The progressive take on the permitting debate

In this episode, Johanna Bozuwa of the Climate and Community
Project shares a progressive vision for permitting reform and the
factors that could speed up the US clean-energy buildout.


(PDF
transcript)


(Active
transcript)


Text transcript:


David Roberts


To achieve its Paris climate targets, the US is going to have to
build out an enormous amount of clean energy and clean-energy
infrastructure in coming years. But that buildout is going slowly
— painfully, excruciatingly slowly — relative to the pace that is
necessary.


This has given rise to considerable debate on the left over what,
exactly, is slowing things down. Much of that debate has come to
focus on permitting, and more specifically, on permitting under
the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA.


A deal that would have put some restrictions on NEPA in exchange
for reforms to transmission planning was effectively killed by
progressives toward the end of the last congressional session,
leading many people inside and outside the climate movement to
accuse progressives of being The Problem. They are so attached to
slowing down fossil fuel development with NEPA, the accusation
goes, that they are willing to live with it slowing clean energy.
And that’s a bad trade.


Progressives, not surprisingly, disagree! Their take on the whole
permitting debate is summarized in a new paper from the Roosevelt
Institute and the Climate and Community Project: “A Progressive
Vision for Permitting Reform.”


The title is slightly misleading, since one of the central points
of the paper is that permitting under NEPA is only a small piece
of the puzzle — there are many other factors that play a role in
slowing clean energy, and many other reforms that could do more
to speed it up. I called up one of the paper’s co-authors,
Johanna Bozuwa of the Climate and Community Project, to ask her
about those other reforms, the larger political debate, and the
progressive community’s take on speed.


All right, then. With no further ado, Johanna Bozuwa from the
Climate and Community Project. Welcome to Volts, and thank you so
much for coming.


Johanna Bozuwa


Thank you so much for having me, David.


David Roberts


This is a hot topic, as you're well aware, permitting and the
larger issues around it. And so, before we jump into specifics, I
wanted to start with a few sort of broad, call them
philosophical, questions.


Johanna Bozuwa


Perfect.


David Roberts


As you know, progressives have been under quite a bit of fire
lately, not only from their typical opponents on the right and in
the fossil fuel industry, but from a lot of sort of centrists and
even a lot of sort of allies in the climate movement. For — I
think the general idea is they are too attached to stopping
fossil fuels and not yet supportive enough of building out
renewable energy. And the mechanisms that they rely on to slow
and stop fossil fuels are also slowing and stopping renewable
energy. And so I think the general critique is that they ought to
swing around and be more pro-building and loosen these
requirements, et cetera, et cetera. I'm sure you've heard all
this.


Johanna Bozuwa


Yes.


David Roberts


So I guess I'd just start with this question. Is, do you think
the progressive — and by the way, I meant to say this by way of a
caveat, I'm going to be sort of using you as a spokesperson for
progressivism, which I think we both realize is ridiculous.


Johanna Bozuwa


Right, exactly.


David Roberts


Progressives are heterogeneous just like anybody else. There's no
official progressive position. But as a crude, let's just say as
a crude instrument here, we're going to ask you to speak for that
perspective as you see it.


Johanna Bozuwa


Perfect.


David Roberts


So in your opinion, do you think progressives have taken it into
their heart that things are moving too slowly and they
desperately need to move faster?


Johanna Bozuwa


My answer to that question is that I think speed is progressive.
You know, David, I don't need to tell this to you or any of the
people that listen to this podcast or even progressives. We're
dealing with the existential threat of the climate crisis and
lives are on the line. And so I think that as progressives, we do
need to take the speed question seriously. And I think what I
would push back on is the fact that people have this myopic focus
on permitting as the thing that's slowing everything down. And
especially when I'm talking about permitting, NEPA permitting.


David Roberts


Right. We're going to definitely get to that.


Johanna Bozuwa


Yeah. And I just think that when it comes to this question of "Do
progressives believe in speed?" I think that they actually very
much do. And one of the things that I get frustrated with
sometimes, when I hear these arguments like "Oh, progressives
don't want to build anything," I think what progressives are
interested in is building the right thing. And if we think about
the United States and how our energy system rolls out today, we
have a real issue that fossil fuels can expand at the same time
as renewable energy is expanding. Like when it comes to fossil
fuels, we can actually export that.


We are now the biggest net exporter of LNG and crude oil. And I
think that progressives are particularly aware that if we do the
wrong thing on permitting then we're actually not only expanding
renewable energy — and maybe poorly done renewable energy — but
also the fossil fuel industry knows how to use these tools so
much better than our renewable energy developers. And we are
going to see just a massive expansion that we absolutely don't
need right now. If we think the climate crisis matters.


David Roberts


What about the argument which goes like this: Fossil fuels are
reaching sort of a structural peak and decline. Renewable energy
is getting cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. It's on the rise. So
if you just, all things being equal, make it easier to build
everything across the board, renewable energy will win that race
and so it's worth doing.


Johanna Bozuwa


I just don't think that argument is true, look at how much power
the fossil fuel industry still has in making these decisions.
Like if we look at who is behind the recent push for permitting
reform: It was largely the oil and gas industry. There's
definitely some more nuance that's there, but they have
significant power to move things and move them faster than the
clean energy world. It's a question of when you're rolling back
some of these bedrock environmental laws that the pie — it's not
that the part of renewable energy in the pie is getting bigger.
It's that even if we are getting more renewable energy, the pie
itself has expanded so that we're having fossil fuels and
renewables expanding at the same time.


And it's not fully pushing out the power of the fossil fuel
industry.


David Roberts


Well, then, how about this? And this is the final philosophical
question before we get down to some nuts and bolts. Do you agree
that there are going to be trade-offs as we pursue speed? This
is, of course, the big discussion right now is that if you really
double down on speed, if you really pursue speed with everything
you've got, there are inevitably going to be some trade-offs,
some other progressive values that have to take a backseat. And
that might be other environmental impacts. It might be impacts on
communities. It might be, you know, name it. It might be that we
have to loosen up a little bit on those other things.


