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Chatting party polarization with League of Conservation Voters CEO Pete Maysmith.
For this week’s conversation I chatted with Pete Maysmith, CEO of the League of Conservation Voters. There’s no one I’d rather talk to at a moment when any conflict over a solar farm can turn into the equivalent of a heated political campaign. I wanted to know how LCV is approaching the way renewables are becoming more partisan and the insurgent rise of local opposition to project development. Thankfully, Maysmith was willing to take some time right before the Labor Day weekend to sit in my hot seat.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
How is your organization attempting to counter the way support for renewable energy projects on the local level is becoming increasingly partisan?
I’m actually not as convinced that’s the case. There’s certainly some markers around it being partisan at times, but I also know there’s lots of polling that shows by far the most popular form of energy is solar. Wind is No. 2. Below that you start to get the fossil fuel forms of energy. I actually think there’s broad support.
That doesn’t mean it is always uncontroversial, but I think there’s a couple things that are really interesting about that. One, a lot of the anti-renewables sentiment falls into a follow-the-money category, in that there is funded opposition intentionally designed to foment opposition to things like offshore wind or sometimes solar facilities. It’s funded by fossil fuel interests — so yes, there’s opposition, but understanding where that springs from. And I think the second thing is that there is, I think, a real lack of full understanding among the public about the fact that renewable energy is the fastest and the cheapest form of energy to bring onto the grid right now. There’s probably a belief or an association that fossil fuels are cheaper. That’s simply not true.
I think that’s a reason to do effective public education — that as we deal with spiking electricity bills across the country, the most effective thing we can do to address it is to bring the fastest and the cheapest form of energy online.
But that doesn’t account for the fights I follow across the country. Those projects are tagged as being “Green New Deal” projects or satisfying some sort of “woke left” agenda. That sentiment very much exists. What do you do about that?
I think you just have to make the case that it’s the cheapest and the fastest form of energy. 93% of all energy brought onto the grid was wind, solar, and battery capacity because it’s the cheapest and the fastest to bring on. You can’t get gas turbines. Meanwhile, energy bills are spiking. Data centers are going in. Extreme storms … all of these things and more are causing demand to spike. What this means is you need more supply.
How we address this is to not say renewables are better than fossil fuels. We obviously think that from a climate perspective, but let’s not have that conversation first. Let’s start with a conversation about what is the cheapest and the fastest form of energy. We need people to understand that if you want to address rising energy prices, let’s use the cheapest and the fastest form of energy in terms of what to bring onto the grid.
For me, the next place I go is to these other concerns around renewable energy. What are you working on to address rising concerns around renewables and farmland, for instance?
I think that there’s lots of opportunity for renewable energy projects to be win-win in all sorts of ways. Look at the projects started under the Inflation Reduction Act. 80% of those were in Republican congressional districts. We had a running list for a while of Republican House members who voted against the IRA – a partisan bill, right? – who then went to ground-breakings and ribbon-cuttings and dirt-shovel events to celebrate battery plants opening and wind or solar facilities.
That doesn’t mean they’re all free of conflict. I’m not saying that. But there are a lot of places where Republicans were celebrating those very projects.
In terms of project by project, take offshore wind. A lot of our affiliates have done a lot of work in New England in localities to talk about the benefits of an offshore wind project. Does that mean 100% of the people always support it? No, of course not. But in lots of instances, we’ve developed a good broad base of support for offshore wind projects because of the jobs, because it creates revenue, and because solar and wind are the cheapest and fastest forms of energy to bring onto the grid.
I often hear about the need for more organizing at the grassroots and local level to get more support into county hearings and planning commission meetings. What are you doing about that?
One of the things I love the most about LCV is the work we do about our 33 affiliates. It’s the affiliates in many of the states with these projects happening that are deeply engaged. Sometimes that’s at the state legislative level to oppose bills that would stop renewables. Sometimes it’s at that level to help speed approval of renewables projects, which we fought for in Illinois. And sometimes it’s at the local level, including to stop efforts to block renewables siting. Our folks in New England have been organizing regionally for offshore wind, for example.
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And more on the week’s most important fights around renewable energy projects.
1. Ocean County, New Jersey – A Trump administration official said in a legal filing that the government is preparing to conduct a rulemaking that could restrict future offshore wind development and codify a view that could tie the hands of future presidential administrations.
