Why a Climate Law Expert Sees ‘Small Glimmers of Hope’

This week’s conversation is a quick catch-up with our friends at Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. I hopped on the phone with the center’s deputy director Romany Webb to chat about recent updates they published to anti-renewables opposition analysis. I wanted to dig into their research beyond the toplines — what should people care about in the coming election? How have data centers come up in their research? Or the repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act?

The following conversation was lightly edited for clarity.

Let’s start with the updates. Walk me through what’s new in your research.

So, we published two-year reports that detail renewable energy opposition across the United States; one is our report we’ve published since 2021 and it’s a new edition, and the other is an update of a report we published a few years ago on false claims about renewable energy where we highlight the misinformed used against projects.

This year’s local opposition report found local opposition continues to be widespread and really endemic. There’s been opposition to renewable energy development in every state across the country and we’re seeing it still have a real impact on whether projects get built. But there are small glimmers of hope. We identified 70 new state and local restrictions, which was a decline from previous years — that’s notable.

In select states where there have been a lot of these local restrictions, we’ve seen a drop off, like in Michigan after they enacted their state siting law. These are encouraging signs, and obviously it’s still early days, but it shows some of these state reforms are having a positive impact.

How is data center opposition coming up in your research?

Our reports do not track opposition to data center development. But we do certainly hear anecdotally that debates over data center development are spilling over into debates over renewable energy and battery storage. Often, local communities express concern that these new projects are just being built to power data centers — in some cases when there’s no connection at all, really. But I don’t have data on that link.

You said the law Michigan enacted might be working. Do you know if these laws limiting local opposition actually help with fighting renewable energy opponents, or are they engendering their own backlashes that undermine their effectiveness?

I think it’s too early to say the impacts they’ll have over the medium to long term. In the near term, many of the laws have been successful in accelerating the permitting of renewable energy projects or making it easier for them to be approved. Recent data out of New York shows that many of the projects that have gone through the new siting process are being approved — they’re still fairly long but they’re consistent which is good for development. In other places we’ve seen efforts to limit local government’s ability to adopt restrictions on renewable energy development, like Illinois and Michigan.

Those laws are relatively new, but the data we have shows that drop-off. It suggests the intended effect. But we need more time to know how effective they are and some of those laws have been getting quite a bit of pushback. There’s been a myriad of bills enacted in state legislatures across the country that would roll back those recent reforms or impose new restrictions on renewable development.

How much does the coming midterm election matter for the future of opposition to renewable energy?

I do think the next election will have important implications on whether we continue to see the ever-growing number of state level restrictions adopted or if we see a shift there.

Even if we see a shift in the composition of legislatures, I do think we’ll continue to see community opposition in many places to these projects. We shouldn’t ignore that developing a solar or wind project does have impacts on the local community and so developers really need to take steps to mitigate and manage those impacts.

If they don’t they’ll face the opposition, and even if they are they may face it because of misinformation around these projects.

My last question is, to what extent did the repeal of the IRA impact the ability for local opposition to kill projects in the crib?

I can’t say that definitively. I certainly don’t have the data that would support that sort of claim. And we don’t track that, specifically.

But often, groups that are opposed to renewable energy development will express concerns about the costs of projects or emphasize projects may not be viable without government subsidies. So the rollback of tax credits under the IRA plays into that argument. Of course when you look at the data, renewable energy projects are cheaper and the argument doesn’t hold muster.

But it’s an argument we regularly see pushed by opposition groups. That is how we have seen the IRA repeal affect this.