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The Clean Air Act isn’t helping.
Wildfire smoke is making air pollution in the United States a lot worse, as anyone in New York City last week can attest. Yet the regulatory tools that have done so much to reduce emissions from cars and smokestacks may actually be getting in the way of effectively managing forests in order to prevent massive, out of control fires.
The increasing importance of wildfire smoke, and the structural policy changes required to fight it — from overhauling forestry practices to worldwide reductions in greenhouse gas emissions — may require a rethinking of how public policy is supposed to protect people from pollution.
Catalytic converters in cars have visibly cleared the air even in the most traffic-jammed cities; getting rid of lead in gasoline has made children smarter; efforts to fight acid rain were so successful that the paucity of it is now seen as a reason to ignore current environmental problems. But all these efforts were aimed at limiting emissions from particular sources, like factories and vehicles, not fires that consume tens of thousands of acres across a mixture of federally managed and privately held land.
This is the paradigm of pollution policy, Kirsten Engel, a law professor at the University of Arizona, told me. Policymakers go to “particular point sources” like factories, cars, and refineries to keep the pollutants they generate below national standards. “Of course wildfires don’t fit that paradigm," she said. “They’re not a point source that’s easily controlled.”
Under the Clean Air Act, states and regions are mandated to meet National Ambient Air Quality Standards, levels of six air pollutants that the EPA sets out — including the tiny particulates that wildfires spew out, known as PM2.5. But many of those wildfire days are essentially not counted under the Clean Air Act rules, as they’re ruled to be “exceptional.” The logic behind this framework is that states should not be held responsible for emissions they can’t reasonably control. Without the exceptional event framework, extreme wildfire events could essentially force mass shutdowns of industry in regions affected by it.
But the framework is being pushed to its limits. Utah State University researcher Liji David found that, between 2000 and 2017, “Wildland fires were the primary driver for PM2.5 exceptional events,” with regions in the western United States having the most such events. This means that a growing source of a form of pollution that’s supposed to be limited under the Clean Air Act is not even falling within the law’s purview. And this is having dramatic effects on air pollution nationally, to the point of partially reversing the gains under the Clean Air Act.
According to research by Stanford economist Marshall Burke and others, “since 2016, wildfire smoke has significantly slowed or reversed previous improvements in average annual PM2.5 concentrations in two-thirds of U.S. states, eroding 23% of previous gains on average in those states (equivalent to 3.6 years of air quality progress) and over 50% in multiple western states.”
Research by Marissa Childs, who contributed to the Burke paper, found that some Western areas “saw decadal increases in an annual smoke PM2.5...comparable in absolute magnitude to the reduction in PM2.5 brought about by the Clean Air Act in the US.”
The solution, explained Michael Wara, a researcher at Stanford, is a complete rethinking of forestry, indoor air quality, and of course, emissions reductions. This would entail overhauling forest management, including a massive increase in prescribed burns on federal, state, and private land. These intentional fires can remove fuel from a forest floor that would spark a larger, uncontrolled fire. Doing controlled burns adequate to the scale of the wildfire challenge would require essentially a total reversal of about a century of forest management policy in the United States.
Here the Clean Air Act isn’t merely silent, as it can be with wildfire, but may be actively inhibiting good policy. Whereas wildfire smoke can and often does get waived by states under the exceptional event framework, smoke from a prescribed burn can often is still counted or the prescribed burns are not done at all in order to maintain compliance with air quality standards. Advocates for controlled burns argue that the net amount of smoke — and therefore pollution — would be lower with a more aggressive and permissive policy for prescribed burns.
According to a Government Accountability Office report, officials at the Department of Interior want more leeway to conduct prescribed burns but feel inhibited by the EPA's use of the exceptional events rule and air quality standards. Land management officials also warned that their hands will be increasingly tied in areas that are already above or near the upper limit of air quality standards, particularly, as the EPA has proposed, if those standards become more strict.
One legal scholar has argued that the exceptional events designation should be flipped on its head entirely, and that the Environmental Protection Agency “should only exempt pollution from wildfire smoke when states take steps to mitigate extreme and increasing wildfire risk through effective land management with prescribed burns.”