2. Prince William County, Virginia – The large liberal city of Manassas rejected a battery project over fire fears, indicating that post-Moss Landing, anxieties continue to pervade in communities across the country.
3. Oklahoma County, Oklahoma – The Sooner state legislature on Monday held a joint committee meeting on solar and wind setbacks featuring prominent anti-wind advocates.
4. Tippacanoe County, Indiana – The developers of a large-scale solar project are suing the county over being rejected.
5. Dane County, Wisconsin – The Wisconsin Public Service Commission approved Invenergy’s Badger Hollow wind project – the state’s first new fully-permitted wind energy project in more than a decade.
A conversation with Courtney Brady of Evergreen Action.
This week I chatted with Courtney Brady, Midwest region deputy director for climate advocacy group Evergreen Action. Brady recently helped put together a report on rural support for renewables development, for which Evergreen Action partnered with the Private Property Rights Institute, a right-leaning advocacy group. Together, these two organizations conducted a series of interviews with self-identifying conservatives in Pennsylvania and Michigan focused on how and why GOP-leaning communities may be hesitant, reluctant, or outright hostile to solar or wind power.
What they found, Brady told me, was that politics mattered a lot less than an individual’s information diet. The conversation was incredibly informative, so I felt like it was worth sharing with all of you.
The following chat was edited lightly for clarity. Let’s dive in:
Okay, so tell me first why you did this report.
Clean energy deployment is getting increasingly challenging for a variety of reasons. What’s happening on the federal level is one thing, but something we don’t talk about much in the climate movement is what’s happening locally, what actually determines the odds of a project being successful and incorporated into the grid.
The side of the story we often hear that’s the loudest is from people at the local level who are opposed to these projects, and it limits our ability to understand the nuances. It’s not always that everyone opposes these projects in their community — that’s often not the case. We talked to several farmers in this report who are using these projects as a lifeline to keep farms in their families’ hands, generate income, preserve their farms. These projects can provide an income lifeline for these farms.
Something we tried to accomplish with this report was to understand the different perspectives, what was driving them. The only way we could do that was by going out and talking to these people in their own communities, on their own land.
The group we worked with has a very conservative background. They work on Republican campaigns. They’re very involved in local government relations. And they were the ones who were able to go out and interview these folks about what this means for their communities.
A few weeks ago, I interviewed the head of the League of Conservation Voters about the way that renewables are perceived as culturally left wing. Are there any takeaways in your research about how to deal with that?
You know, I expected to hear a little bit more of that political ideological leanings than what we actually got in these interviews. Our partners went out and interviewed seven folks; four of the case studies were in Pennsylvania, and three of them were in Michigan. It was a mix of local government officials and landowners themselves, most of whom were farmers. And they asked them, What are you hearing in your community? Where’s the opposition coming from?
I’d assumed this would be a left-versus-right, red-versus-blue issue, but this is not what we heard. We heard a lot about a lack of information or misinformation in these communities and the crucial incomes these projects can provide to landowners themselves. Again, everyone in this report that was interviewed identified as a conservative or said they were Trump supporters. It’s interesting to hear that hasn’t impacted their views of clean energy at large. They were either really happy with the projects they’d sited or still trying to get projects sited years and years later.
When you talked about misinformation, what came up?
The sizing of these leases. We heard about fears in communities that land was going to be completely overtaken over by solar or wind.
Some of these farmers said one of the biggest things they heard from their neighbors was that we’re giving away hundreds and thousands of acres to solar projects and wind projects and taking away land that should go towards crops and food. We’re hearing from these farmers that a lot of this land is no longer fertile, so providing a temporary solar lease allows that farmer to continue generating revenue while letting that land breathe.
People really had this fear of farmland being completely converted to energy production. I don’t know where a lot of that came from. We asked if that was something spread on the internet and we heard, Neighbors talk and there are Facebook groups. So there’s this overblown fear about the size of projects.
When it comes to these interviews, it does seem like you spoke to a lot of people who believe what you say. But did you speak to people who don’t believe this stuff? Because right now we’re seeing cases where opposition is either winning over county commissioners or voting out of office local officials who believe exactly what you heard from some folks.
We’ve heard so much of the opposition. It’s trending, really growing across the country. And understanding the root of why opposition is there is important. But so often we don’t hear the other side of it, these really nuanced perspectives.
There are these folks in the middle who are really thematic in these interviews — this is not about energy but a core American property rights issue. That resonates with people regardless of party.
