Sign In or Create an Account.

By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy

Climate

What the YIMBY Movement Can Teach the Climate Movement

States are playing Whack-a-Mole against restrictive local laws.

What the YIMBY Movement Can Teach the Climate Movement

Why don’t we build things?

Yale Law School professor David Schleicher, who studies local government and land use, has been trying to answer this question for years. While Schleicher typically writes about housing, his latest work — an essay literally called “Why Can’t We Build?” for the New York University Journal of Law and Liberty — is useful for thinking about why we don't have as much green energy infrastructure as we need. “Despite a generation of low interest rates and innovation in many non-physical realms,” he writes, “there are few physical monuments that we will pass to future generations — where are today’s Brooklyn Bridges or Hoover Dams?”

There are certainly explanations for this lack of infrastructural boldness. But more importantly, what are the reasons for it?

The explanations are often local restrictions on growth. When it comes to housing, that might mean zoning regulations that limit what kind of structures can be built where or fees that are sometimes charged to multifamily units. For renewable energy, developers of wind and solar might find themselves coming up against noise restrictions, rules that essentially require minimum amounts of land for installations, or even outright bans on certain types of generation.

But that doesn’t explain why these rules exist — the reasons why infrastructure doesn’t get built. As for these, he told me, most of them come down to the structural factors of local politics. “Statewide majorities have policy preferences” that often support development, Schleicher said. But local a body of government institutions that have been built up since the 1970s “have limited the capacity of those stated statewide preferences to be reflected in policy in many places.”

When it comes to zoning, Schleicher told me, proponents of reform “make arguments at the local level, but they’re very simply turning to the state level because the issue is larger than any individual jurisdiction.” The same goes for renewable energy.

If you ask people across an entire state if they want more housing or renewable energy, they will likely say yes. But local elections — which typically have comparatively low participation and are more likely to be decided on national party lines than on local policy issues — rarely reflect this political reality. With a lack of direct checks from the electorate, interest and advocacy groups have outsize weight on local policymaking.

Local governments have a variety of structures meant to discourage growth and systematically prioritize the views of those with the time and inclination to show up to local meetings — not just those who show up to vote every two or four years. Decisionmaking on individual projects may be dominated by homeowners or local environmental groups that don’t want to see any building or change in the built environment.

Statewide policymaking, on the other hand, “can bring different interest groups to the fore,” Schleicher told me, including labor and large employers. When Michigan, for instance, passed a suite of clean energy bills in 2023 with support from labor, it allowed the state to take over permitting for large clean energy projects if the applicable local rules are too restrictive.

California, too, has passed a series of laws centralizing renewable energy permitting and limiting the appeals that advocacy groups can make to block projects, which Governor Gavin Newsom has already put to work. Earlier this year, he essentially fast-tracked a 400 megawatt solar project in Riverside County by giving opponents just nine months to petition against its approval.

In all likelihood, however, Michigan will have to pass more new laws and regulations to speed up renewable development in any meaningful way. “Realistically, one of the other things that the zoning story has taught us that may be relevant for clean energy is that it's almost never does one law do the trick,” Schleicher told me. When states have tried to boost housing production, he pointed out, it has often required several rounds of legislation to get a meaningful boost in production as local opponents of new housing adapt to new laws.

California, again, provides a helpful example. The state is in the midst of a massive building boom in so-called accessory dwelling units, a.k.a. “granny flats” or ADUs. Housing advocates in the state credit this not just to a set of bills passed in 2016 preempting certain local regulations including setbacks, some parking requirements, and fees for utility connections that discouraged their construction, but also to 11 more bills passed by 2022, methodically clearing out local restrictions on building, renting, and selling ADUs.

And this was just the latest chapter in the effort to encourage the building of ADUs — the first bill trying to get around local bans in California passed in 1982. Forty years later, however, there were still only 1,000 permitted ADUs in the whole state. As of 2022, the state had registered 82,000 ADUs, a fifth of all housing produced in the state that year, according to CA YIMBY, a housing advocacy group.

"The first couple times statewide ADU bills were passed, local governments would come up with other ways to stop things," Schleicher said.

Something similar has and likely will continue to happen as states try to wrest siting for renewables projects from local governments. In New York, a 1972 law the governing the siting of power plants has gone through many different iterations. This law, known as Article 10, was changed in 2010 to apply to smaller generators and therefore include renewables projects. Article 10 created a “siting board” that could permit renewables projects under a fast-track process that exempted them from environmental impact statements required by the State Environmental Quality Review Act. The Board would even be allowed to waive “unreasonably burdensome” local laws restricting renewables development.