Do you think that there are those trade-offs?


Johanna Bozuwa


I think that there are some trade-offs. You, I think, had my
colleague, Thea Riofrancos, on the pod some time ago talking
about lithium extraction, right? And the fact that if we are
going to decarbonize our transportation sector, it is going to
take extraction in order to accomplish that. Right. And there are
substantial and significant impacts that has in terms of water
contamination in some of the most drought-impacted parts of the
United States, that is something that we need to be thinking
about. And I think what my hesitation is when it comes to so much
of this conversation is that we're talking about deregulation as
the way to do speed instead of actually talking about planning
and coordination.


And from my perspective, it's the planning and coordination that
allows us to think through the decisions we're making with a far
better sense of what's happening instead of a "get government out
of the way, we'll figure it out" project that — it didn't really
do great things for the planet. Are we going to do that again and
trying to fix it? That seems like a silly mistake to make.


David Roberts


Yeah, that's a really important distinction. I'm glad we get that
out up front. Because I hate when we go from, "Yes, there are
trade-offs" to therefore "Let it rip, let everything go." As Thea
said on the podcast, we can acknowledge those trade-offs and
thoughtfully try to minimize them through planning.


Johanna Bozuwa


Exactly.


David Roberts


So let's start with this. As you say, there's this sort of what
we're calling the permitting debate, quote unquote. Permitting
debate is actually a bunch of debates and they're all kind of
getting squished together under this notion of permitting. But in
fact, there's a lot of things going on here other than
permitting. So maybe talk just a little bit about all the
disparate things that are now sort of getting lumped together
under that rubric.


Johanna Bozuwa


Exactly. So I think just to put a point on it, often when people
are talking about permitting, they're talking about this
unfocused conversation about cutting red tape. But really what it
comes down to is where the fight is right now in particular on
the national stage is around NEPA. So the National Environmental
Policy Act, but wrapped up into all of their arguments are all
these other pieces that actually are maybe more of the problem
than particularly NEPA. So, you know, four of them, just to start
us off, obviously we do have NEPA. That's part of the permitting
process.


We have local and state zoning permits, approvals, things like
that. You know, going to Georgia County to make sure that you can
put something through. Then you have third, these contracts or
arrangements that are actually between private organizations.
David, I know you had folks talking about internet connection
queues — that often is part of the permitting debate, but it's
actually about who gets to go onto the transmission that's being
built.


David Roberts


Let me pause there because I want to make a point that I'm not
sure everybody understands and I'm not even sure we made it in
that pod. But the ISOs, the ...


Johanna Bozuwa


Independent service operators. I know I always mess it up. RTOs.
ISOs.


David Roberts


Yes, I know. ISOs and RTOs. I could never call that to mind. But
anyway, the ones who are sort of running the transmission systems
and running these queues are not public organizations. Those are
not state organizations. They are private consortia of
transmission organizations and utilities and things like that. So
it's not something that the state can come in and just directly
change. I just think that's worth sort of putting on the record.


Johanna Bozuwa


I think that's a really important point and I think we'll
probably dig into this further. But the idea that and I think you
talked about this on the pod last time, but there are so many
different kind of private actors that are operating within the
RTOs and ISOs with not actually a huge amount of oversight, as it
currently stands.


David Roberts


Yes, or transparency.


Johanna Bozuwa


Or transparency.


David Roberts


Or accountability, really.


Johanna Bozuwa


Yeah, exactly. And it turns out if we're looking at what's really
miring the buildout of renewable energy, a solid amount of it is
right there. Is in the interconnection queues. I think it was
Southwest PowerPool — takes like eight years sometimes to get the
developer to get their project through. And those are for
projects that already have their offtaker and have all their
permitting in place. So it just feels quite misguided for us to
spend all of this time talking about permitting when we could be
actually diagnosing the problem —


David Roberts


And you said there was a fourth.


Johanna Bozuwa


— and there's a fourth. The fourth one, I would say, is just
operation and construction permits, like some of the pollution
discharge stuff that is at some of these more local levels. And
those four don't even include some of the other things that stop
things, which is like access to capital, utility squabbles,
supply chain slowdowns, these whole host of other issues that are
just being swept under the rug because it's very alluring to say,
guess what? I have the one quick fix to make sure that renewable
energy gets built in the United States.


David Roberts


And local NIMBYism. I'd throw that in.


Johanna Bozuwa


Yeah, yeah, local NIMBYism, absolutely. Add it to the pile,
exactly. So and NEPA's not going to do things about local
NIMBYism in the same way that's the local and state zoning stuff.


David Roberts


Yeah, I think people really want, for obvious reasons, they're
frustrated by everything going so slowly and everybody wants
there to be sort of like something to cut the Gordian knot, sort
of one, as you said, one weird trick. And that's, I think, why
people are grasping onto NEPA because it seems like that's one
big thing we can argue about and change. But as you say, the
reasons here are very disparate. But let's just take a second to
talk about NEPA. I go back and forth on this, but is it, do you
think the progressive position that NEPA is okay "as is" and
doesn't need any changes?


Like, do you think there are problems with NEPA and how it's
administered?


Johanna Bozuwa


Okay. My feeling on this is that the case about NEPA is
overstated, especially as we describe so many other things, even
outside of the permitting process that matters. But if we're
going to talk about NEPA, I think overall the projects are going
through pretty quickly. There was a new study, actually, this
month by, I think, David Adelman that did a really comprehensive
look at wind and solar NEPA reviews over the past ten years, and
he found that less than 5% of Wind and solar projects required.
The EIS, like the Environmental Impact Statement, which is the
one that takes the most time usually, can be two and a half years
or whatever, but they're going through with categorical
exclusions or some of these faster ways to move wind and solar
projects through, or just projects in general.


And he found that there was very little litigation involved,
which is often like the dog whistle, I feel like, of some of
these folks who are calling for permitting.


