Way back in 2016, I posted about how I was hunting for a magazine with an ecofrugal spin. Unfortunately, I never really found one I was happy with. But over the years since then, I've searched again from time to time, and last January I thought I might have found a solution. By becoming a member of Green America, I'd automatically get a subscription to its Green American magazine, which covers a range of topics related to climate, social justice, and green living. Even if it wasn't exactly what I wanted, at least my subscription fee would go to support a worthy environmental organization.
So, the year went by, and I was reasonably satisfied with the magazine—not utterly delighted, but I thought it was good enough to be worth the membership fee. Being a member also meant that I would periodically receive emails urging me to take action on various environmental issues, but I didn't really mind that. I'd occasionally click through if I thought the issue was worthy of attention, and if I didn't, I'd just hit delete. Until this week, when this message from Green America brought me up short:
Tell Your Senator to Block Manchin's Dirty Deal
Senator Joe Manchin’s “Dirty Deal” is back and, if passed, would put front-line communities at greater risk and increase greenhouse gases by “streamlining” the approval process for fossil fuel projects. The senator wants to dismantle the policies in place that are meant to protect communities and mitigate the climate crisis. We need to stop it ASAP.
So, you may ask, what's wrong with that? Shouldn't an environmentalist like me want to stop new fossil fuel infrastructure? I mean, if we want to transition to a clean energy economy, isn't blocking fossil fuel projects a crucial part of that?
No. No it isn't.
The fact is, fossil fuel projects are already on the decline. And it's not because environmentalists have been vigilant about blocking them; they're just too expensive. At this point, the cheapest ways to generate electricity are solar and wind. In 2021, 85% of all new energy capacity came from clean sources, mostly solar. And of the new projects currently in the "queue"—that is, proposed projects waiting to be approved—over 92% are wind and solar. Natural gas accounts for only 7.5% of the total, and coal for none whatsoever.
But here's the catch: Most of these proposed clean energy projects will never be built. And the main reason why is problems with permitting—not just for the plants themselves, but for the power lines they need to carry their energy.
You see, the best places to put new solar and wind farms are out in the country, where there's lots of room for them. But in order to get the energy from these facilities to cities, where it's needed, you need new transmission lines—a lot of new transmission lines. According to Princeton University's Net Zero America project, we need to more than triple the rate at which we're building new transmission lines in order to support a fully renewable power grid by 2050. If we continue to build them at our current, slow rate, we'll miss out on about 80% of all the emissions cuts promised by the Inflation Reduction Act. In fact, fossil fuel use in the U.S. will actually increase, because we'll have to burn more coal and gas to meet the increased demand for electricity from all those electric cars and heat pumps.
But right now, getting those new power lines built is a long, slow, cumbersome process. On average, getting a new long-distance transmission line built takes over ten years. And over four of those years are spent just getting all the necessary permits. If a transmission line runs between states, you have to get separate permits from each state government—and often from municipal governments too—before you can even start building. Each of these governments has its own rules about permitting, usually involving extensive environmental review. And a project can be challenged at any step of the process, tying it up in court for years.
Approval for fossil fuel pipelines tends to go significantly faster. These can be approved at the federal level by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). The Energy Independence and Security Act would have allowed FERC to approve interstate transmission lines and also to intervene in fights over who should pay for them. But because the same bill also contained some provisions that would have helped fossil fuel suppliers, environmental groups—including Green America—have labeled this a "dirty deal" and lobbied heavily against it, blocking it not once but twice. Even though the bill's benefits would have gone overwhelmingly to clean power projects, and even though failure to improve the grid will actually make emissions worse, they decided that it was the principle of the thing that mattered.
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