“The EPA is philosophically at this point still not convinced of that idea,” Wara said.
Even beyond the rules around exceptional events, Wara said, more funding and a different culture of forest management are needed. “We don’t have a workforce, we don’t have a budget, we don’t have a career line that would support this kind of work. If you’re going to treat land in any way at the scale we’re talking about, we need an army,” Wara said.
Beyond wildfire prevention, there’s also the immediate responses to bad air, namely well insulated homes and workspaces with adequate filtration. “In the meantime you can’t let people die,” Wara said. “People need protection,” including air filters for seniors, who are at a higher risk of negative health outcomes from smoke.
“The most basic idea of the Clean Air Act and all environmental laws is to protect people and protect public health,” Wara said. “It’s not climate change, it’s not cute little creatures. The big political movement that drove change was to protect people. And I think we need to get back to that basic idea when it comes to the Clean Air Act.”
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A conversation with VDE Americas CEO Brian Grenko.
This week’s Q&A is about hail. Last week, we explained how and why hail storm damage in Texas may have helped galvanize opposition to renewable energy there. So I decided to reach out to Brian Grenko, CEO of renewables engineering advisory firm VDE Americas, to talk about how developers can make sure their projects are not only resistant to hail but also prevent that sort of pushback.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Hiya Brian. So why’d you get into the hail issue?
Obviously solar panels are made with glass that can allow the sunlight to come through. People have to remember that when you install a project, you’re financing it for 35 to 40 years. While the odds of you getting significant hail in California or Arizona are low, it happens a lot throughout the country. And if you think about some of these large projects, they may be in the middle of nowhere, but they are taking hundreds if not thousands of acres of land in some cases. So the chances of them encountering large hail over that lifespan is pretty significant.
We partnered with one of the country’s foremost experts on hail and developed a really interesting technology that can digest radar data and tell folks if they’re developing a project what the [likelihood] will be if there’s significant hail.
Solar panels can withstand one-inch hail – a golfball size – but once you get over two inches, that’s when hail starts breaking solar panels. So it’s important to understand, first and foremost, if you’re developing a project, you need to know the frequency of those events. Once you know that, you need to start thinking about how to design a system to mitigate that risk.
The government agencies that look over land use, how do they handle this particular issue? Are there regulations in place to deal with hail risk?
The regulatory aspects still to consider are about land use. There are authorities with jurisdiction at the federal, state, and local level. Usually, it starts with the local level and with a use permit – a conditional use permit. The developer goes in front of the township or the city or the county, whoever has jurisdiction of wherever the property is going to go. That’s where it gets political.
To answer your question about hail, I don’t know if any of the [authority having jurisdictions] really care about hail. There are folks out there that don’t like solar because it’s an eyesore. I respect that – I don’t agree with that, per se, but I understand and appreciate it. There’s folks with an agenda that just don’t want solar.
So okay, how can developers approach hail risk in a way that makes communities more comfortable?
The bad news is that solar panels use a lot of glass. They take up a lot of land. If you have hail dropping from the sky, that’s a risk.
The good news is that you can design a system to be resilient to that. Even in places like Texas, where you get large hail, preparing can mean the difference between a project that is destroyed and a project that isn’t. We did a case study about a project in the East Texas area called Fighting Jays that had catastrophic damage. We’re very familiar with the area, we work with a lot of clients, and we found three other projects within a five-mile radius that all had minimal damage. That simple decision [to be ready for when storms hit] can make the complete difference.
And more of the week’s big fights around renewable energy.
1. Long Island, New York – We saw the face of the resistance to the war on renewable energy in the Big Apple this week, as protestors rallied in support of offshore wind for a change.
2. Elsewhere on Long Island – The city of Glen Cove is on the verge of being the next New York City-area community with a battery storage ban, discussing this week whether to ban BESS for at least one year amid fire fears.
3. Garrett County, Maryland – Fight readers tell me they’d like to hear a piece of good news for once, so here’s this: A 300-megawatt solar project proposed by REV Solar in rural Maryland appears to be moving forward without a hitch.