David Roberts


Yeah, I was surprised when I looked at that study. It's a
relatively low percentage of those projects that get litigated
after they're done.


Johanna Bozuwa


Right, exactly. And I think if I were to make any improvements to
NEPA, the thing I would do is bulk up the administrative state.
Jamie Gibbs Pleune wrote a kind of corresponding piece of
research to our permitting report where she investigated and
talked about NEPA in particular with Roosevelt. But she was
looking at another paper and found of 40,000 NEPA decisions that
the US Forest Service looked at, the biggest causes of delays
were actually from a lack of experienced staff, budget
instability, and honestly, delays from the applicants themselves
not getting their stuff in on time. So I just feel as if we're
going to do anything to make NEPA better, give the BLM, give US
Forest Service, give EPA far more funds, training, staff
empowerment that's going to actually move these projects even
faster through the pipeline when they're actually moving
relatively quickly.


And these places have experienced chronic understaffing and lack
of empowerment. So there is work to be done there. I don't want
to understate that, but I think that it's a reasonable thing for
us to accomplish without rolling back and applying a very
neoliberal frame to how we get this job done.


David Roberts


Yeah, I would say it does seem like NEPA has sprawled a bit since
it was passed. Originally, it was supposed to be major projects
that came under NEPA review, and the court basically decided that
all projects were under NEPA review. And so there's just
thousands and thousands now that just have these little sort of
not very long delays because they get these categorical
exemptions. But there's just a lot of — it's very sprawling, it
seems like, and unfocused. This is one of those areas where I
feel like there are procedures of the administrative state that
could work better and more effectively.


But at this point, liberals, they've just been under assault for
so long. And liberals just know if you open this can of worms, if
you open it up to review, there's just a pool of piranhas that
want to go in and strip it bare. And so they just don't open it
for review. Like, there's so many things like this. Like, if we
could have a good faith process of actually trying to do what
NEPA is supposed to do better than NEPA does it, I feel like,
yeah, there's stuff we could improve, but Joe Manchin doesn't
want to improve it.


Johanna Bozuwa


We don't want Joe Manchin in charge of what NEPA looks like and
what's the more muscular version that takes into consideration
the real-life climate impacts. Because I don't know when you're
talking there, David, a thing that comes up for me is the reality
that we will have more things happening on the ground. Like,
let's say you put transmission in, we have a wildfire crisis. Now
all of a sudden, the stakes are higher when it comes to these
things like environmental review that are very material that I
think also aren't talked about as much as they should be. And so,
yeah, I can imagine things being shifted and changed within NEPA
so that it works better for the current context.


But I think that, as you describe it, could be a real political
problem for us to do that type of work right now. And we have
other mechanisms that can move us much more quickly in the
interim. Like, is this really the thing we want to be spending
our time on as progressives? The answer is no.


David Roberts


And I also think if you look at the reforms that were sort of
ended up getting jammed through, like of all the thoughtful
things you could do to NEPA to make it work better, just a sort
of — page limit, like a page limit on reviews: Seems like it's
such a blunt instrument. It's such a crude way of approaching
this.


Johanna Bozuwa


Oh, and I think it's going to get them into serious trouble. If
you want a thing that is going to increase litigation, try adding
an arbitrary deadline and page limit to something with no
administrative capacity.


David Roberts


Okay. We could do a whole pod on NEPA, but I don't want to get
too — our whole point is it's not the sole or even main
impediment here. So at a slightly more granular level, let's talk
about what you think is actually slowing down clean energy
infrastructure build out. And there's a few categories your
report covers starting with transmission, which is, I think, the
big one.


Johanna Bozuwa


Yeah, totally. And I would agree with you. I mean, transmission
planning is kind of in shambles in this country. It's not up to
the job.


David Roberts


Yeah, I don't think literally anybody on any side of anything
would disagree with you about that.


Johanna Bozuwa


Exactly. And I think there are a couple of reasons for that. One
is that multistate transmission buildouts are incredibly hard to
do in a federalized system. We just have so many different actors
that are vying to hold on to their particular part of the market,
especially with our vertically integrated utilities that don't
have much interest in allowing other utilities into their service
territory. And in deregulated states, utilities are kind of out
of the picture for deciding where new generation is being built.
So there's not a lot of efficiencies that are built into that. So
we just get this really haphazard development, if development at
all, of our transmission system, which I think is just quite a
failure.


There are so many clear opportunities to do much more clear
planning around this.


David Roberts


Yes. And then what about big large-scale renewable energy
projects like big solar, wind, geothermal, what is in practice,
slowing down their build out?


Johanna Bozuwa


Yeah, so I think that when it comes to some of these larger scale
projects around solar or wind, you're running again into projects
that aren't thinking strategically about where they're being
placed. So if we're looking at the amount of land that we're
going to need with the energy transition right. Wind and solar
take more space up than one natural gas plant. And I think that
there's just like a clear lack of land use planning when it comes
to these larger scale projects when we could be doing it far
better. Right. And thinking about what are the areas that make
sense and are going to limit the amount of impact on our
landscape and on communities and actually deploy it in those
areas.


And I actually think there are answers to that question.


David Roberts


Well, we're not to answers yet. We're dwelling on problems.


Johanna Bozuwa


Okay, all right —


David Roberts


So how does that slow down? I mean, what does that manifest as?
How does that slow down the build out?


Johanna Bozuwa


Yeah, well, the way that that manifests is that you're putting
big renewable energy projects in tension with things like
agriculture. You're putting big renewable projects in tension
with our biodiversity goals. And so those are the things that are
going to potentially mire the development and deployment of these
larger scale projects — in addition to getting them attached to
the transmission and making sure that it's colocated with the
transmission we need.


David Roberts


Yes, the aforementioned interconnection queue issue, which alone
is like, "That's a lot of years," which as you say, that's a lot
of years tacked on the end of all the other stuff they have to go
through. Like once they have to go through all that other stuff,
then they get in the interconnection queue and wait and wither,
etc. And then another thing you take on here is a big piece of
the clean energy buildout, which I think a lot of people don't
really think about as much, maybe don't enjoy thinking about as
much, which is the sort of minerals and metals aspect of it. A
big part of IRA, the Inflation Reduction Act, is an attempt to
onshore supply chains so that China does not dominate them.


