You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
Life cycle analysis has some problems.
About six months ago, a climate scientist from Arizona State University, Stephanie Arcusa, emailed me a provocative new paper she had published that warned against our growing reliance on life cycle analysis. This practice of measuring all of the emissions related to a given product or service throughout every phase of its life — from the time raw materials are extracted to eventual disposal — was going to hinder our ability to achieve net-zero emissions, she wrote. It was a busy time, and I let the message drift to the bottom of my inbox. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
Life cycle analysis permeates the climate economy. Businesses rely on it to understand their emissions so they can work toward reducing them. The Securities and Exchange Commission’s climate risk disclosure rule, which requires companies to report their emissions to investors, hinges on it. The clean hydrogen tax credit requires hydrogen producers to do a version of life cycle analysis to prove their eligibility. It is central to carbon markets, and carbon removal companies are now developing standards based on life cycle analysis to “certify” their services as carbon offset developers did before them.
At the same time, many of the fiercest debates in climate change are really debates about life cycle analysis. Should companies be held responsible for the emissions that are indirectly related to their businesses, and if so then which ones? Are carbon offsets a sham? Does using corn ethanol as a gasoline substitute reduce emissions or increase them? Scientists have repeatedly reached opposite conclusions on that one depending on how they accounted for the land required to grow corn and what it might have been used for had ethanol not been an option. Though the debate plays out in calculations, it’s really a philosophical brawl.
Everybody, for the most part, knows that life cycle analysis is difficult and thorny and imprecise. But over and over, experts and critics alike assert that it can be improved. Arcusa disagrees. Life cycle analysis, she says, is fundamentally broken. “It’s a problematic and uncomfortable conclusion to arrive at,” Arcusa wrote in her email. “On the one hand, it has been the only tool we have had to make any progress on climate. On the other, carbon accounting is captured by academia and vested interests and will jeopardize global climate goals.”
When I recently revisited the paper, I learned that Arcusa and her co-authors didn’t just critique life cycle analysis, they proposed a bold alternative. Their idea is not economically or politically easy, but it also doesn’t suffer from the problems of trying to track carbon throughout the supply chain. I recently called her up to talk through it. Our conversation has been edited for clarity.
Can you walk me through what the biggest issues with life cycle analysis are?
So, life cycle analysis is a qualitative tool —
It seems kind of counterintuitive or even controversial to call it a qualitative tool because it’s specifically trying to quantify something.
I think the best analogy for LCA is that it’s a back-of-the-envelope tool. If you really could measure everything, then sure, LCA is this wonderful idea. The problem is in the practicality of being able to collect all of that data. We can’t, and that leads us to use emissions factors and average numbers, and we model this and we model that, and we get so far away from reality that we actually can’t tell if something is positive or negative in the end.
The other problem is that it’s almost entirely subjective, which makes one LCA incomparable to another LCA depending on the context, depending on the technology. And yes, there are some standardization efforts that have been going on for decades. But if you have a ruler, no matter how much you try, it’s not going to become a screwdriver. We’re trying to use this tool to quantify things and make them the same for comparison, and we can’t because of that subjectivity.
In this space where there is a lot of money to be made, it’s very easy to manipulate things one way or another to make it look a little bit better because the method is not robust. That’s really the gist of the problems here.
One of the things you talk about in the paper is the way life cycle analysis is subject to different worldviews. Can you explain that?
It’s mostly seen in what to include or exclude in the LCA — it can have enormous impacts on the results. I think corn ethanol is the perfect example of how tedious this can be because we still don’t have an answer, precisely for that reason. The uncertainty range of the results has shrunk and gotten bigger and shrunk and gotten bigger, and it’s like, well, we still don’t know. And now, this exact same worldview debate is playing into what should be included and not included in certification for things [like carbon removal] that are going to be sold under the guise of climate action, and that just can’t be. We’ll be forever debating whether something is true.
Is this one of those things that scientists have been debating for ever, or is this argument that we should stop using life cycle analysis more of a fringe idea?
I guess I would call it a fringe idea today. There’s been plenty of criticism throughout the years, even from the very beginning when it was first created. What I have seen is that there is criticism, and then there is, “But here’s how we can solve it and continue using LCA!” I’ve only come across one other publication that specifically said, “This is not working. This is not the right tool,” and that’s from Michael Gillenwater. He’s at the Greenhouse Gas Management Institute. He was like, “What are we doing?” There might be other folks, I just haven’t come across them.
