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Nearly 80% of U.S. adults believe conservation is more important than a speedy renewable energy rollout, our poll finds. That spells trouble for Biden’s climate agenda.
In Virginia, environmentalists fought a utility-scale solar farm that would rank among the largest on the East Coast.
In New Jersey, an ocean-conservation group is battling an offshore wind farm that could power half a million homes.
In Utah, Nevada, and even the San Francisco Bay area, green groups are threatening renewable projects that officials say are crucial to meeting local zero-carbon goals.
Around the country, self-described environmentalists are trying to stop some of the same solar and wind projects that experts say are crucial to solving climate change. They are sometimes dismissed as NIMBYs or accused of being stooges for the fossil-fuel industry, and some groups literally are funded by oil interests.
But a new poll shows that their views — at least at the surface level — resonate with nearly four out of every five Americans.
An overwhelming majority of Americans say that conserving local land and wildlife is more important than building new sources of renewable electricity, even if that slows down the world’s response to climate change, according to the inaugural Heatmap Climate Poll, a scientific survey conducted by the Benenson Strategy Group last month.
The poll finds that even though Americans love renewables in the abstract — with 94% endorsing the benefits of rooftop solar and 88% embracing large-scale solar farms — they are skittish about their potential trade-offs. Some 79% of Americans said that new renewable energy should be rolled out “slowly” rather than “quickly” and that the conservation of land and wild animals should be prioritized above rapid greenhouse-gas reductions
In contrast, only 21% of Americans agreed with the statement that “we should roll out renewable energy quickly to lower emissions as fast as possible, even if it means harming natural land or wild animals.”
In other words, you don’t necessarily need recourse to astroturfing schemes or secret fossil-fuel connections to explain why so many Americans oppose new renewable projects. The Heatmap poll surveyed 1,000 adult Americans in all 50 states during a five-day period in February.
The results offer a warning to the Biden administration — and for that matter, anyone who seeks to decarbonize the American economy before the world sails past the 1.5-degree mark. In order for the United States to meet its goal of eliminating carbon pollution from the power system by 2035, the country’s physical infrastructure must transform at a pace and scale that has no peacetime precedent. Solar and wind capacity must quadruple nationwide, according to one estimate from the National Renewable Electricity Laboratory; up to 10,100 miles of new power lines might be required to hook those renewables into the grid. That build-out will be extremely difficult if Americans are susceptible to arguments that renewables are harming local flora and fauna.
“When you think about renewables you’re talking about an impact on the landscape that is beyond the scale of anything this country has ever seen before,” Larry Selzer, the president and chief executive of the Conservation Fund, one of the country’s largest buyers of conserved land, told me. “The IRA explicitly contemplates up to a million miles of new transmission lines and 65,000 miles of new pipelines.”
In contrast, the country’s last major infrastructure project — the Interstate Highway System — is about 48,000 miles long, he said. And much of it was built half a century ago.
“People intuitively understand the scale of investment [in the Inflation Reduction Act], even though it’s going to help save them and their communities” and ultimately protect wildlife, he said. “For most Americans, the idea of climate change is relatively amorphous and distant from their lives, yet they feel the loss of wildlife in a proximate way.”
Although the Inflation Reduction Act contains at least $25 billion to support conservation programs on agricultural and forestry land, this has not attracted as much attention as its clean-energy programs.
For climate advocates, the most upbeat finding in the poll might be that most Americans would be happy to add renewable energy near where they live, even if they want those facilities to have few trade-offs. More than 70% of Americans said that they would welcome the construction of wind turbines or large-scale solar farms in their community; more than 60% expressed comfort with a local geothermal power plant.
The only energy technology that most Americans did not want to live near is, ironically, the same technology that virtually guarantees local conservation. About one-third of respondents said that they would not welcome a new nuclear plant in their community, the poll found. Many nuclear facilities — such as the Calvert Cliffs power plant in Maryland — are surrounded by acres of protected parkland in order to ease local concerns. They also need far less space than other clean energy sources, like solar panels or wind turbines, to generate the same amount of power.
But perhaps that’s not so surprising: Americans’ view of the clean-energy future differs significantly from experts in several areas. Recent reports from a Princeton University team and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory have projected that the IRA will reduce the cost of producing electricity nationwide. Yet nearly half of Americans said that they expect the move to renewables will raise their costs. Only about a third expect lower costs in the future.
This story was updated at 2:36 p.m. ET on Thursday.
The Heatmap Climate Poll of 1,000 American adults was conducted via online panels by Benenson Strategy Group from Feb. 15 to 20, 2023. The survey included interviews with Americans in all 50 states and Washington, D.C. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3.02 percentage points. You can read more about the topline results here.
