Fighting Climate Change With Low-Tech Tools

In the late 1990s, regulators in some U.S. states began to make electric utilities sell their nuclear reactors to private operators. They weren’t trying to help head off climate change, yet they managed to do just that.

Deregulation was supposed to bring down power prices. The sale of nuclear plants to nonutility owners, such as Exelon Corp., was part of the process and was intended to serve that goal. But it also helped offset more greenhouse gas emissions in the 2000s than all of the wind and solar generation in the country combined.