But that means onshoring some mines and some minerals processing
which are not necessarily environmentally friendly, not
necessarily things people like having in their backyard. So
what's slowing those things down?


Johanna Bozuwa


I guess I would say there are two pieces that are happening. One
is just that this is a pretty new area and there are so many
price fluctuations that are happening. There's all of these big
mining companies that are shifting ownership, trying to figure
out financing. Right? So there's a lot that's happening there.
And mining companies are not the best known for having perfect
environmental impact statements or anything like that, that's
going to get them mired right. And then you add in the fact that
as we talked about earlier, a lot of where these lithium reserves
are is also in extremely — like the likelihood for drought is a
lot higher if you're looking, for instance, at the Salton Sea in
California or, you know, over in Nevada, these are places that we
actually have to be extremely careful about. And also it just
takes a really long time to build a mine like this isn't
something that happens the next day. Right. It's like 10 to 15
years in the future type thing. So it is a longer time frame
that's going to be even longer if we aren't thinking, again,
about who is impacted, how they are going to be impacted by the
mining itself. What is that going to do to air quality, water
quality, all of these different things?


It's a really big part of the permitting discussion, or of the
transition discussion in particular that is being discounted in
the United States.


David Roberts


And one more bit on problems, before we transition to
recommendations. I noticed that one thing you don't get into a
lot in the report is the expression of those state and local
level permitting issues. And a lot of those I think, are tied to
environmental review. And a lot — like, for instance, the
California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) is just sort of like
legendarily at this point, a tool for local NIMBYs to stop things
happening. Like we just read a story that was bouncing around
Twitter a few days ago about these wealthy people — I forget what
county they were in — but they were suing because someone had
moved a playground closer to their house.


They didn't like the sound of the kids playing and so they sued.
And part of it was that the city had not done a proper
environmental review under CEQA of moving the playground. And you
hear stories like that all the time. Do you think you said that
NEPA is not as big a problem as people say? Do you think state
level environmental review is a serious problem, a serious
barrier, at least in some places?


Johanna Bozuwa


I think it just really depends on the place. And I think that's
part of why as we were writing a national paper, being able to
dig into the detail and differentiations between all of these
different places seemed like a big haul for a small paper. So
yeah, I think that there are these pieces at the local level, the
zoning things, right? People are historic preservation boards
that are saying like, "No rooftop solar because we don't like the
look of it." Yeah, that's some BS in my mind and I think we do
need to figure out how to manage that.


And I think what this comes into conversation with is a little
bit of like, what is the community review process? What does that
look like and how do we manage that?


David Roberts


Contemplating the variety and number of those instruments at the
state and local level is really overwhelming and really does make
the problem feel so intractable because it's just like, as you
say in a federalist system, it's like every bit of reform is not
just one bit, it's 50 bits. Every bit is 50 fights.


Johanna Bozuwa


Totally agree. And I think that's why we get stuck in these
gridlocks sometimes. And also when we get to solutions, I think
there are some examples that we can draw on and utilize our
little multi tool of ideas of how to move this forward.


David Roberts


Final thing before that, because I forgot about this bit, but
actually it's worth making a note that it's actually easier for
fossil fuel infrastructure to get NEPA permits than it is for
clean energy projects. It's something you note in the paper. If
anything, NEPA is easier on these pipelines and stuff. Even
though Joe Manchin is complaining ceaselessly about it.


Johanna Bozuwa


Yes, and I mean, I think that's why in particular, people who
have been fighting the fossil fuel industry for so long, look to
this group of folks, more center left folks, that are saying
"Repeal NEPA, let's do it, we want to build." They're saying, "Oh
my gosh. What you're doing by saying that is saying that the West
Virginian that I have been fighting alongside is going to be
decimated by this pipeline that's being passed now." So there are
really high stakes and in a lot of the permitting process that we
saw at the federal level, it also implicated the Mountain Valley
pipeline.


Right. And that type of infrastructure getting a pass when it
couldn't even get some of its permits at the state level to just
go forth is a really, I think, scary potential because that locks
us into decades of extraction.


David Roberts


Yeah, I feel like that was not covered well when this whole thing
happened. You know, the Mountain Valley Pipeline: It's not that
it was like stuck unfairly in a bureaucratic tangle. It just sort
of straightforwardly was polluting and so it couldn't get the
permits, the permits were rejected. It wasn't like stuck in some
queue or something. It was just straightforwardly a polluting
project that could not qualify under US law to go on. And it was
just like jammed through. So I feel like the outrage of that
didn't really penetrate partially because everybody's on this
like "everything needs to go faster tip" and so they just kind of
slotted it under there.


But we don't want things that straightforwardly fail
environmental review going forward do we?


Johanna Bozuwa


Exactly, like, I would like, that the Cuyahoga River does not
catch on fire again. And that's the reason we have environmental
review and NEPA. And also I would like it to be able to stop more
fossil fuel infrastructure.


David Roberts


Yeah, I know. And this is the other thing too, as though we're
supposed to have some sort of content neutral opinions about
permitting as such. I'm just like, "Well, I want more good stuff
and less bad stuff. Can I have that opinion?"


Johanna Bozuwa


Exactly. That's so crucial too, where there are ways for us to
stop permitting new fossil fuel infrastructure and permit the
hell out of good renewable energy projects. That's a political
possibility that Biden actually had signed up for and now is
stepping back on.


David Roberts


Yeah, I mean, it's politically tough, but let's be positive here.
You have a lot of recommendations in here, all of which are
juicy, all of which could probably have a podcast of their own on
them. There's no way we can cover them all. But you sort of have
your principles and recommendations grouped under three headings.
And the first one, which I think is the one that is most directly
germane to the speed question, is enabling more coordination and
planning. And I think this is a huge thing. This is one of my
soapboxes I get on all the time.


