You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
The president isn’t trying to cut emissions as fast possible. He’s doing something else.
Here’s the problem with President Joe Biden’s climate policy: From a certain point of view, it makes no sense.
Take his electricity policy. At the top level, Biden has committed to eliminating greenhouse-gas pollution from the power sector by 2035. He wants to accomplish this largely by making clean energy cheaper — that’s the goal of the Inflation Reduction Act, of course — and he has also changed federal rules so it’s slightly easier to build power lines and large-scale renewable projects. He has also added teeth to that goal in the form of new Environmental Protection Agency rules cracking down on coal and natural gas.
Yet at the same time, Biden has seemingly also made it more difficult to decarbonize. Last week, he raised tariffs on cheap solar panels and grid-scale batteries made in China. And he ended the two-year “solar bridge,” a tariff exemption for some Chinese-based solar manufacturers that operated in other countries. That means that as soon as next month, some eye-watering tariffs — possibly as high as 254% — could apply to many U.S. solar imports.
Then there’s Biden’s policy on electric cars. The president wants 50% of all new vehicles sold in the U.S. to be EVs or plug-in hybrids by 2030, and he has overseen billions of dollars of spending aimed at building a national charging network. His climate law discounts the price of many EVs by $7,500 and directly subsidizes virtually every battery and vehicle made in America. Yet he recently put 100% tariffs on EV imports from China, the country that makes some of the world’s cheapest and best electric cars.
This combination is, frankly, a little confusing. And it has confounded critics around the world: It can sometimes seem like the president is cutting the cost of clean energy with one hand while raising it with another. “The Biden effect will be to raise the U.S. domestic price of EVs, solar panels and other green inputs and delay America’s energy transition,” writes Edward Luce of the Financial Times. The Economist, in high dudgeon, lectured Biden for forgetting his David Ricardo.
There is certainly much to criticize about Biden’s climate policy, but reading coverage of it, I’m often struck by how little the commentator seems to understand what the policy is trying to do. There is, as Noah Smith and Matt Yglesias have written, a strong national-security component to the tariffs announced last week. But there’s more to these policies than national security alone. Although the president’s actions can sometimes seem contradictory, there is in fact a logic to what Biden is trying to do on climate change. And without defending the policy, I think it is important to describe it accurately.
Let’s back up. For the past 30 years, climate advocates tried to raise the cost of fossil fuels in America by imposing a carbon price. Taxing carbon pollution is the most elegant and economically efficient way to solve climate change, and — at least in theory — it doesn’t require the kind of fine-tuned economic tampering that the Biden administration is engaged in. Or at least that’s what the economists say — I remain skeptical that a carbon tax alone would have succeeded in decarbonizing the economy without additional policy.
And in any case, the point is moot: Climate advocates never succeeded in passing such a price. Voters were understandably resistant to raising the cost of energy, especially gasoline, and no coalition emerged to persuade politicians that the political costs of a carbon tax would be worth bearing. During many of those years, too, the American economy was so understimulated that passing a revenue-raising tax made little political sense: There was effectively no public constituency for deficit reduction.
By 2020, Democrats had largely given up on this approach. Although many still believe that a carbon tax could be an effective decarbonization tool, they instead adopted a new political economic philosophy. Simplified somewhat, it goes something like:
1. The biggest obstacle to passing American climate policy is the lack of a domestic coalition that supports the deep and continued decarbonization of the domestic economy.
2. Passing climate policy has been so hard historically because a powerful and geographically diverse set of companies, unions, state, and local officials, and political donors — largely but not entirely in the fossil fuel industry — don’t want to see the U.S. move away from oil and natural gas. They’re backed up by status-quo-favoring consumers.
3. The central aim of near-term climate policy, then, should be to create an enduring coalition to support the continued decarbonization of the U.S. economy.
This is the guiding logic of Biden’s climate policy: that American politics must have a powerful, durable, and flexible pro-decarbonization coalition if the U.S. is to succeed in reaching net zero. Achieving this coalition is the underlying aim of the IRA, the EPA rules, and — yes — the recent tariffs.
This is what I wish critics understood about the president’s climate strategy: Biden’s strategy won’t have succeeded if the U.S. makes some headway on emissions but imports all of its decarbonization tech from China. The U.S. actually has to develop its own supply chain and manufacturing base to build the kind of deep economic coalition that can sustain long-term decarbonization. This is why trade restrictions have become so central to the administration’s world view.
I should add that for all that the administration emphasizes “good-paying union jobs” in its messaging around climate policy, jobs alone aren’t necessarily the goal of this strategy. Critics of American industrial policy sometimes point out that, even in China, the labor share of manufacturing is falling; indeed, one of China’s great manufacturing advantages is the extent to which it has automated its assembly lines. But that may not necessarily matter to coalition politics: As the political scientist Nina Kelsey has shown in her research on the Montreal Protocol, companies tend to support environmental policy when doing so will help their large-scale, fixed investments — essentially, their factories — not their labor force.