But the new process did little to speed permitting. What was intended to be a one- to two-year process instead turned “more lengthy and challenging than originally anticipated,” according to Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers Lawrence Susskind and Anushree Chaudari. By 2018, Columbia University professor Michael Gerrard and then Arnold & Porter partner Edward McTiernan wrote, a single project had been approved under the new system.

New York passed a new law in 2020, which included fixed timelines for review. The new process, while relatively new, has managed to get some local rules on renewable siting thrown out as “unreasonably burdensome,” and opponents to wind and solar projects have lost out in front of the new siting board.

As New York state struggles to meet its ambitious goals for decarbonization, it will likely need to reform land use and permitting regulations again, and again, and again, along with every other state.

“Remember that you’re in a long fight instead of a short one,” Schleicher told me. “One of the most important things is to be able to pass successive bills because local opponents to statewide efforts are going to adapt and change and respond.”

Yellow

You’re out of free articles.

Subscribe today to experience Heatmap’s expert analysis 
of climate change, clean energy, and sustainability.
To continue reading
Create a free account or sign in to unlock more free articles.
or
Please enter an email address
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Electric Vehicles

AM Briefing: Sean Duffy Wastes No Time

On the new Transportation secretary, California’s fires, and energy storage

Sean Duffy Targets Biden’s Fuel Economy Standards
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Current conditions: Storm Herminia moved over Europe, bringing severe flooding to Spain and France • The air quality is low in Mumbai, where a panel is considering banning vehicles powered by gas or diesel • It’s chilly but sunny in Washington, D.C., where Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will face the Senate Finance Committee in his confirmation hearings to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Judge halts Trump’s funding pause

A lot happened in Washington yesterday. Chaos erupted after the Office of Management and Budget dropped a two-page memo ordering a pause on federal grant programs that “advance[s] Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies.” According to Heatmap’s Jael Holzman, the freeze targets programs including vast swathes of the federal government most relevant to the energy sector, from major Energy Department cleantech research offices and labs to all implementations of energy tax credits, including those in the Inflation Reduction Act. It also includes essentially all work at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a Commerce Department subagency that produces climate science and weather forecasting. The order was set to take effect at 5 p.m. but a federal judge temporarily halted enforcement of it until a hearing on February 3.

Keep reading...Show less
Yellow
Offshore wind question marks.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Among the many, many, many actions President Donald Trump took in his first week to curtail clean energy and climate policy in the U.S., he issued an order freezing all wind farm approvals. It’s anyone’s guess what happens next. On the one hand, we know the president hates wind energy — as he reiterated during his first post-inauguration interview on Fox News last week: “We don’t want windmills in this country.” But the posture is also at odds with Trump’s declaration of a national energy emergency and vision for “energy dominance.” Plus, it’s Trump. There’s a non-zero chance he’ll change his mind.

But let’s assume the wind leasing and permitting freeze stays in place for the next four years. Trump also plans to “conduct a comprehensive review of the ecological, economic, and environmental necessity of terminating or amending” existing leases, which could upheave projects already under construction or built. How do we make sense of what this all means for climate change?

Keep reading...Show less
Blue
Podcast

The Trump Policy That Would Be Really Bad for Oil Companies

Jesse and Heatmap deputy editor Jillian Goodman talk Canadian tariffs with Rory Johnston.

Canadian oil production.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

On February 1 — that is, three days from now — President Donald Trump has promised to apply a tariff of 25% to all U.S. imports from Canada and Mexico, crude oil very much not excepted. Canada has been the largest source of American crude imports for more than 20 years. More than that, the U.S. oil industry has come to depend on Canada’s thick, sulfurous oil to blend with America’s light, sweet domestic product to suit its highly specialized refineries. If that heavy, gunky stuff suddenly becomes a lot more expensive, so will U.S. oil refining.

Rory Johnston is an oil markets analyst in Toronto. He writes the Commodity Context newsletter, a data-driven look at oil markets and commodity flows. He’s also a lecturer at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy and a fellow with the Canadian Global Affairs Institute and the Payne Institute for Public Policy at the Colorado School of Mines. He previously led commodities market research at Scotiabank. (And he’s Canadian.)

Keep reading...Show less
Yellow