I really want the climate movement to take this up is that we've
had decades and decades of for lack of a better term,
neoliberalism and this sort of instinctive free market stuff. And
it's not like any major developed economy actually stops
planning. What happens when you claim you're not planning and you
claim you're being a free market is you just move planning behind
closed doors or bury it in the tax code where no one can see it
or understand what's happening. And then that results in whoever
has the most power and money winning the planning fights.


So I'm done with my soapbox. Let's talk about restoring our
ability to do public, transparent, cooperative planning. Let's
talk about a few of the items under here. And first is just land
use planning. What do you mean by that and what would it look
like?


Johanna Bozuwa


So, land use planning, as we talked about earlier, it turns out
that one fossil fuel plant is a lot smaller than the types of
assets that we need to build. That's just a reality of what we're
working with. And so that necessitates far more land use planning
to think about how do we get the most out of the least amount of
space that is going to do the best for keeping the lights on. And
so there are examples of how we can do this type of land
planning. And one example I want to bring up actually is in
California.


So there was the Desert Renewable Energy Plan that was basically
where states and federal agencies came together and they were
looking at the Mojave and Colorado desert area. It's like 22
million acres.


David Roberts


Very sunny.


Johanna Bozuwa


Yeah, very sunny, exactly. Very sunny, very good for some solar.
And what they did is that they coordinated a plan for this entire
region so that it was prescreened for issues. So they said, okay,
we're going to look at the biodiversity impacts of things being
put here. We're going to look at the cultural or tribal impacts,
the environmental potential impacts. And so after they did that
kind of, what's called often like a programmatic study, that
meant that the developers that came in to build the stuff there
don't have to go through some more involved environmental impact
assessment or study because it's already done.


And so that meant that because they had done all of that work
ahead of time, projects are getting approved so much faster.
They're getting approved in less than ten months. And have, I
think it's been now this zone has been around for about ten years
and I don't think there is one litigation case. So that is just
such a good example of land use planning where it's like thinking
ahead of what we need and how we're going to do it. And that
still does allow for private developers to come in, even though I
might even argue that we could do even more planning and fill in
the gaps with some public transmission or public renewable
energy.


But we can get into that later.


David Roberts


And we did an example from California, so I think now we're
constitutionally obliged to do one from Texas too.


Johanna Bozuwa


Absolutely. Well, exactly. Thank you for setting me up so neatly,
David, for the Competitive Renewable Energy Zones of Texas, which
was such a success. So this is a very similar situation where the
legislature directed the PUC, the Public Utilities Commission to
plan where new generation and transmission was going to be
located, routed, all of this. And so by doing so, they allowed
for this proliferation of wind in Texas, a place where you might
not expect a massive amount of wind to be. And I was reading a
study the other day that said that in the past ten years, the
CREZ line, so the Competitive Renewable Energy Zone, represents
23% of all new high voltage lines in the US.


David Roberts


Good grief.


Johanna Bozuwa


Right?


David Roberts


Yeah. They're actually building I mean, I don't know if people
know this, they're actually building transmission in Texas. I'll
just talk about how transmission never gets built. They're
building it there because —


Johanna Bozuwa


They had a plan.


David Roberts


They planned in advance. Yes, they had zones where it got
approved and so you didn't have to then go there and do the
entire like a transmission developer didn't have to go somewhere
and then do the entire thing. Right. Do the entire review, do the
entire land use review and the environmental review. They didn't
have to start over every time that stuff was done in advance.


Okay, point made. There more land use coordination and planning.
That's the states doing it. But you could imagine the feds
getting into that somewhat. You have these jurisdictional issues
and federalism issues that are a bit of a tangle, but it does
seem like the feds at the very least could do some informational,
advisory planning and assessment on a bigger level, don't you
think?


Johanna Bozuwa


Oh, absolutely. Actually, we do have a lot of private land in
this country. Absolutely. But there is a lot of land that is
owned by the federal government. So they're actually implicating
a lot of this already. And it makes far more sense for an actor
that has that kind of meso level understanding of what we need to
build to be involved in those processes and be doing kind of a
national assessment of where should those zones be. Like CREZ
that's going to have all of these benefits and is going to allow
for the most kind of efficient way for us to be deploying
renewable energy while also taking into consideration these
biodiversity, tribal nation relations and all of these things.


That's a good role for the federal government to actually play.


David Roberts


Okay, we're going to pass quickly by two of these since I've done
pods on them. But as you say, one is the interconnection process,
which is probably the biggest thing right now, slowing down
renewable energy getting built. I did a whole pod on that with
RMI's Chaz Teplin a few weeks ago.


Johanna Bozuwa


A fantastic one.


David Roberts


Really encourage everybody to go listen to that. There's a lot of
recommendations in there for how to improve the interconnection
process, how to improve things in batches. To return to a theme
here, a lot of that has to do with just more and better planning
on the ISO's parts.


Once again, like, think in advance a little bit and you can skip
some of this case by case stuff, but I encourage people to go
listen to that pod. Another one, which we've touched on slightly,
which I also did a pod on, is just and I think this is so
important is just the capacity of the agencies that are doing
these reviews. These are at the state level and at the federal
level. These agencies have been cut to the bone. They're all, all
understaffed, desperately behind, and that, of course, makes
things go slower. So all these people who are whinging about
reviews, if they're not talking about bulking up agency capacity,
I just have trouble taking them seriously because that is the
lowest hanging fruit you could do.


But I did a whole pod on that several weeks ago about government
capacity and about some of the provisions in the IRA that are
meant to bulk up capacity at these agencies. It's just a matter
of money and hiring. So we're going to check that one off the
list. Let's talk a little bit about this next recommendation,
which is about more publicly owned energy and transmission. What
do you mean by that? What would that look like?


