Environmental movement doesn’t know what to do with the power it has – 06/20/2023 – Ezra Klein

When I spoke with Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, he was clearly frustrated. “This is ridiculous,” he stated. “These guys write reports and protest. But we need to build. You can’t take climate and environment seriously without reforming licensing and procurement in this state.”

Being hammered by your friends is painful. And that’s what’s happening with Newsom. More than 100 environmental groups — including the Sierra Club of California and the Center for Environmental Advocacy — have banded together to fight a package the governor created to make it easier to build infrastructure in California.

For Newsom, it’s a painful break. “I licked envelopes for these organizations as a kid. My dad was on the board of the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund for over ten years. That was my life. But that rigidity and ideological purity will hinder progress. I made climate law in 2022, and those same groups applauded them. It means nothing unless we can deliver.”

The environmental movement is dealing today with the confusion of not knowing what to do with the power it has gained. Hundreds of billions of dollars are being invested in clean energy infrastructure, and previously out-of-the-way decarbonization targets are being signed into law. That’s true in California, which has committed to being carbon neutral and running the power grid on 100% clean energy by 2045.

Meeting those goals requires California to nearly quadruple the amount of electricity it can generate — and shift what it gets today from polluting fuels to clean sources. That means setting aside large areas for solar farms, wind turbines and geothermal systems, building transmission lines to move that energy from where it’s produced to where it’s needed, and creating enough charging stations for electric vehicles to make it possible to ban combustion engine cars. internal.

Taken as a whole, it’s a construction task bigger than anything the state has ever attempted, and it needs to be completed at a speed that nothing in California’s recent history suggests is possible.

California has become famous for what it fails to build. Newsom knows this. “As Mayor, Lieutenant Governor and now as Governor I have seen years turn into decades on high-speed trains,” he said. “People are losing confidence in our ability to build great things. They look at me and say, ‘What the hell happened to California in the 1950s and 1960s?'”

But Newsom’s immediate problem is the Biden administration. Because he also focused on how hard it got to build — not just in California. “These delays are pervasive at all levels — federal, state and local,” John Podesta, Biden’s senior adviser on clean energy, said in a speech last month. “We got so good at stopping projects that we forgot how to build things in the US.”

Compounding Newsom’s problems, California’s recent surpluses turned into deficits. He needs federal money, and lots of it, to fulfill his climate pledges. If California does not get these appropriations, it will fall short of its goals.

“We are going to lose billions of dollars in the current situation,” he told me. “The state can’t cover it. And we’re losing part of it to red states [republicanos]! I’m outraged. The beneficiaries of many of those dollars are red states that don’t give a damn about these issues and are getting the bills. We’re not getting the money because our rules are getting in the way.”

The breadth of opposition and the emotion in Newsom’s defense left me a little unprepared for his actual permissions package, a collection of specific, mostly modest, policies.

When a lawsuit is filed under the Environmental Quality Act, should all emails between agency employees be part of the record or only those seen by decision makers? Should environmental litigation be limited to 270 days for certain types of infrastructure? Should the Department of Transportation contract jobs by type or does it have to run a new bid for each job? Should the 15 endangered species currently classified as “fully protected” be reclassified as “endangered” to make building near them less costly? And so on.

This is not a radical overhaul of California’s environmental protection laws. It doesn’t follow recent housing reforms that use state planning processes to bypass city governments. The proposed changes to the Environmental Quality Act are arguably more modest than those made, almost without notice, to the National Environmental Policy Act as part of the debt ceiling deal.

Much of the fight is being framed as a dispute over the process. Newsom, as he is wont to do, is sending the packet through an accelerated process. It could pass in a few weeks. Opposition groups say acting so quickly “excludes the public and stakeholders and prevents the open and transparent deliberation of important and complex policies”.

Newsom rolls his eyes. Those same groups, he said, “supported us when we passed environmental laws last year through the same process.” “And those goals mean nothing without it.”

The claim Newsom is making is not that all development is good, but that development has become too easy to stop, or at least delay. He is right? It can be said that it depends on the project in question. But policymakers need to set broad rules.

The harder it is to stop development, the more likely it is that bad designs will be made. The easier it is to stop development, the more likely it is that good projects will be blocked. Often, the issue is not whether a project is good or bad, but who helps and who bears the costs. A wind farm can be good for the state and a nuisance for its neighbors.

I’m a little skeptical that Newsom’s package is important enough to deserve the controversy it created. But the fight isn’t just about that package. All involved believe there is still plenty of permissive reform to come as the world warms, the clock ticks against California’s targets, and the federal government begins to apply more pressure.

These are the early stages of a transition from a liberalism that spends to a liberalism that builds. It will be a mess. So far, progressives have been united in the fight against the climate crisis. They wanted more money for clean energy and more ambitious goals to phase out fossil fuels — and they got it. Now that new energy system needs to be built, and quickly. And progressives are nowhere near agreed on how to do that.

Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves

PRESENT LINK: Did you like this text? Subscriber can release five free hits of any link per day. Just click the blue F below.