Nuclear Bombs,” co-written by my friends Amory and Hunter Lovins in Foreign Affairs, reads like it was written yesterday.)

Every “peaceful” nuclear program is riddled with weapons potential. That makes the hair splitting by the left—hey, Iran wasn’t THAT close to a bomb—irrelevant. It also underscores that even an “obliterated” Iranian nuclear program inherently has the pieces to reassemble easily and quickly. Both perspectives dominating our airwaves are highly misleading.

Those of us with “green” views have long considered it a high priority to phase out the nuclear industry across the world. We felt lucky to have had the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl nuclear meltdowns when we did, because they rendered nuclear power expansion—literally and metaphorically—radioactive. And what remained of the nuclear industry was largely wiped out by escalating capital costs. Nuclear power is so expensive that only two new reactors have been built in the United States in the last 30 years (two more might open soon)—and they required massive subsidization.

A smart U.S. policy, as the Lovins argued in 1980, would be to phase out nuclear energy domestically and do everything possible to help the world follow suit. We might implement a “Sunbeams for Peace” program, and make the following offer to Iran: Drop your nuclear energy program altogether, and we’ll help spread renewable energy in your country.

Fanciful? Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, says in the June 30 issue of The New Yorker about Iran’s nuclear program: “[N]uclear power has been a practical and strategic ‘albatross’; it supplies only about one per cent of Iran’s energy needs but has cost up to five hundred billion dollars in construction, research, and the penalties of international sanctions.”

The opportunity for “Sunbeams for Peace” is huge. Solar electricity is significantly cheaper than nuclear electricity right now, and that comparative advantage is getting bigger by the day.

So what are we actually doing? This brings me to my other news stories.

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) continues to reinforce fantasies about reviving the U.S. nuclear industry. On June 27, Bill Lee, the Governor of Tennessee, editorialized about why the U.S. government should continue to underwrite his costly nuclear power ambitions in the Tennessee Valley. On July 1, WSJ reported: “President Trump wants the U.S power industry to go nuclear. His recent executive orders aim to quadruple nuclear-power generation in the next 25 years.”

Meanwhile, Congress is on the verge of a budget bill that aims to upend hundreds of solar projects underwritten by the Inflation Reduction Act and add irrational new fees and taxes on new renewable energy projects. Besides ceding the critically important market for renewables to China, these policy choices undermine any possibility of offering Iran a different energy choice.

But all is not lost. We, as individual investors, can make sure that solar energy wins and spreads rapidly. And we should look for ways of sharing renewable energy innovations with countries like Iran. If our government won’t do it, then we must as individuals and communities.

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Paying subscribers will find other helpful articles about investment opportunities:

• Elias Crim lays out the case for a new generation of ambitious social cooperatives, which is all the more urgent given imminent Congressional cuts in food and health services for the poorest Americans.

• ImpactAlpha published its fifth cohort of 25 “transformative” investment funds, with this year’s list highlighting seven place-based, indigenous-led models.

• Bloomberg estimates that Trump’s tariffs have already exacted a $12 billion cost on America’s tourism industry.

• If your passion is about “making” stuff, you’ll be interested in reading about “a new cohort of craft-led, micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) building climate-smart, community-focused solutions within India’s Creative Manufacturing and Handmade (CMH) sector—a massive subset of the nation’s $2 trillion cultural economy.”

• Good Jobs First reports the latest example of dumb “attraction” subsidies being pushed by economic un-developers in Orange County, New York, which would give $178,000 per job to the nation’s second richest company, Amazon, to build a distribution warehouse. Please.

• And finally, two pieces on Black-owned businesses: Brookings has introduced a “Black Business Parity Dashboard.” And the Urban Institute has a new program on policies that cities can use to boost black businesses.

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