Johanna Bozuwa


Yeah, so this is kind of trying to answer the question of
building where private companies will not, right? Like, we do
have this problem of not having the long-range solution in the
mind's eye, right? And we have this system in which there isn't a
lot of this coordination that's in the mind's eye of a developer,
right? Like, they're focused on their development, whereas the
state government, federal government, has a little bit more of
like, "Okay, what are we trying to accomplish? We are trying to
handle the climate crisis. And that means we need to move as
quickly as possible to deploy as much renewable energy as
possible.


And it turns out we actually do have some capacity and to
actually build this ourselves." And we've done this in the past,
admittedly, in a much less dense energy system. But the New Deal
is a really good example of this, where the U.S. either directly
financed or built itself a massive amount of transmission and
energy infrastructure, like the Rural Electrification
Administration that FDR put in place. It electrified 80% of the
United States land mass in ten years. And when we're talking
about the climate crisis, I would like to go at that clip. So I
think if there are ways for us where we have a standstill where
things aren't getting built fast enough, where can the federal
government, the state government come in with a little political
muscle and do that building?


And I think that there are additional kind of benefits to doing
this too, which include the fact that if you're building public
renewables, for instance, you're also probably going to value
having higher and better-paid jobs. You are probably going to, in
comparison to a private developer, probably thinking a little bit
more about some of those community benefits. And I think that
there's a real win there that actually kind of creates a baseline
for the rest of the private industry in a good way too.


David Roberts


Instead of just nudging and incentivizing private developers to
do these things, we could just do them.


Johanna Bozuwa


We could just do them and we can also show them the way a little
bit too. Right. Like right now, right. We just have the Inflation
Reduction Act. Fabulous. We love the climate investments. It's so
great. And also it just largely relies on tax incentives, right.
And in those it's like you get a little bit more if you use local
steel and if you have high wage jobs, all these things. And we
could also just do that, build some public renewables and make it
happen ourselves. And also when you have, particularly from a job
perspective, right, like a public renewables entity that's
building these developments with high wage work, that means that
the private developers are afraid that they're going to lose all
of their workers.


So then they have to raise their wages too, which is a good
thing.


David Roberts


Race to the top, I think they call that.


Johanna Bozuwa


I would love a race to the top instead of a race to the bottom in
our renewable energy world.


David Roberts


Yes. Okay, we got to keep moving here. There's a long list. The
next one is something we covered, I think, on the Thea Riofrancos
post, which is just we know we have to build a lot of stuff, but
that's not a fixed quantity of stuff we have to build. Right. We
can be more efficient with how we use materials. We can try to
build in a less material intensive way. So, you know, what Theo
was talking about is encourage more walking and biking and
multimodal transportation rather than cars, cars, cars. Like
that's a choice. And there are other choices we could make to
build a clean, but the less material intensive version of clean.


There's a lot of different ways we can guide things in that
direction.


Johanna Bozuwa


Oh yeah, absolutely.


David Roberts


Everyone should go listen to that podcast, too. This pod is like
an advertisement for all my other pods.


Johanna Bozuwa


I love it, I love it. Yeah. And just to kind of emphasize, the
more that we can invest in efficiency, the fewer transmission
lines we might have to build, right? Like if we have a bunch of
houses that aggressively go in on multi units. Like, we're having
more people housed in multi units. We're creating urban density.
We're making the houses that we already have more efficient. All
of those things accumulate and make it so that we actually don't
have to do the same level of massive deployment, which is a huge
win. So we have to — I think it's like questioning some of the
assumptions, too, of how much do we need to build.


David Roberts


Right. Maybe not all our private vehicles need to be the size of
military tanks and weigh three tons. This segues perfectly into
the next one, which I feel like is underappreciated, which is
supporting distributed energy resources. Talk about why that's
part of going faster here. How does that fit into this picture?


Johanna Bozuwa


So let's say we're able to add rooftop solar to a lot of the
rooftops that are around and implement microgrids and put in
storage. These are all, again, things that are going to be a lot
easier probably to deploy because they're smaller. There's less
of this zoning permitting etc. that has to happen when it comes
to some of the bigger stuff, where you're going to maybe need
environmental review. And so by making those investments in
distributed energy resources, you're actually lightening the load
again on transmission development.


David Roberts


Right. It's kind of a piece of the previous one, really.


Johanna Bozuwa


Totally.


David Roberts


It's about being less material intensive.


Johanna Bozuwa


Exactly. And I also think the added benefit of doing that, of
course, is the fact that we live in unreliable times and it adds
additional reliability potential by having things like microgrids
deployed.


David Roberts


Yes, many future pods on that particular subject are in the
works, are cooking in the Volts oven. Let's go to the second big
category here, and this is where I have a little bit of
skepticism. So this category is "Enhance community participation
and consent." So this is what I want to talk about: You say,
let's bring communities in more and earlier. And of course, I
think most people, at least most people in my world, when they
hear "more community involvement," their palms start sweating.
They envision these local zoning meetings with old people
shouting at city officials.


They envision nothing ever getting done, everything getting
blocked, NIMBY's everywhere. You have this sentence where it
says, "Strengthening community participation early in the process
will likely move projects forward faster without as much
community opposition." Do we know that to be true? I want that to
be true. I like the idea of it. Do we know that?


Johanna Bozuwa


Great question. It's worth interrogating. I'm going to borrow a
little bit from my colleague that we've already referenced today,
Thea Riofrancos, that she often says which is "Sometimes going
fast isn't actually fast." So, you know, if we streamline, right,
or NEPA gets streamlined or many of these other permitting
processes, you cut the red tape and therefore you are
steamrolling communities affected by the infrastructure. You're
potentially hardening them against the project. And when they
feel mad or disenfranchised, chances are they're going to throw
the book at you. They're going to throw the book to stop the
project. We talked about these arbitrary dates set by some of the
permitting system.


You're actually putting yourself up for far more potential
litigation and drawn out legal battles because you actually
haven't done the work that's necessary to bring that group on
side, nor do you have all of your ducks in a row. So I think that
there is a justification for defraying conflict and making our
odds better at doing that. I'm not saying that we're not going to
run into problems and there isn't going to be this annoying mob
of Karens that's going to show up every once in a while. But I do
think that our odds do look better when we do involve community.


