Environmental Purists Test Being Realists

Originally published for customers January 11, 2023.

Environmental purists will regularly state that climate change is an existential crisis and the need to act is now. Yet, they regularly refuse to consider paths that include solutions other than wind and solar, and insist on preserving processes that ultimately slow development of even their preferred infrastructure to a crawl. Insistence on dictating the one and true path to net zero while also tightening permitting processes will not address the energy evolution in a timely manner. Some purists are slowly acknowledging this fact, but are wary of being ostracized for their views by other purists.

For infrastructure to be built at the pace needed for any path to net zero by 2050, the U.S. will need drastic changes to infrastructure permitting and that reform will have to apply to both traditional and renewable energy sources to gain sufficient political support to be sustainable over numerous election cycles.

Environmental Purists are Slowly Recognizing That They Are a Major Roadblock

Late last year the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) issued a blog post that begrudgingly acknowledged how difficult it will be to build the infrastructure necessary to meet a net zero by 2050 goal here in the U.S. According to that blog post, the NRDC intends to release its own analysis on pathways to net zero this month, and that report will show the U.S. must “build at an unprecedented rate of 60 GW of solar and 40 GW of wind per year for the next decade.” But that is not all; the electric transmission system must be built at an unprecedented rate, with current projections showing capacity growing by only 17% by 2040, but that the NRDC’s net-zero pathway will require transmission to quadruple by 2050.

This is very consistent with the study released in 2020 by Princeton University that we first discussed in 2021 in Environmental Purists May Be a Greater Risk to Climate Goals Than Climate Deniers. As we noted then, a key issue with this transmission buildout is that it will mainly be designed to bring wind and solar power from states that in 2020 voted primarily for President Trump (red color) to those states that voted for President Biden (blue color) and will need to cross a number of states that neither get the benefit of the new wind and solar construction nor need the power that requires the construction of this huge grid.

The NRDC even cites one of the primary Princeton researchers, Jesse Jenkins, as noting that “over 80% of the potential carbon emissions reductions of the Inflation Reduction Act by 2030 will be lost if transmission growth is limited to its recent growth rate.”

The NRDC’s solution, however, is modest; it suggests only that environmental groups shift from making renewables and transmission cheaper to making them easier to build. But the NRDC insists that such projects must still be “built responsibly, dramatically increasing conservation, and helping to redress our nation's history of systemic racism and deepening inequality.” In other words, climate change is an existential crisis but nothing else should be sacrificed to combat it.

The Problem Is Not Everyone Agrees

The problem with NRDC’s proposal is best exemplified by a recent study issued by the Science Impact Collaborative at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. That study looked at over fifty renewable energy projects, including utility scale wind and solar projects and electric transmission projects that had been delayed or canceled because of opposition. The seven key objections and barriers the study identified would be familiar to anyone who has ever worked on a major infrastructure project:

1. Concerns over possible environmental impacts, including impacts on wildlife
2. Challenges to project financing and revenue generation
3. Public perceptions of unfair participation processes or inadequate inclusion in light of regulatory requirements
4. Failure to respect Tribal rights, including the right to consultation
5. Health and safety concerns
6. Intergovernmental disputes
7. Potential impacts on land and property value

As seen above, the grounds for objecting to the fifty-seven projects number far more than fifty-seven. This is because, as the study found, in 80% of the projects more than one ground was used to oppose the project and that organized opposition groups used a variety of means to stop renewable energy projects, “including lawsuits, political campaigns, appeals to other levels of government including county and township, and direct political protest.” It also determined that opposition groups often form coalitions that share only one goal, which was to stop the project.

Some key findings about the opposition to these projects, which will also surprise no one that has permitted infrastructure projects, included:

Environmental interest groups leveraged mandatory regulatory reviews to challenge the possible adverse environmental impacts.

The financial viability of a particular project is often a function of decisions made by regulatory agencies that don’t share the project developers’ financial priorities.

In most instances, opponents have struggled to produce evidence that the projects cause health hazards, but the “perception of threats to health and safety are compelling enough to trigger opposition.”

The legality of a particular local action opposing a project “is irrelevant if the legal process itself creates delays that ultimately block work on a project.”