Okay, so what is the alternative to LCA that you’ve proposed in this paper?
LCA targets the middle of the supply chain, and tries to attribute responsibility there. But if you think about where on the supply chain the carbon is the most well-known, it is actually at the source, at the point of origin, before it becomes an emission. At the point where it is created out of the ground is where we know how much carbon there is. If we focus on that source through a policy that requires mandatory sequestration — for every ton of carbon that is now produced, there is a ton of carbon that’s been put away through carbon removal, and the accounting happens there, before it is sold to anybody — anybody who’s now downstream of that supply chain is already carbon neutral. There is no need to track carbon all the way down to the consumer.
We know this is accurate because that is where governments already collect royalties and taxes — they want to know exactly how much is being sold. So we already do this. The big difference is that the policy would be required there instead of taxing everybody downstream.
You’re saying that fossil fuel producers should be required to remove a ton of carbon from the atmosphere for every ton of carbon in the fuels they sell?
Yeah, and maybe I should be more specific. They should pay for an equal amount of carbon to be removed from the atmosphere. In no way are we implying that a fossil carbon producer needs to also be doing the sequestration themselves.
What would be the biggest challenges of implementing something like this?
The ultimate challenge is convincing people that we need to be managing carbon and that this is a waste management type of system. Nobody really wants to pay for waste management, and so it needs to be regulated and demanded by some authority.
What about the fact that we don’t really have the ability to remove carbon or store carbon at scale today, and may not for some time?
Yes, we need to build capacity so that eventually we can match the carbon production to the carbon removal, which is why we also proposed that the liability needs to start today, not in the future. That liability is as good as a credit card debt — you actually have to pay it. It can be paid little by little every year, but the liability is here now, and not in the future.
The risk in the system that I’m describing, or even the system that is currently being deployed, is that you have counterproductive technologies that are being developed. And by counterproductive, I mean [carbon removal] technologies that are producing more emissions than they are storing, and so they’re net-positive. You can create a technology that has no intention of removing more carbon than its sequesters. The intention is just to earn money.
Do you mean, like, the things that are supposed to be removing carbon from the atmosphere and sequestering it, they are using fossil fuels to do that, and end up releasing more carbon in the process?
Yeah, so basically, what we show in the paper is that when we get to full carbon neutrality, the market forces alone will eliminate those kinds of technologies that are counterproductive. The problem is during the transition, these technologies can be economically viable because they are cheaper than they would be if 100% of the fossil fuel they used was carbon neutral through carbon removal. And so in order to prevent those technologies from gaming the system, we need a way to artificially make the price of fossil carbon as expensive as it would be if 100% of that fossil carbon was covered by carbon removal.
That’s where the idea of permits comes in. For every amount that I produce, I now have an instant liability, which is a permit. Each of those permits has to be matched by carbon removal. And since we don’t have enough carbon removal, we have futures and these futures represent the promise of actually doing carbon removal.
What if we burn through the remaining carbon budget and we still don’t have the capacity to sequester enough carbon?
Well, then we’re going into very unchartered territory. Right now we’re just mindlessly going through this thinking that if we just reduce emissions it will be good. It won’t be good.
In the paper, you also argue against mitigating greenhouse gases other than carbon, and that seems pretty controversial to me. Why is that?
We’re not arguing against mitigating, per se. We’re arguing against lumping everything under the same carbon accounting framework because lumping hides the difficulty in actually doing something about it. It’s not that we shouldn’t mitigate other greenhouse gases — we must. It’s just that if we separate the problem of carbon away from the problem of methane, away from the problem of nitrous oxide, or CFCs, we can tackle them more effectively. Because right now, we’re trying to do everything under the same umbrella, and that doesn’t work. We don’t tackle drinking and driving by sponsoring better tires. That’s just silly, right? We wouldn’t do that. We would tackle drinking and driving on its own, and then we would tackle better tires in a different policy.
So the argument is: Most of climate change is caused by carbon; let’s tackle that separately from the others and leave tackling methane and nitrous oxide to purposefully created programs to tackle those things. Let’s not lump the calculations altogether, hiding all the differences and hiding meaningful action.
Is there still a role for life cycle analysis?
You don’t want to be regulating carbon using life cycle analysis. So you can use the life cycle analysis for qualitative purposes, but we’re pretending that it is a tool that can deliver accurate results, and it just doesn’t.