David Roberts


There's a cynical point of view here which says communities are
always going to have their Karens. There's always going to be
somebody who objects, no matter how early, no matter how much you
consult, there's always going to be somebody who doesn't want
something near them. The only way in the end to overcome this
problem is to take those instruments of delay out of their hands,
including the litigation tool, including the environmental review
tool, including the community review tool, and just get a little
bit more Chinese about the whole thing. Just go do stuff, even if
— bulldoze, basically.


I know we want to resist that conclusion, but I wish we knew
better. I wish we had better models of moving quickly.


Johanna Bozuwa


So I think actually, since you mentioned the Chinese, I'm going
to mention the Danish. And I think that part of this is actually
like — we have this problem, right, that we know that deploying
renewable energy, deploying clean energy is just incredibly
important for the climate crisis. But the benefits are diffuse
where the potential negative is pretty concentrated when it comes
to these things. And so I think one question we can ask or the
permit reviewers or whatever it is, or how we're thinking about
developing these projects, is getting in their shoes and asking,
what is in it for me?


We can pay people to have some of this stuff, right? So the
Danish government in the 1990s was building out a bunch of wind.
And so one of the ways that they incentivized this wind
development was by incentivizing that part of it is owned by the
local government to give them a revenue stream. And that actually
helped to limit the controversy. And you'll see that in Denmark,
people have kind of higher concepts or like the polling is better
for wind. And I was talking with this professor, Nick Pevzner
from University of Pennsylvania, who was discussing this really
interesting particular instance in which in one of these towns
where they were going to be around the offshore wind, they
actually brought in landscape architects to design the offshore
wind. So that it would be aesthetically pleasing.


David Roberts


The Danes give a shi-, give a dang, about how things look like.
What a thought.


Johanna Bozuwa


Huge difference.


David Roberts


Yes, I know. You look at what's the one waste incineration plant
in the middle of the town that's like gorgeous. It's got a laser
display, I think it's got a ski hill on it. All these kind of
things. It seems like we don't care here in the US. How ugly
things are. Witness any sort of midsize town or strip mall or the
periphery of any city. Everything's just like plain and ugly.
Like what if we made things look nice that might improve
community —


Johanna Bozuwa


We deserve nice things. Communities deserve nice things.


David Roberts


We can have nice things. And you talk about we should do what's
called a "Cumulative impact analysis."


Johanna Bozuwa


Yes.


David Roberts


Again, to me on first blush that sounds like oh, bigger and more
analysis: Surely that's going to slow things down. So how do you
see that working?


Johanna Bozuwa


Well, again, this kind of takes us to our planning. Right. Like
cumulative impact analysis which New Jersey and New York have put
in place is this way to discern not just the impact of the
project but the accumulated impact of that project and what's
already come to date. And I think what you would find in
cumulative impact in these places, is that actually it's doing
some of what we were talking about before, which is trying to
fight off the bad and build more of the good. So that's a way to
stop new fossil fuel infrastructure but maybe see benefit around
solar or something like that.


These are actually tools that, yes, as you say, at first glance
you might think, "Oh my gosh, more? Really?" But what it's doing
is assuring some of that larger meso level discerning and also in
a lot of ways these are environmental justice tools too. Right.
The reason that they're doing that is because it has so
consistently been the same community that has had to shoulder the
coal plant, then the gas plant, then the pipeline, then another
cement factory. Right. And so they're trying to say, "Okay wait,
this is out of control. Let's think about where we're putting
this and how that's going to burden people."


David Roberts


So the last category here is "Empower a just transition." And I
don't think we need to go piece by piece through here since these
are very familiar asks from progressive climate people, which is
just stop permitting new fossil fuel facilities. Protect the
communities that are getting hurt by fossil fuel pollution and
set emission reduction targets that will phase out fossil fuels.
I think those are all pretty straightforward. I do think the
point here, though the larger point you're making with this
section is worth underlining because it seems obvious to me, but
also frequently left out of this debate, which is if you want to
get renewable energy built faster: One way you could do that is
through statute and regulation forcing fossil fuel out. Like,
nothing's going to speed up renewable energy more than forcing
fossil fuels out. Right. It seems so obvious, but it's weirdly
left out here.


Johanna Bozuwa


Very weirdly left out. It's a bizarre kind of development that
we've seen in the climate realm, right? The IRA, for instance,
that is a bill that is great. It creates a lot of carrots, but
basically no sticks. And the reality is we need sticks if we're
actually going to do this, right, as we were talking about at the
kind of outset of the show, we can't let just the entire pie keep
on getting bigger and bigger. We actually need to get rid of the
fossil fuels. That's the point of what we're doing here. They're
the reason that we have the climate crisis.


And so, the best way to get rid of them is to just regulate them
out of existence, like eliminate them. And I also think there's a
certain amount of private industry hates regulation, but they do
love certainty. So what is more certain than a decarbonization
mandate that says, like, well, you need to be done by this date?
And that actually gets us to more of the displacement than when
we just say "Build, build, build just hopefully build the right
thing for us, please please."


David Roberts


Yes, I think that's true on several micro levels and it's true on
a macro level too. One thing that would help us go faster is if
we could just clearly articulate our goals. But we're sort of
just hampered by having to beg Joe Manchin for his vote. And to
get Joe Manchin's vote, you have to pretend that the whole pie is
going to get bigger, that everything's going to grow. That's
explicitly the grounds upon which he voted yes on Iraq. He sets
it outright. He's like, I voted yes because I thought it was
going to grow renewable energy and fossil fuels.


In some sense, politically, we can't just come out and say the
goal is to get rid of fossil fuels. That's where we're headed. It
would just help everybody, private developers, state and local
governments, if we were just on the same friggin page. Instead of
sort of like backing into this, we're just backing into
everything we do. Trying to sort of like wink wink at one
another. Like we know what we're doing, they don't know what
we're doing. It's just a bunch of confusion.