The other piece is, there’s fear in communities of being the person to speak out against groups that are loud, the ones who want to kick people out of office over energy things. So it was really important to elevate these voices and in the interviews just made a lot of common sense. This was about elevating voices that don’t always get a seat at the table in discussions around these issues.
Packed hearings. Facebook organizing. Complaints about prime farmland and a disappearing way of life. Sound familiar?
Solar and wind companies cite the rise of artificial intelligence to make their business cases after the United States government slashed massive tax incentives for their projects.
But the data centers supposed to power the AI boom are now facing the sort of swift wave of rejections from local governments across the country eerily similar to what renewables developers have been dealing with on the ground over the last decade. The only difference is, this land use techlash feels even more sudden, intense, and culturally diffuse.
What’s happening is simple: Data centers are now routinely being denied by local governments in zoning and permitting decisions after local residents turn against them. These aggrieved denizens organize grassroots campaigns, many with associated Facebook groups, and then flood city council and county commission hearings.
Just take this past week. Last Thursday, Prince George’s County, Maryland, paused all data center permitting after a campaign against converting an abandoned mall into a data center gained traction online, with a petition garnering more than 20,000 signatures. On Monday, faced with a ferocious public outcry, Google rescinded a proposal to build what would’ve been its second data center in Indiana in Franklin Township, a community in southeastern Indianapolis – a withdrawal requested mere minutes before the township council was reportedly going to reject it.
That same day, the rural Illinois town of DeKalb denied a solar company’s request to build a “boutique data center” on the same site as a previously-permitted solar farm. And on Tuesday, the small city of Howell – located smack between Lansing and Detroit, Michigan – denied a data center proposed by an anonymous Fortune 100 company. Apparently, so many people showed up to voice their opposition to the project that the hearing was held in a high school gymnasium.
Opponents cite many things in their arguments against development, some unique to the sector like energy and water use, and others familiar to the solar and wind industry, like preserving prime farmland or maintaining a way of life.
These arguments are incredibly salient, as polling conducted by Heatmap News has revealed: less than half of Americans would ever support a data center coming near them, and this technology infrastructure is less popular than any form of renewable energy. Digging into the cross-tabs of that poll, data centers are unpopular with essentially all age demographics, and arguments against the facilities – like “they use too much water” or “they consume too much electricity” – get relatively similar agreement from registered Democrats and Republicans alike.
Ben Inskeep, a clean energy advocate in Indianapolis, told me he started fighting data centers last year after he became aware of the total power needed to fuel the rising number of projects in the state. His advocacy organization, Citizens Action Coalition of Indiana, previously weighed in on rate hikes and electricity generation decisions. Now, they’re tracking more than 40 data center projects they say are proposed in the state and getting involved in the fight on the ground against them.
Inskeep told me that, from his point of view, the primary support for data centers comes from local governments and municipally-funded works like schools and health facilities that are facing slashed budgets. In some cases the projects are being rejected despite representing millions – even billions – in capital investments and potential tax revenues so large that municipal governments are put between a rock and a hard place as they’re pressured by a weakening economy and state funding cuts.
That’s what happened in Indianapolis. Earlier this month the school district that would’ve been funded by the now-rejected Google data center came out in support of the project, declaring it would welcome new tax revenue, and said it would also lead to new educational partnerships with the tech giant. But none of that mattered. Some local officials even lambasted their colleagues' support as unwarranted, a lashing out that reminds me of what happens to pro-solar officials in Ohio.
Heatmap News has been tracking contested data center projects since the spring of this year and has found almost 100 projects under development across the country that are being actively fought by local organizers, citizens advocacy groups, and environmental organizations. The data is preliminary and likely an undercount.
Still, there’s lots to glean from it. Crucially, as we’ve seen with renewable energy development, data center opposition crops up most often in tandem with the number of projects proposed and constructed. This is only logical: the more of something that is built in a place, the more likely people are to say, “We’ve built enough of that.” This is why Virginia is the top state when it comes to data centers being opposed – it’s a hub that’s seen development spike for far longer than elsewhere in the United States.
I believe that as data center project proposals continue to rise across the country, we’ll see in parallel rising hostility to their development – potentially much larger than anything renewable energy has ever faced. It will undoubtedly also be a problem for anyone in solar or wind who is riding on an AI boom to add demand for their projects.