Big and little construction jobs need various permits, and if you have ever renovated your house, you know the process can be difficult and confusing, never mind time-consuming. Sometimes neighbors and the neighbors of neighbors (abutters and their abutters) need to be notified of your plan and allowed to comment, especially if the renovation project adds a room or otherwise changes the size, appearance, or use of the property that may require a variance of the local zoning code. Builders and homeowners alike find that the processes of lining up permits and variances delay the work for quite some time, it being far too common to have a hiccup or two in one or another or several steps of permitting.
Now imagine getting permits for a large construction project such as a electrical transmission line connecting renewable energy production to the end users of the electricity. These lines may cross several different states, and go through many different towns and neighborhoods, and may be best routed through a wetland or two or maybe a state park or forest. Today, such projects can take ten years or more to line everything up before construction starts, including various environmental impact statements. There is no problem with the practice of assessing environmental impacts for projects, but there is a problem with how badly coordinated the various Federal and State and local agencies involved in such assessments are in practice. Throw in the challenges of authorities within overlapping jurisdictions, such as the mis-mash of FERC (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission) and State energy regulatory bodies, and you’ve upped the complication factor that much more.
As we look to have more of our energy needs answered by clean energy production, these long delays are everyone’s problem. There are significant numbers of clean energy production buildouts that are finished but remain idle because the permitting process for putting in the transmission lines needed to bring the clean energy to the users of the clean energy simply haven’t been built yet, mired in the permitting process.
Of course, the political path to passing bills to improve and speed up energy transmission infrastructure is complicated too. You may recall the role of Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) in scuttling the first clean energy act in the Senate, but you probably also know that the version of a clean energy act called Inflation Reduction Act did pass, and that time Manchin voted yes. Manchin voted yes in large part because he reached an accommodation with others in the Senate that a bill allowing faster energy projects permitting would be supported by fellow Democrats. There was reluctance on the part of some Democrats in the Senate stemming from Manchin’s purpose for the bill, which was to speed up the completion of the Mountain Valley Pipeline, a fossil fuel (natural gas) project in West Virginia, which seemed the wrong direction in relation to greenhouse gas reduction efforts. On the other hand, some 92% of new energy projects currently awaiting permits are solar and wind, and just 7.5% are natural gas.
In the end a bill to this effect was included in Fiscal Responsibility Act (i.e., the debt ceiling bill), which passed Congress and was signed by President Joe Biden in May 2023. The website of the Citizens’ Climate Lobby describes the key components as follows:
- Designates a lead federal agency and singular environmental review document for permitting projects.
- Sets time and page limits on environmental assessments and impact statements while allowing federal agencies to extend the deadlines in coordination with project applicants.
- Allows project applicants to choose to write environmental documents themselves with federal agency review for accuracy.
Progress is being made, but the permitting process remains too cumbersome and slow. As for permitting processes streamlining fossil fuel projects, this may be a compromise, but climate change activists can take comfort in the fact that the vast number of new transmission lines that will benefit from streamlining the permitting processes serve renewable energy. Somewhat less comforting is the hard work still ahead, with the recent permitting bill helpful, but not close to being sufficient.
Citizens’ Climate Lobby has a major project to mobilize citizens to lobby for clean energy permitting reform bills in Congress. Their tagline is on point:
The clean energy revolution is ready. We just need to cut some red tape.
There are nearly a dozen relevant bills making the rounds at the moment, and some are better than others (a few are focused on fossil fuel energy projects!), but the most likely way for a good bill to pass is citizen involvement. A good way to be involved in this effort is through Citizens’ Climate Lobby, an organization specifically designed to influence lawmakers (i.e., “lobby”), which is a good thing considering the fossil fuel industry resources that buy influence. There are other organizations that do great work, including Bill McKibben’s 350.org and his new entity Third Act, which aims to get people of 60 years of age or older into climate activism.
McKibben addressed via video the CCL Conference that took place in Washington D.C. this past June, and his talk was, as usual, terrific. He spoke about permitting reform, but perhaps the high point was his discussion about YIMBY, or Yes In My Back Yard.
And now, neighbor, let’s look closer to home. Not In My Back Yard, or NIMBY, is our present permitting process problems writ small, where a person’s conviction about reducing greenhouse gasses to help offset the severity of climate change too often weakens when it comes to local clean energy efforts, even to the point of opposing such efforts. I recall one such instance, now some years ago, when a farmer of modest means facing retirement after decades of hard toil had entertained an offer of a solar farm lease on some part of his property. Emergency community meetings were called and the Select Board placed this on the agenda to consider a zoning question, even though at that time the Massachusetts law regarding placement of solar installations allowed such use by right. Why then did the Select Board step in? Well, several second homeowners, having purchased their homes near the farm for the pastoral views, threatened to sue the town if the Zoning Board didn’t insist on the solar farm requiring a special permit, despite Massachusetts law. These homeowners prevailed because the developer of the solar farm simply went somewhere else that offered less resistance.
This story is anecdotal, but the NIMBY problem is endemic, and there’s the added issue of climate justice, which is a part of the climate movement that wishes to protect those with less economic power from getting the short end of the stick. In more formal terms, as defined by UC Center for Climate Justice:
Climate Justice recognizes the disproportionate impacts of climate change on low-income communities and communities of color around the world, the people and places least responsible for the problem.
I can still picture that old farmer’s knobbed and knotted hands, and I still shake my head about how selfish we can be. We need to say yes to climate change mitigation efforts far more often and we need permitting reform to move forward, both nationally and locally, and we need to embrace efforts to reduce the threats of climate change, yes, even in—especially in—our own back yards.