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The Senate’s reconciliation bill essentially repeals the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards, abolishing fines for automakers that sell too many gas guzzlers.
A new provision in the Senate reconciliation bill would neuter the country’s fuel efficiency standards for automakers, gutting one of the federal government’s longest-running programs to manage gasoline prices and air pollution.
The new provision — which was released on Thursday by the Senate Commerce Committee — would essentially strip the government of its ability to enforce the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards, or CAFE standards.
The CAFE rules are the government’s main program to improve the fuel economy of new cars and light-duty trucks sold in the United States. Over the past 20 years, the rules have helped push the fuel efficiency of new vehicles to record highs even as consumers have adopted crossovers and SUVs en masse.
But the Republican reconciliation bill would essentially end the program as a practical concern for automakers. It would set all fines issued under the program to zero, stripping the government of its ability to punish automakers that sell too many polluting vehicles.
“It would essentially eviscerate the standard without actually doing so directly,” Ann Carlson, a UCLA law professor who led the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration from 2022 to 2023, told me.
“It says that, ‘We have standards here, but we don’t care if you comply or not. If you don’t comply, we’re not going to hold you responsible,’” she said.
Representatives for the Senate Commerce Committee did not respond to an immediate request for comment. A talking points memo released by the committee on Thursday said that the new bill would “[bring] down automobile prices modestly by eliminating CAFE penalties on automakers that design cars to conform to the wishes of D.C. bureaucrats rather than consumers.”
Since 1975, Congress has required the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (pronounced NIT-suh) to set annual fuel efficiency standards for new cars and light trucks sold in the United States. The rules generally require new vehicles sold nationwide to get a little more fuel efficient, on average, every year.
The rules have remained in effect — with varying levels of stringency — for 50 years, although they have generally encouraged automakers to get more efficient since Congress strengthened the law on a bipartisan basis in 2007.
In model-year 2023, the most recent period for which data is available, new cars and light trucks achieved a real-world fuel economy of 27.1 miles per gallon, an all-time high. The vehicle fleet was set to hit another record high in 2024, according to last year’s report.
Opponents of the fuel economy rules argue that the regulations increase the sticker price of new cars and trucks and push automakers to build less profitable vehicles. The Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that published Project 2025, has called the rules a “backdoor EV mandate.”
The rules’ supporters say that the standards are necessary because consumers don’t take fuel costs — or the environmental or public health costs of air pollution — into account when buying a vehicle. They say the rules keep gasoline prices low for all Americans by encouraging fuel efficiency across the board.
The strict Biden-era rules were projected to save consumers $23 billion in gasoline costs, according to an agency analysis. The American Lung Association said that the rules would prevent more than 2 million pediatric asthma attacks and save hundreds of infant lives by 2050.
Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy has targeted the fuel economy rules as part of a wide-ranging effort to roll back Biden-era energy policy. On January 28, as his first official act, Duffy ordered NHTSA to retroactively weaken the rules for all cars and light trucks sold after model-year 2022.
On Friday, Duffy separately issued a legal opinion that would restrict NHTSA’s ability to include electric vehicles in its real-world estimates of the country’s fuel economy rules. The opinion sets up the next round of CAFE rules to be considerably weaker than existing law.
But the new Republican reconciliation bill, if adopted, would render those rules moot.
Under current law, automakers must pay a fine when the average fuel economy of the vehicles they sell exceeds the fuel economy standard set for that year. Automakers can avoid paying that penalty by buying “credits” from other car companies that have done better than the rules require.
The fine’s size is set by a formula written into the law. That calculation includes the number of cars sold above the fuel-economy threshold, how much those cars exceeded it, and a $5 multiplier. The GOP tax bill rewrites the law to set the multiplier to zero dollars.
In essence, no matter how much an automaker exceeds the fuel economy rules, the GOP reconciliation bill will now multiply their fine by zero.
The original CAFE law contains a second formula allowing the government to set even higher penalties if doing so would achieve “substantial energy conservation.” The new reconciliation bill sets the multiplier in this formula, too, to zero dollars.
The CAFE law’s penalties can be significant. The automaker Stellantis, which owns Fiat and Chrysler, recently paid more than $426 million in penalties for cars sold from model year 2018 to 2020. Last year, General Motors paid a $38 million fine for light trucks sold in model year 2020.
The CAFE provision in the GOP mega-bill seems designed to skirt past the Byrd rule, a Senate rule that policies in reconciliation bills must affect revenue, spending, or generally have more than a “merely incidental” effect on the federal budget.
But Carlson, the former NHTSA acting administrator, doubted whether the provision should really survive a Byrd bath.
Zeroing out the fines is “not really about revenue,” she said, but about compliance with the law. “This is a way to try to couch repeal of CAFE in revenue terms instead of doing it outright.”
