Green monsters
How big government gets in the way of any hope for improving the environment
THE biggest enemy of immediate environmental action in the United States is, surprisingly, our government itself. Federal renewable energy permits can often take years to be approved — and that’s on top of any (inevitable) local, state, or regional challenges.
Offshore wind, of which the US has a mere 42 megawatts of installed capacity, is a perfect example. Compare this to China, where they installed 17 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity last year alone. While countries like China (and European nations) have quickly built offshore wind facilities, the U.S. government has spent over 10 years just to approve the permits for such efforts. Solar and land-based wind projects have encountered similar challenges due to their interconnectivity with our nation’s complicated multi-state electric grid. The backlog of renewable energy grid applications has doubled the wait time for these projects to begin.
Likewise, America’s nuclear energy sector has some of the toughest restrictions and permitting regulations in the world. In 2022, I toured Plant Vogtle, in Waynesboro, Ga., where the most common complaint I heard was about the higher costs and amount of time that government regulations needlessly slapped onto each project.
Indeed, it’s no secret that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s (NRC) heavy-handed regulatory approach has made it nearly impossible to build any new American nuclear power plants in the past 30 years. In 2009, the Georgia Public Service Commission approved the construction of two new reactors at Plant Vogtle; however, just three months later, the NRC decided to impose new rules, including a requirement that all new reactors withstand direct impact from a large aircraft. The plants never opened.
Other renewable energy sources have been hamstrung by federal regulation, including geothermal. Although the federal government has deemed only a limited number of sites suitable for traditional geothermal efforts, next-generation technologies — such as horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing — could eventually allow us to capture geothermal energy just about anywhere. A major challenge that remains for many states, however, is the permitting process to drill wells on federal lands — which account for about 90% of known sites with geothermal potential. Any geothermal energy development must go through environmental assessments resulting in an average development timeline of eight years.
Government bureaucracy surrounding conservation is also far too restrictive — resulting in harsh consequences in our fight against climate change. For example, one forest-thinning project in Northern California was recently held up for over a decade by unnecessary red tape, created by activists who wanted to protect endangered spotted owls. As the project was paused, a wildfire tragically burned 75% of the owl habitat to the ground, contributing to the 130 million tons of carbon dioxide released by forest fires that year (the equivalent of about a year’s worth of pollution from 25 million cars). All of this could have been prevented via accelerated government approval for forest management.
Contrary to the mainstream narrative, getting the government out of its own way is the first step to scaling environmental protection measures. The federal government should only step in when projects involve territory across more than one state, such as a river; when projects impact the nation’s health, such as with the carbon emissions from forest fires; or when one state’s actions affect an entire industry, such as California’s stricter tailpipe emissions regulations (which forced automakers to change their designs and raise prices for the entire nation).
With our adversaries China and Russia quickly building new projects for all energy sources, America continues to fall behind, largely due to this government overreach. Even worse, the majority of the emissions reductions and clean energy projects promised in President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act are impossible to achieve if our government continues to stand in the way.
While Washington certainly has a role in protecting our environment, we cannot continue allowing bureaucracy to prevent good people, good ideas and good projects from getting off the ground. As such, we must undo any unnecessary government barriers bottlenecking clean energy, conservation and other pro-environmental programs. Local communities, the economic marketplace and entrepreneurs can solve most of these challenges on their own. If we truly care about protecting our environment, we need to work across the aisle, get government out of the way and accelerate America’s clean future.
Adapted from The Conservative Environmentalist: Common Sense Solutions for a Sustainable Future by Benji Backer with permission from Sentinel, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2024 by Benjamin Backer