Despite these findings the study’s primary solution focuses on bringing stakeholders into the process earlier, because by “including community members and relevant stakeholders in location, design, finance, mitigation, and other decisions we believe it should be possible to resolve many of the conflicts that tend to arise.” (Emphasis supplied). This is a statement clearly without any empirical support, because the study actually notes that for the 13% of the projects that were ultimately completed, it “found little evidence that the concrete steps taken by project supporters to overcome opposition had any effect.”

So What Can Work?

At the end of MIT’s report, they do note their “analysis raises a fundamental question about whether the regulatory systems in place in the U.S. are suited to reviewing the rapidly growing number of new utility-scale renewable energy projects.” One environmental lawyer, who spent many years litigating against things like highways, landfills, and incinerators and “never met an EIS that I couldn’t sue,” has decided something needs to change. While his description of the problem and his proposed changes to process would be welcome, he clearly worries about being cast out of the environmental purist crowd because he quickly cautions that he is advocating reforms to the “tools of obstruction” present in our laws but only for “clean energy and climate adaptation infrastructure,” but certainly not for “fossil fuel projects.”

But what better source could there be for understanding what needs to change than the views of someone steeped in the use of the current “tools of obstruction.” He notes that there are many legal impediments to building infrastructure. “Each one could become, if not a veto point, a cause of years of delay that can kill a project, or a specter that keeps it from serious consideration in the first place.” He then lists some that clearly need to be addressed in any serious permitting reform package: local zoning and building codes; the Endangered Species Act and other species protection laws; the National Environmental Policy Act and its state equivalents, with all of their procedural intricacies; the wetlands and coastal protections in Section 404 of the Clean Water Act; protections for environmental justice communities and Indigenous peoples; labor and human rights conditions along the supply chains; and property rights and trade protections. While acknowledging that each of these are legitimate concerns, he laments that “cumulatively they contribute to preventing us from building what is needed at the pace and scale essential to address the climate crisis.”

Before listing his proposed changes, he cautions, as we did back in 2021 in Environmental Purists May Be a Greater Risk to Climate Goals Than Climate Deniers, that rather “than climate denial, the environmental community has tradeoff denial.” He argues that there is simply too little time to “preserve everything we consider precious, and to linger in making decisions.” The author then suggests a very decent list of problems that need to be addressed, including:

Allowing some intrusion into the critical habitat of an endangered species if that habitat is where we need to put our wind farms, solar arrays, transmission lines to carry the power, or the mines to extract essential minerals.

Allowing for aesthetic damage because while it is “wonderful to look at unadorned nature,” the best places for wind turbines are where winds are strongest, such as on top of ridge lines or off the coasts.

Finding ways for NEPA reviews to take a lot less time and to shorten the length of environmental impact statements.

Reexamining the need for local consent.

Reexamining public participation requirements because we cannot afford to spend years negotiating every project until everyone is happy.

He concludes by noting some key suggestions for reform that others in the environmental community have made, including:

Federal preemption of state and local control;

More centralized decision making, not just coordination, so that individual agencies cannot hold things up;

Broader allowance of mitigation when adverse impacts are found;

Extensive use of eminent domain;

Use of programmatic EISs (which cover multiple similar projects, not just one);

Regional assessments of species habitat and historic sites so that individual projects within the studied regions can move quickly;

Adoption of standard assessment and mitigation measures and permit conditions;

Imposition of tighter timelines for project reviews, with default approvals if those timelines are not met;

Limits on judicial review, perhaps requiring all challenges to projects to be brought in the D.C. Circuit on the administrative record, with a short statute of limitations; and

Early engagement with disadvantaged communities, tribal governments and Indigenous peoples.

While chastising his fellow environmentalists for being tradeoff denialists, he still seems to want to limit these changes to just renewable projects and transmission. But if the above map shows anything, it shows that such changes will need to be applicable across all types of infrastructure to garner the needed support from the red states as well. If the environmentalists can no longer protect everything they view as “precious” they also cannot afford to wait for a sea change in our current polarized politics. The only durable solution is one that can garner bipartisan support and for that to exist the permitting changes must apply to all infrastructure and not just renewables. That was the genius of the core deal that was struck between Senators Manchin and Schumer as part of the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act. But whether environmentalists can be persuaded to join with conservatives to pass a permitting reform bill this year will likely turn on whether they truly believe climate change is an existential crisis and get over their tradeoff denialism.