Johanna Bozuwa


Right? And I think that it's also a little bit laughable because
they obviously know what we're trying to do, right? Like, we're
not really hiding the bag. And I think that this speaks to the
need for us to be like, this is a 20-year fight, we're not done
with the fight the progressive left needs to keep — we can't just
have IRA and think that we're done and can wipe our hands. I
mean, even this conversation that has come up on permitting shows
that people are hungry and need more. And the question is okay,
how do we build the actual political power so that Manchin isn't
the one that's in the driver's seat?


David Roberts


Yes.


Johanna Bozuwa


I think one kind of last thing on this kind of community consent
piece or community engagement that makes me really nervous to tie
us back to the permitting realm, right. Is that the people who
are potentially going to be railroaded by infrastructure that
they don't want is rural America. And if you are pissing off
rural parts of the United States right now, that's a very
short-sighted game to be playing, right. Because you are
potentially taking these rural folk who have just been beaten
back again and again, and you're turning them to the right, to a
growing fascist right, and giving away a massive voting bloc that
is going to be crucial for us to continue to win and win again
and keep winning until we actually solve the climate crisis.


So I think when it comes to this kind of larger political project
that we're doing on from a progressive perspective, we have to be
wary of this idea that this is — not a get it fixed quick scheme.


David Roberts


Yes. We do not want to tick off these particular communities any
more than they're ticked off. I think if you talk to Biden
administration officials sort of behind the scenes, they will
tell you that part of the design of IRA, part of the thinking
behind it is we need to flood these areas of the country that
were hollowed out by neoliberalism, hollowed out by globalism. We
need to flood them with new economic activity and new development
or else our democracy is screwed. But it is also the case that
you can't just go stomping things down here and there,
willy-nilly, without community consent.


They need to have a feeling that they're involved in where and
how this is done.


Johanna Bozuwa


Yeah, we're trying to bring them into the fight for a populist
amazing future, and shoving this down their throats I just don't
think is the most effective tactic. And if you look back to the
New Deal, right, so much of it was workers. It was people that
were in more of rural America. There were so many of these folks
who were standing up and fighting. And if we're not setting
ourselves up for that same kind of sea change, then I'm afraid
we're not going to be able to win this thing.


David Roberts


Okay. We are just about out of time. So just to kind of review,
this is just, I think the point of your report, point of all this
is to say the question of speed is not the same as the question
of permitting. Technically speaking, permitting is a relatively
small piece of the puzzle here. There's lots of other things we
could be doing to speed things up that have nothing technically
to do with NEPA or even technically to do with permitting. And
we've reviewed a lot of them here, and I would commend people to
your report to get a fuller picture of them and to think about
them.


But let me finish, I guess with, this is all a vision. I love
this vision, but politics are politics and we live in a fallen
world, et cetera, et cetera. So toward the end of last session,
there was this chance to have a permitting deal, and basically it
was these sort of arbitrary caps on NEPA reviews, the length of
NEPA reviews and the Mountain Valley pipeline in exchange for
some pretty substantial transmission stuff, some pretty
substantial stuff on transmission, federal transmission planning.
The progressive movement rallied to kill that. They called it
Manchin's dirty deal. They rallied, they killed it.


And what ended up happening was the NEPA stuff squeezed through
somewhere else. The Mountain Valley pipeline squeezed through
somewhere else, and the transmission stuff died. Looking back on
that, do you think that was the right political move for the
progressive movement to fight that bill? And more broadly, do you
think the progressive movement is prepared to sort of make the
political trade-offs which are going to be necessary since a lot
of this stuff that you list in your report is just going to be
very difficult with today's current political distribution of
power?


Johanna Bozuwa


Yeah, great question, and I think my answer is that the
progressive movement still did the right thing. We needed to
fight — or the progressive movement folks who were in those
fights needed to fight off and make very clear the MVP is not
something that we can have — this permitting that's going to
expand. It was a big toad to swallow. And I think if we look at
some of the transmission stuff, like, sure, it was fine. Was it
the things that we were fully looking for? I think it was
Hickenlooper's bill, big wires that was in some of those kind of
final fights, right.


With the Fiscal Responsibility Act, his bill included something
like a 30% interregional transfer. The DOE says we need a 120%
increase in interregional transfer. That's just not even at the
scale that we need, and we'd be giving up so much for it. So,
yeah, we didn't fully win that fight, but I think that from what
I'm hearing, kind of at the congressional level, there is the
potential for another bite at the apple on transmission. There is
still some, as we said earlier, right, everyone agrees that
transmission is a boondoggle right now and a hot mess. So I think
that should be one of the things that we're thinking about as the
progressive movement.


How do we do that? Right? But I don't think I would go back in
time and say "Eh, we should just accept Manchin's deal." I think
that it was an important political flag to stamp in the ground
that, no, we actually don't believe that we should be expanding
fossil fuels and renewable energy at the same time because that's
not what we need to do. Saying all that, I do think there are
things that we can be doing right now to advance transmission.
For instance, FERC is looking at some of these interconnection
issues right now. Biden should not rest on his laurels until he
gets someone approved and appointed to the FERC board.


David Roberts


Hey, there's Joe Manchin again being a jerk.


Johanna Bozuwa


I know, it's so true. But there are things and again, we've
already talked on this pod about stuff that can be done at the
state level, too. We still have some cards to play in our hand to
accelerate and prove our case increasingly and build the case for
more federal implementation, too.


David Roberts


Johanna, thanks so much for coming on. I feel like lately the
progressive environmental left has appeared in mainstream media
and social media more as a weird caricature viewed from a
distance than been able to speak for itself. So I'm glad to be
able to have you on so we can talk through a little bit about how
progressives see this and the larger issues at play and their
specific recommendations, all of which I think are great. So
people should check out your report. And thanks for sharing your
time with us.


Johanna Bozuwa


Thank you so much for having me today, David. It's lovely.


David Roberts


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