Hey Environmentalists — We Need to Build
On November 1, Danish wind developer Ørsted announced that it was cancelling the Ocean Winds 1 and 2 projects in New Jersey, totaling 2,248 megawatts (MW). This, unfortunately, is only the latest in a long list of recent cancellations of U.S. offshore wind projects. Ørsted also walked away from the 884 MW Revolution Wind 2 project after its bid was rejected by Rhode Island’s utility in July. Similarly, Avangrid cancelled its contract with the State of Connecticut for the 804 MW Park City Wind project in last month, after cancelling the 1,200 MW Commonwealth Wind project in July.
All told, there are at least 5,500 megawatts of offshore wind projects on the U.S. East Coast that have been cancelled recently. This represents a peak output of 5.5 standard-sized nuclear reactors, or about 30% of peak demand on an average winter day in New England.
And while offshore wind projects are dying on the vine, we are not on track to build the transmission lines that are critical to fully decarbonize the U.S. electricity supply. While Princeton’s Net Zero project estimates that we need to scale U.S. transmission 2–5x to fully decarbonize our energy systems, Harvard’s Kennedy School’s Belfer Center notes that since 2005 it has taken an average of more than 10 years to build new transmission lines, with interstate transmission lines often taking 15 years or more.
These cancelled offshore wind projects put the schedule for decarbonization of the entire Northeast — a region where 1 in 6 Americans lives — in jeopardy. And the difficulty of building transmission threatens to derail the entire nation’s timeline for getting off fossil fuels.
The problems in the offshore wind sector are many: rising equipment and material costs, supply chain issues and scarcity of key equipment, and soaring interest rates. At their root, a central problem is that many of the projects that are being cancelled were planned and signed contracts to deliver power many years ago under economic assumptions that made sense then but no longer apply.
Digging deeper, the problems that both offshore wind and transmission face are fundamentally problems with timelines. It is simply taking too long to build the infrastructure that we need, and there are too many opportunities for bad actors — or even changing economic conditions — to sabotage these lengthy processes.
Some of the reasons that it takes so long to build both offshore wind and transmission are logistical and/or inherent to the process. But many aren’t. One main impediment is the length of time it takes to get through the Byzantine, overlapping permitting process in the United States.
These policy challenges ultimately reflect political positions. While they are far from the only actors to blame for the dysfunction in the U.S. Congress, the Progressive (Left) wing of the Democratic Party has resisted permitting reform at the federal level. Progressives, led by Rep. Raul Grijalva, have notably insisted that the cumbersome and litigation-prone National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) process remain untouched.
There are many excellent articles already written on this subject, such as this one by two fellows at Institute for Progress, or this one by Brookings. As such, I won’t go into why NEPA in particular needs to be reformed to advance clean energy, except to call out one point made in the Institute for Progress article. At least in the electricity sector, the infrastructure that is in the approval process is overwhelmingly for clean energy, and that therefore speeding up permitting will benefit the transition away from fossil fuels.
Instead, I want to focus on what I see as the underlying problem — the ideology that guides these positions. The progressive members of Congress who resist permitting reform are reflecting the policy positions and thinking of environmental NGOs and the environmental left. And the problem here is larger than any one policy; it is an orientation towards environmental issues that is in many ways stuck in 1970s environmentalism and is ill-suited to meet the urgent needs of combatting the climate crisis.
This is far from the only political challenge that we face when pursuing rapid decarbonization. However, the positions of progressives, environmental NGOs and the environmental left are perhaps the most internally inconsistent, as these are the groups pushing the hardest for action on the climate crisis. In this essay I will examine what I see as the source of this fundamental disconnect that gets in the way of effective climate action, and present where our movement needs to go.