4. Stark County, Ohio – The Ohio Public Siting Board rejected Samsung C&T’s Stark Solar project, citing “consistent opposition to the project from each of the local government entities and their impacted constituents.”
5. Ingham County, Michigan – GOP lawmakers in the Michigan State Capitol are advancing legislation to undo the state’s permitting primacy law, which allows developers to evade municipalities that deny projects on unreasonable grounds. It’s unlikely the legislation will become law.
6. Churchill County, Nevada – Commissioners have upheld the special use permit for the Redwood Materials battery storage project we told you about last week.
Long Islanders, meanwhile, are showing up in support of offshore wind, and more in this week’s edition of The Fight.
Local renewables restrictions are on the rise in the Hawkeye State – and it might have something to do with carbon pipelines.
Iowa’s known as a renewables growth area, producing more wind energy than any other state and offering ample acreage for utility-scale solar development. This has happened despite the fact that Iowa, like Ohio, is home to many large agricultural facilities – a trait that has often fomented conflict over specific projects. Iowa has defied this logic in part because the state was very early to renewables, enacting a state portfolio standard in 1983, signed into law by a Republican governor.
But something else is now on the rise: Counties are passing anti-renewables moratoria and ordinances restricting solar and wind energy development. We analyzed Heatmap Pro data on local laws and found a rise in local restrictions starting in 2021, leading to nearly 20 of the state’s 99 counties – about one fifth – having some form of restrictive ordinance on solar, wind or battery storage.
What is sparking this hostility? Some of it might be counties following the partisan trend, as renewable energy has struggled in hyper-conservative spots in the U.S. But it may also have to do with an outsized focus on land use rights and energy development that emerged from the conflict over carbon pipelines, which has intensified opposition to any usage of eminent domain for energy development.
The central node of this tension is the Summit Carbon Solutions CO2 pipeline. As we explained in a previous edition of The Fight, the carbon transportation network would cross five states, and has galvanized rural opposition against it. Last November, I predicted the Summit pipeline would have an easier time under Trump because of his circle’s support for oil and gas, as well as the placement of former North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum as interior secretary, as Burgum was a major Summit supporter.
Admittedly, this prediction has turned out to be incorrect – but it had nothing to do with Trump. Instead, Summit is now stalled because grassroots opposition to the pipeline quickly mobilized to pressure regulators in states the pipeline is proposed to traverse. They’re aiming to deny the company permits and lobbying state legislatures to pass bills banning the use of eminent domain for carbon pipelines. One of those states is South Dakota, where the governor last month signed an eminent domain ban for CO2 pipelines. On Thursday, South Dakota regulators denied key permits for the pipeline for the third time in a row.
Another place where the Summit opposition is working furiously: Iowa, where opposition to the CO2 pipeline network is so intense that it became an issue in the 2020 presidential primary. Regulators in the state have been more willing to greenlight permits for the project, but grassroots activists have pressured many counties into some form of opposition.
The same counties with CO2 pipeline moratoria have enacted bans or land use restrictions on developing various forms of renewables, too. Like Kossuth County, which passed a resolution decrying the use of eminent domain to construct the Summit pipeline – and then three months later enacted a moratorium on utility-scale solar.
I asked Jessica Manzour, a conservation program associate with Sierra Club fighting the Summit pipeline, about this phenomenon earlier this week. She told me that some counties are opposing CO2 pipelines and then suddenly tacking on or pivoting to renewables next. In other cases, counties with a burgeoning opposition to renewables take up the pipeline cause, too. In either case, this general frustration with energy companies developing large plots of land is kicking up dust in places that previously may have had a much lower opposition risk.
“We painted a roadmap with this Summit fight,” said Jess Manzour, a campaigner with Sierra Club involved in organizing opposition to the pipeline at the grassroots level, who said zealous anti-renewables activists and officials are in some cases lumping these items together under a broad umbrella. ”I don’t know if it’s the people pushing for these ordinances, rather than people taking advantage of the situation.”