What has the response been like to this paper? What kind of feedback have you gotten?
Stunned silence!
Nobody has said anything?
In private, they have. Not in public. In private, it’s been a little bit like, “I’ve always thought this, but it seemed like there was no other way.” But then in public, think about it. Everything is built on LCA. It’s now in every single climate bill out there. Every single standard. Every single consulting company is doing LCA and doing carbon footprinting for companies. It’s a huge industry, so I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised to hear nothing publicly.
Yeah, I was gonna ask — I’ve been writing about the SEC rules and this idea that companies should start reporting their emissions to their investors, and that would all be based on LCA. There’s a lot of buy-in for that idea across the climate movement.
Yeah, but there’s definitely a fine line with make-believe. I think in many instances, we kid ourselves thinking that we’re going to have numbers that we can hang our hats on. In many instances we will not, and they will be challenged. And so at that point, what’s the point?
One thing I hear when I talk to people about this is, well, having an estimate is better than not having anything, or, don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good, or, we can just keep working to make them better and better. Why not?
I mean, I wouldn’t say don’t try. But when it comes to actually enforcing anything, it’s going to be extremely hard to prove a number. You could just be stuck in litigation for a long time and still not have an answer.
I don’t know, to me it just seems like an endless debate while time is ticking and we will just feel good because we’ll have thought we measured everything. But we’re still not doing anything.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Why killing a government climate database could essentially gut a tax credit
The Trump administration’s bid to end an Environmental Protection Agency program may essentially block any company — even an oil firm — from accessing federal subsidies for capturing carbon or producing hydrogen fuel.
On Friday, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed that it would stop collecting and publishing greenhouse gas emissions data from thousands of refineries, power plants, and factories across the country.
The Trump administration argues that the scheme, known as the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program, costs more than $2 billion and isn’t legally required under the Clean Air Act. Lee Zeldin, the EPA administrator, described the program as “nothing more than bureaucratic red tape that does nothing to improve air quality.”
But the program is more important than the Trump administration lets on. It’s true that the policy, which required more than 8,000 different facilities around the country to report their emissions, helped the EPA and outside analysts estimate the country’s annual greenhouse gas emissions.
But it did more than that. Over the past decade, the program had essentially become the master database of carbon pollution and emissions policy across the American economy. “Essentially everything the federal government does related to emissions reductions is dependent on the [Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program],” Jack Andreasen Cavanaugh, a fellow at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, told me.
That means other federal programs — including those that Republicans in Congress have championed — have come to rely on the EPA database.
Among those programs: the federal tax credit for capturing and using carbon dioxide. Republicans recently increased the size of that subsidy, nicknamed 45Q after a section of the tax code, for companies that turn captured carbon into another product or use it to make oil wells more productive. Those changes were passed in President Trump’s big tax and spending law over the summer.
But Zeldin’s scheme to end the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program would place that subsidy off limits for the foreseeable future. Under federal law, companies can only claim the 45Q tax credit if they file technical details to the EPA’s emissions reporting program.
Another federal tax credit, for companies that use carbon capture to produce hydrogen fuel, also depends on the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program. That subsidy hasn’t received the same friendly treatment from Republicans, and it will now phase out in 2028.
The EPA program is “the primary mechanism by which companies investing in and deploying carbon capture and hydrogen projects quantify the CO2 that they’re sequestering, such that they qualify for tax incentives,” Jane Flegal, a former Biden administration appointee who worked on industrial emissions policy, told me. She is now the executive director of the Blue Horizons Foundation.
“The only way for private capital to be put to work to deploy American carbon capture and hydrogen projects is to quantify the carbon dioxide that they’re sequestering, in some way,” she added. That’s what the EPA program does: It confirms that companies are storing or using as much carbon as they claim they are to the IRS.
The Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program is “how the IRS communicates with the EPA” when companies claim the 45Q credit, Cavanaugh said. “The IRS obviously has taxpayer-sensitive information, so they’re not able to give information to the EPA about who or what is claiming the credit.” The existence of the database lets the EPA then automatically provide information to the IRS, so that no confidential tax information is disclosed.
Zeldin’s announcement that the EPA would phase out the program has alarmed companies planning on using the tax credit. In a statement, the Carbon Capture Coalition — an alliance of oil companies, manufacturers, startups, and NGOs — called the reporting program the “regulatory backbone” of the carbon capture tax credit.