And more of the week’s top news about renewable energy conflicts.
1. Nassau County, New York – Opponents of Equinor’s offshore Empire Wind project are now suing to stop construction after the Trump administration quietly lifted its stop-work order.
2. Somerset County, Maryland – A referendum campaign in rural Maryland seeks to restrict solar development on farmland.
3. Tazewell County, Virginia – An Energix solar project is still in the works in this rural county bordering West Virginia, despite a restrictive ordinance.
4. Allan County, Indiana – This county, which includes portions of Fort Wayne, will be holding a hearing next week on changing its current solar zoning rules.
5. Madison County, Indiana – Elsewhere in Indiana, Invenergy has abandoned the Lone Oak solar project amidst fervent opposition and mounting legal hurdles.
6. Adair County, Missouri – This county may soon be home to the largest solar farm in Missouri and is in talks for another project, despite having a high opposition intensity index in the Heatmap Pro database.
7. Newtown County, Arkansas – A fifth county in Arkansas has now banned wind projects.
8. Oklahoma County, Oklahoma – A data center fight is gaining steam as activists on the ground push to block the center on grounds it would result in new renewable energy projects.
9. Bell County, Texas – Fox News is back in our newsletter, this time for platforming the campaign against solar on land suitable for agriculture.
10. Monterey County, California – The Moss Landing battery fire story continues to develop, as PG&E struggles to restart the remaining battery storage facility remaining on site.
A conversation with Biao Gong of Morningstar
This week’s conversation is with Biao Gong, an analyst with Morningstar who this week published an analysis looking at the credit risks associated with offshore wind projects. Obviously I wanted to talk to him about the situation in the U.S., whether it’s still a place investors consider open for business, and if our country’s actions impact the behavior of others.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
What led you to write this analysis?
What prompted me was our experience in assigning [private] ratings to offshore wind projects in Europe and wanted to figure out what was different [for rating] with onshore and offshore wind. It was the result of our recent work, which is private, but we’ve seen the trend – a lot of the big players in the offshore wind space are kind of trying to partner up with private equity firms to sell their interests, their operating offshore wind assets. But to raise that they’ll need credit ratings and we’ve seen those transactions. This is a growing area in Europe, because Europe has to rely on offshore wind to achieve its climate goals and secure their energy independence.
The report goes through risks in many ways, including challenging conditions for construction. Tell me about the challenges that offshore wind faces specifically as an investment risk.
The principle behind offshore wind is so different than onshore wind. You’re converting wind energy to electricity but obviously there are a bunch of areas where we believe it is riskier. That doesn’t mean you can’t fund those projects but you need additional mitigants.
This includes construction risk. It can take three to five years to complete an offshore wind project. The marine condition, the climate condition, you can’t do that [work] throughout the year and you need specialized vehicles, helicopters, crews that are so labor intensive. That’s versus onshore, which is pre-fabricated where you have a foundation and assemble it. Once you have an idea of the geotechnical conditions, the risk is just less.
There’s also the permitting process, which can be very challenging. How do you not interrupt the marine ecosystem? That’s something the regulators pay attention to. It’s definitely more than an onshore project, which means you need other mitigants for the lender to feel comfortable.
With respect to the permitting risk, how much of that is the risk of opposition from vacation towns, environmentalists, fisheries?
To be honest, we usually come in after all the critical permitting is in place, before money is given by a lender, but I also think that on the government’s side, in Europe at least, they probably have to encourage the development. And to put out an auction for an area you can build an offshore wind project, they must’ve gone through their own assessment, right? They can’t put out something that they also think may hurt an ecosystem, but that’s my speculation.
A country that did examine the impacts and offer lots of ocean floor for offshore is the U.S. What’s your take on offshore wind development in our country?
Once again, because we’re a rating agency, we don’t have much insight into early stage projects. But with that, our view is pretty gloomy. It’s like, if you haven’t started a project in the U.S., no one is going to buy it. There’s a bunch of projects already under construction, and there was the Empire Wind stop order that was lifted. I think that’s positive, but only to a degree, right? It just means this project under construction can probably go ahead. Those things will go ahead and have really strong developers with strong balance sheets. But they’re going to face additional headwinds, too, because of tariffs – that’s a different story.
We don’t see anything else going ahead.
Does the U.S. behaving this way impact the view you have for offshore wind in other countries, or is this an isolated thing?
It’s very isolated. Europe is just going full-steam ahead because the advantage here is you can build a wind farm that provides 2 or 3 gigawatts – that’s just massive. China, too. The U.S. is very different – and not just offshore. The entire renewables sector. We could revisit the U.S. four or five years from today, but [the U.S.] is going to be pretty difficult for the renewables sector.