The Limitations of 1970s Environmentalism
When I talk about “1970s environmentalism,” I am referring to an approach to environmental problems with two main aspects. First, it is focused on preserving a state of untouched or pristine nature and is less concerned with meeting human needs. As part of this, 1970s environmentalism has a strong anti-industrial bias, its more extreme forms flirt with anti-technology primitivism. Second, at its core this environmentalism is essentially oppositional: it is about preventing the manifestations of our industrial society from damaging or destroying discrete aspects of nature, including species or ecosystems.
This manifested in actions such as measures to stop the pollution of rivers and the cutting of old-growth forests, to protect endangered species and stop industry and development in environmentally sensitive areas. In doing so, the movement scored some important victories in curbing the worst excesses of industry, mostly in the United States and Europe.
But the 1970s approach has three damning limitations when it comes to addressing big problems like the climate crisis: first, it is limited by its focus on specific places, species, or ecosystems, second that its anti-industrial bias means it is often opposed to infrastructure that meets human needs, and finally that it is fundamentally oppositional. The latter is particularly damning at a time when we need to be building. 1970s environmentalism cannot build; it cannot transform societies or economies. It can only oppose; it can only play defense.
Environmentalism has evolved since the 1970s, even while some features remain. The most important development has been the rise of the environmental justice movement and its incorporation into mainstream environmentalism. This was critical as it helped to shift environmentalism from a focus on preserving untouched nature to a focus on protecting human beings — specifically low-income and people of color that are the most vulnerable in our society, both to various forms of pollution and other harms.
Environmental justice and its offspring, climate justice, can be important parts of the solution by helping to build a better world and broaden the constituencies of climate action while still directly addressing the climate crisis. A good example of this “and, not or” approach are the generous incentives for energy projects serving low income communities and in areas dominated by fossil fuel employment, as well as mandates for the payment of prevailing wages for clean energy projects in the Inflation Reduction Act.
But even with the selective incorporation of environmental justice, much of the environmental movement and the climate movement remains limited by the oppositional, anti-industrial orientation and attitudes that it inherited from 1970s environmentalism.
This is why we see the climate movement mobilizing to stop pipelines, protest banks, and engage in other supply-side actions to stop fossil fuel projects. As explained in a previous essay (There are Bigger Climate Concerns than the Mountain Valley Pipeline), these actions are largely futile and meaningless when dealing with a global, interconnected fossil fuel industry that, like it or not, is meeting human needs for transportation, electricity and heat.
Meanwhile, much of the climate movement may support the idea of building renewable energy, or policies to provide incentives. But when it comes to specific projects and technical details like permitting, the climate movement does not provide unified or consistent support for taking the necessary steps to build the infrastructure that we desperately need to transition our economy off of fossil fuels.
The Climate Moment
I suspect that at its core, the environmental movement’s failure to adapt to the moment that we are in comes from a failure to internalize the implications of the climate crisis. The moment that we are in is not like other moments in human history. We have a very limited amount of time to dramatically reduce emissions and prevent the worst of the climate crisis. Per the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, if we do not reduce global emissions by at least half by 2030, we will lose our chance to keep the world below 1.5°C.
This crisis is no longer in the future, or theoretical. It is tangible and it is now. We are already experiencing the climate crisis directly, with floods, more intense hurricanes, deadly heatwaves, unprecedented wildfires, and effects on agriculture. Per recent studies, we may cross the 1.5°C threshold in as little as seven years.
With every fraction of a degree above 1.5C, we move closer to climate “tipping points,” such as the loss of Arctic sea ice, the melting of methane-laden permafrost, or the transformation of forests from climate sinks to climate sources. When these tipping points are passed, there may be no return in any meaningful timeframe for our species, and they can accelerate further temperature increases and chaos in our weather systems.
It is important to note that whether in Central America, or the U.S. Gulf Coast, these effects are already hitting the poor and people of color more intensely than the affluent. This will only get worse; whether it is the North China Plain, Southern India, or another location, it will be those in the Global South who are most likely to die in large numbers from the first mass casualty event caused by deadly “wet bulb” temperatures.