“It is not an understatement that the long-term success of the carbon management industry rests on the robust reporting mechanisms” in the EPA’s program, the group said.
Killing the EPA program could hurt American companies in other ways. Right now, companies that trade with European firms depend on the EPA data to pass muster with the EU’s carbon border adjustment tax. It’s unclear how they would fare in a world with no EPA data.
It could also sideline GOP proposals. Senator Bill Cassidy, a Republican from Louisiana, has suggested that imports to the United States should pay a foreign pollution fee — essentially, a way of accounting for the implicit subsidy of China’s dirty energy system. But the data to comply with that law would likely come from the EPA’s greenhouse gas database, too.
Ending the EPA database wouldn’t necessarily spell permanent doom for the carbon capture tax credit, but it would make it much harder to use in the years to come. In order to re-open the tax credit for applications, the Treasury Department, the Energy Department, the Interior Department, and the EPA would have to write new rules for companies that claim the 45Q credit. These rules would go to the end of the long list of regulations that the Treasury Department must write after Trump’s spending law transformed the tax code.
That could take years — and it could sideline projects now under construction. “There are now billions of dollars being invested by the private sector and the government in these technologies, where the U.S. is positioned to lead globally,” Flegal said. Changing the rules would “undermine any way for the companies to succeed.”
Ditching the EPA database, however, very well could doom carbon capture-based hydrogen projects. Under the terms of Trump’s tax law, companies that want to claim the hydrogen credit must begin construction on their projects by 2028.
The Trump administration seems to believe, too, that gutting the EPA database may require new rules for the carbon capture tax credit. When asked for comment, an EPA spokesperson pointed me to a line in the agency’s proposal: “We anticipate that the Treasury Department and the IRS may need to revise the regulation,” the legal proposal says. “The EPA expects that such amendments could allow for different options for stakeholders to potentially qualify for tax credits.”
The EPA spokesperson then encouraged me to ask the Treasury Department for anything more about “specific implications.”
Paradise, California, is snatching up high-risk properties to create a defensive perimeter and prevent the town from burning again.
The 2018 Camp Fire was the deadliest wildfire in California’s history, wiping out 90% of the structures in the mountain town of Paradise and killing at least 85 people in a matter of hours. Investigations afterward found that Paradise’s town planners had ignored warnings of the fire risk to its residents and forgone common-sense preparations that would have saved lives. In the years since, the Camp Fire has consequently become a cautionary tale for similar communities in high-risk wildfire areas — places like Chinese Camp, a small historic landmark in the Sierra Nevada foothills that dramatically burned to the ground last week as part of the nearly 14,000-acre TCU September Lightning Complex.
More recently, Paradise has also become a model for how a town can rebuild wisely after a wildfire. At least some of that is due to the work of Dan Efseaff, the director of the Paradise Recreation and Park District, who has launched a program to identify and acquire some of the highest-risk, hardest-to-access properties in the Camp Fire burn scar. Though he has a limited total operating budget of around $5.5 million and relies heavily on the charity of local property owners (he’s currently in the process of applying for a $15 million grant with a $5 million match for the program) Efseaff has nevertheless managed to build the beginning of a defensible buffer of managed parkland around Paradise that could potentially buy the town time in the case of a future wildfire.
In order to better understand how communities can build back smarter after — or, ideally, before — a catastrophic fire, I spoke with Efseaff about his work in Paradise and how other communities might be able to replicate it. Our conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Do you live in Paradise? Were you there during the Camp Fire?
I actually live in Chico. We’ve lived here since the mid-‘90s, but I have a long connection to Paradise; I’ve worked for the district since 2017. I’m also a sea kayak instructor and during the Camp Fire, I was in South Carolina for a training. I was away from the phone until I got back at the end of the day and saw it blowing up with everything.
I have triplet daughters who were attending Butte College at the time, and they needed to be evacuated. There was a lot of uncertainty that day. But it gave me some perspective, because I couldn’t get back for two days. It gave me a chance to think, “Okay, what’s our response going to be?” Looking two days out, it was like: That would have been payroll, let’s get people together, and then let’s figure out what we’re going to do two weeks and two months from now.
It also got my mind thinking about what we would have done going backwards. If you’d had two weeks to prepare, you would have gotten your go-bag together, you’d have come up with your evacuation route — that type of thing. But when you run the movie backwards on what you would have done differently if you had two years or two decades, it would include prepping the landscape, making some safer community defensible space. That’s what got me started.
Was it your idea to buy up the high-risk properties in the burn scar?
I would say I adapted it. Everyone wants to say it was their idea, but I’ll tell you where it came from: Pre-fire, the thinking was that it would make sense for the town to have a perimeter trail from a recreation standpoint. But I was also trying to pitch it as a good idea from a fuel standpoint, so that if there was a wildfire, you could respond to it. Certainly, the idea took on a whole other dimension after the Camp Fire.
I’m a restoration ecologist, so I’ve done a lot of river floodplain work. There are a lot of analogies there. The trend has been to give nature a little bit more room: You’re not going to stop a flood, but you can minimize damage to human infrastructure. Putting levees too close to the river makes them more prone to failing and puts people at risk — but if you can set the levee back a little bit, it gives the flood waters room to go through. That’s why I thought we need a little bit of a buffer in Paradise and some protection around the community. We need a transition between an area that is going to burn, and that we can let burn, but not in a way that is catastrophic.
How hard has it been to find willing sellers? Do most people in the area want to rebuild — or need to because of their mortgages?
Ironically, the biggest challenge for us is finding adequate funding. A lot of the property we have so far has been donated to us. It’s probably upwards of — oh, let’s see, at least half a dozen properties have been donated, probably close to 200 acres at this point.
We are applying for some federal grants right now, and we’ll see how that goes. What’s evolved quite a bit on this in recent years, though, is that — because we’ve done some modeling — instead of thinking of the buffer as areas that are managed uniformly around the community, we’re much more strategic. These fire events are wind-driven, and there are only a couple of directions where the wind blows sufficiently long enough and powerful enough for the other conditions to fall into play. That’s not to say other events couldn’t happen, but we’re going after the most likely events that would cause catastrophic fires, and that would be from the Diablo winds, or north winds, that come through our area. That was what happened in the Camp Fire scenario, and another one our models caught what sure looked a lot like the [2024] Park Fire.
One thing that I want to make clear is that some people think, “Oh, this is a fire break. It’s devoid of vegetation.” No, what we’re talking about is a well-managed habitat. These are shaded fuel breaks. You maintain the big trees, you get rid of the ladder fuels, and you get rid of the dead wood that’s on the ground. We have good examples with our partners, like the Butte Fire Safe Council, on how this works, and it looks like it helped protect the community of Cohasset during the Park Fire. They did some work on some strips there, and the fire essentially dropped to the ground before it came to Paradise Lake. You didn’t have an aerial tanker dropping retardant, you didn’t have a $2-million-per-day fire crew out there doing work. It was modest work done early and in the right place that actually changed the behavior of the fire.
Tell me a little more about the modeling you’ve been doing.
We looked at fire pathways with a group called XyloPlan out of the Bay Area. The concept is that you simulate a series of ignitions with certain wind conditions, terrain, and vegetation. The model looked very much like a Camp Fire scenario; it followed the same pathway, going towards the community in a little gulch that channeled high winds. You need to interrupt that pathway — and that doesn’t necessarily mean creating an area devoid of vegetation, but if you have these areas where the fire behavior changes and drops down to the ground, then it slows the travel. I found this hard to believe, but in the modeling results, in a scenario like the Camp Fire, it could buy you up to eight hours. With modern California firefighting, you could empty out the community in a systematic way in that time. You could have a vigorous fire response. You could have aircraft potentially ready. It’s a game-changing situation, rather than the 30 minutes Paradise had when the Camp Fire started.
How does this work when you’re dealing with private property owners, though? How do you convince them to move or donate their land?
We’re a Park and Recreation District so we don’t have regulatory authority. We are just trying to run with a good idea with the properties that we have so far — those from willing donors mostly, but there have been a couple of sales. If we’re unable to get federal funding or state support, though, I ultimately think this idea will still have to be here — whether it’s five, 10, 15, or 50 years from now. We have to manage this area in a comprehensive way.
Private property rights are very important, and we don’t want to impinge on that. And yet, what a person does on their property has a huge impact on the 30,000 people who may be downwind of them. It’s an unusual situation: In a hurricane, if you have a hurricane-rated roof and your neighbor doesn’t, and theirs blows off, you feel sorry for your neighbor but it’s probably not going to harm your property much. In a wildfire, what your neighbor has done with the wood, or how they treat vegetation, has a significant impact on your home and whether your family is going to survive. It’s a fundamentally different kind of event than some of the other disasters we look at.