As such, an environmentalism that does not focus on doing what we need to prevent the worst of the climate crisis cannot be said to be an environmentalism that is truly serving the most vulnerable in our world. And yet many environmental groups deprioritize rapid decarbonization in favor of “protecting” specific ecosystems or places — such as the resistance to even the modest impacts caused by lithium extraction in the salt flats of Chile, or the fights by conservationists against solar projects in the Mountain West and transmission lines in New England.
Even the climate movement is not consistently taking the kinds of strategic actions that are necessary given the emergency that we are in. By insisting on protecting a process that draws out the timelines for building offshore wind, transmission, and other clean energy infrastructure with red tape, environmental NGOs have shown that they are unable to see the forest for the trees.
At its worst, this anti-industrial, oppositional, regulation-heavy 1970s approach provides room for well-heeled Not In My Backyard (NIMBY) and anti-renewable energy groups to slow and block the infrastructure we need. These groups show their ideological debt to 1970s environmentalism when they inevitably use the language of “saving” particular places from renewable energy development. They also show just how easily this form environmentalism can be used as an excuse for the affluent to protect their privileges — such as their views off the beaches of Nantucket — at the expense of humanity’s future.
The Movement We Need
First, the environmental movement needs to accept that the climate crisis is the most potent existential threat that we face as a species, and that all other concerns are necessarily secondary.
Second, in order for the environmental movement to realize its potential, it must be transformed from a reactive, defensive, movement to a creative movement. It must become one that focuses on deployment of solutions; one that builds.
Third, because a human-focused and a solutions-focused environmentalism that confronts the climate crisis will mean proposing solutions that have environmental impacts — most notably mining — this movement must effectively deal with the inevitable clash with existing values. We in the environmental movement and climate movements are going to have to get more comfortable with trade-offs of lesser harms for those changes that are needed to stave off the worst of a warming planet. As Michael Gerrard of Columbia Law School so eloquently put it, we must approach this crisis with a triage mentality, knowing that we will not save everything.
We must also transform aesthetics. Instead of a focus on “untouched” nature, we need to embrace development that serves human needs without destroying our future. While we can continue to love forests, rivers, and mountains, and see these things as beautiful, we need to also see the beauty of wind turbines, of transmission lines, of solar farms, and of fast electric trains running on smooth tracks.
We must embrace industry that brings us the future that we need — including the developers who have been so effectively demonized in popular culture and who serve as scapegoats for other societal failures. But we must also recognize that industry alone cannot achieve the shift that is needed. The clean energy industries have powerful economic advantages but politically they do not have the money or lobbying power that incumbent fossil fuel industries have. They need support from those outside the industry.
There are many individuals and groups that have already begun this shift, from the YIMBY/urbanist movement to explicitly pro-renewable energy groups. There may be no better exemplar of the spirit of the movement that we need than Department of Energy Loan Programs Office head Jigar Shah’s slogan of “deploy, deploy, deploy.”
As part of our work to reframe environmental discourse, we scale our presence within the environmental movement. Those with clear vision need take leadership. In doing so, we will need to push aside environmentalists who have failed to evolve with the times, and those for whom the false “perfect” world of no environmental impacts — a world that never existed — has become the enemy of a livable planet.
Such actions may or may not save all of the current wave of offshore wind projects, power lines, or other clean energy projects that have been derailed by lawsuits. In order to scale our response to the urgency of the climate crisis, we need the participation of many parts of society, and the environmental and climate movements are only one part of this.
But these movements could play a critical role in shifting the balance of society. But by changing attitudes, we can work to change policies to ensure that successive waves of clean energy projects can be executed ever more quickly and with greater regulatory certainty, and are less likely to be dragged down by spurious lawsuits.
We need to transform our movement into one that builds, and celebrates building. We have limited time to do so.
Note: As with my other writing on Medium, this story reflects my personal views and not those of my employer.