Do you have any advice for community leaders who might want to consider creating buffer zones or something similar to what you’re doing in Paradise?
Start today. You have to think about these things with some urgency, but they’re not something people think about until it happens. Paradise, for many decades, did not have a single escaped wildfire make it into the community. Then, overnight, the community is essentially wiped out. But in so many places, these events are foreseeable; we’re just not wired to think about them or prepare for them.
Buffers around communities make a lot of sense, even from a road network standpoint. Even from a trash pickup standpoint. You don’t think about this, but if your community is really strung out, making it a little more thoughtfully laid out also makes it more economically viable to provide services to people. Some things we look for now are long roads that don’t have any connections — that were one-way in and no way out. I don’t think [the traffic jams and deaths in] Paradise would have happened with what we know now, but I kind of think [authorities] did know better beforehand. It just wasn’t economically viable at the time; they didn’t think it was a big deal, but they built the roads anyway. We can be doing a lot of things smarter.
A war of attrition is now turning in opponents’ favor.
A solar developer’s defeat in Massachusetts last week reveals just how much stronger project opponents are on the battlefield after the de facto repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act.
Last week, solar developer PureSky pulled five projects under development around the western Massachusetts town of Shutesbury. PureSky’s facilities had been in the works for years and would together represent what the developer has claimed would be one of the state’s largest solar projects thus far. In a statement, the company laid blame on “broader policy and regulatory headwinds,” including the state’s existing renewables incentives not keeping pace with rising costs and “federal policy updates,” which PureSky said were “making it harder to finance projects like those proposed near Shutesbury.”
But tucked in its press release was an admission from the company’s vice president of development Derek Moretz: this was also about the town, which had enacted a bylaw significantly restricting solar development that the company was until recently fighting vigorously in court.
“There are very few areas in the Commonwealth that are feasible to reach its clean energy goals,” Moretz stated. “We respect the Town’s conservation go als, but it is clear that systemic reforms are needed for Massachusetts to source its own energy.”
This stems from a story that probably sounds familiar: after proposing the projects, PureSky began reckoning with a burgeoning opposition campaign centered around nature conservation. Led by a fresh opposition group, Smart Solar Shutesbury, activists successfully pushed the town to drastically curtail development in 2023, pointing to the amount of forest acreage that would potentially be cleared in order to construct the projects. The town had previously not permitted facilities larger than 15 acres, but the fresh change went further, essentially banning battery storage and solar projects in most areas.
When this first happened, the state Attorney General’s office actually had PureSky’s back, challenging the legality of the bylaw that would block construction. And PureSky filed a lawsuit that was, until recently, ongoing with no signs of stopping. But last week, shortly after the Treasury Department unveiled its rules for implementing Trump’s new tax and spending law, which basically repealed the Inflation Reduction Act, PureSky settled with the town and dropped the lawsuit – and the projects went away along with the court fight.
What does this tell us? Well, things out in the country must be getting quite bleak for solar developers in areas with strident and locked-in opposition that could be costly to fight. Where before project developers might have been able to stomach the struggle, money talks – and the dollars are starting to tell executives to lay down their arms.
The picture gets worse on the macro level: On Monday, the Solar Energy Industries Association released a report declaring that federal policy changes brought about by phasing out federal tax incentives would put the U.S. at risk of losing upwards of 55 gigawatts of solar project development by 2030, representing a loss of more than 20 percent of the project pipeline.
But the trade group said most of that total – 44 gigawatts – was linked specifically to the Trump administration’s decision to halt federal permitting for renewable energy facilities, a decision that may impact generation out west but has little-to-know bearing on most large solar projects because those are almost always on private land.
Heatmap Pro can tell us how much is at stake here. To give you a sense of perspective, across the U.S., over 81 gigawatts worth of renewable energy projects are being contested right now, with non-Western states – the Northeast, South and Midwest – making up almost 60% of that potential capacity.
If historical trends hold, you’d expect a staggering 49% of those projects to be canceled. That would be on top of the totals SEIA suggests could be at risk from new Trump permitting policies.
I suspect the rate of cancellations in the face of project opposition will increase. And if this policy landscape is helping activists kill projects in blue states in desperate need of power, like Massachusetts, then the future may be more difficult to swallow than we can imagine at the moment.