There are big risks to Biden’s strategy. The next administration — which in this moment looks likely to be helmed by Donald Trump — could repeal the production and installation subsidies for renewables but leave the tariffs in place. That would devastate the finances of domestic solar manufacturers and significantly slow down the decarbonization of America’s grid, and it would mean that Americans who want to import cheap solar panels wouldn’t be able to. That would essentially freeze America’s decarbonization effort while the rest of the world races ahead.
Even if Biden wins, the kind of economic management that he’s trying to do may simply not be possible in the federal system — or, for that matter, with the existing Democratic coalition. There may be too many interest groups to placate or too many obstacles to building. California offers a warning about how well-intentioned liberal policy can prevent enough new infrastructure from getting built.
Still a third risk is that the American solar manufacturing industry meets domestic demand but doesn’t become very competitive, so it doesn’t reduce costs aggressively. A relatively small number of firms actually make solar panels in the United States, and they have to compete for engineering talent with more established industries like software. What has brought down the cost of solar in China isn’t subsidies per se, but an intensely competitive and very large domestic market. It isn’t clear that the American market for solar power will attain such scale or efficiency.
These would, obviously, be lasting setbacks for American decarbonization. But even in critiquing this set of policies, I hope the world notes what a different problem America faces when taking on climate change as compared to the rest of the world. Most countries import more oil than they produce, meaning their fossil-fuel addiction shackles their currencies and economies to a volatile global commodity. They are only too happy to move away from fossil fuels, and especially oil, provided that a cheap and acceptable alternative is available. In the United Kingdom, for instance, cross-partisan support for decarbonization policy has existed since the era of Margaret Thatcher.
In the United States, with our oil-drenched politics, the task is different. Only a sufficiently powerful pro-climate coalition will be able to unseat the fossil fuels enthroned atop our economy. Forging this coalition — even if it slows down decarbonization for a few years — is Biden’s true goal. Whether that’s worth it is another story.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Almost half of developers believe it is “somewhat or significantly harder to do” projects on farmland, despite the clear advantages that kind of property has for harnessing solar power.
The solar energy industry has a big farm problem cropping up. And if it isn’t careful, it’ll be dealing with it for years to come.
Researchers at SI2, an independent research arm of the Solar Energy Industries Association, released a study of farm workers and solar developers this morning that said almost half of all developers believe it is “somewhat or significantly harder to do” projects on farmland, despite the clear advantages that kind of property has for harnessing solar power.
Unveiled in conjunction with RE+, the largest renewable energy conference in the U.S., the federally-funded research includes a warning sign that permitting is far and away the single largest impediment for solar developers trying to build projects on farmland. If this trend continues or metastasizes into a national movement, it could indefinitely lock developers out from some of the nation’s best land for generating carbon-free electricity.
“If a significant minority opposes and perhaps leads to additional moratoria, [developers] will lose a foot in the door for any future projects,” Shawn Rumery, SI2’s senior program director and the survey lead, told me. “They may not have access to that community any more because that moratoria is in place.”
SI2’s research comes on the heels of similar findings from Heatmap Pro. A poll conducted for the platform last month found 70% of respondents who had more than 50 acres of property — i.e. the kinds of large landowners sought after by energy developers — are concerned that renewable energy “takes up farmland,” by far the greatest objection among that cohort.
Good farmland is theoretically perfect for building solar farms. What could be better for powering homes than the same strong sunlight that helps grow fields of yummy corn, beans and vegetables? And there’s a clear financial incentive for farmers to get in on the solar industry, not just because of the potential cash in letting developers use their acres but also the longer-term risks climate change and extreme weather can pose to agriculture writ large.
But not all farmers are warming up to solar power, leading towns and counties across the country to enact moratoria restricting or banning solar and wind development on and near “prime farmland.” Meanwhile at the federal level, Republicans and Democrats alike are voicing concern about taking farmland for crop production to generate renewable energy.
Seeking to best understand this phenomena, SI2 put out a call out for ag industry representatives and solar developers to tell them how they feel about these two industries co-mingling. They received 355 responses of varying detail over roughly three months earlier this year, including 163 responses from agriculture workers, 170 from solar developers as well as almost two dozen individuals in the utility sector.
A key hurdle to development, per the survey, is local opposition in farm communities. SI2’s publicity announcement for the research focuses on a hopeful statistic: up to 70% of farmers surveyed said they were “open to large-scale solar.” But for many, that was only under certain conditions that allow for dual usage of the land or agrivoltaics. In other words, they’d want to be able to keep raising livestock, a practice known as solar grazing, or planting crops unimpeded by the solar panels.
The remaining percentage of farmers surveyed “consistently opposed large-scale solar under any condition,” the survey found.
“Some of the messages we got were over my dead body,” Rumery said.
Meanwhile a “non-trivial” number of solar developers reported being unwilling or disinterested in adopting the solar-ag overlap that farmers want due to the increased cost, Rumery said. While some companies expect large portions of their business to be on farmland in the future, and many who responded to the survey expect to use agrivoltaic designs, Rumery voiced concern at the percentage of companies unwilling to integrate simultaneous agrarian activities into their planning.
In fact, Rumery said some developers’ reticence is part of what drove him and his colleagues to release the survey while at RE+.
As we discussed last week, failing to address the concerns of local communities can lead to unintended consequences with industry-wide ramifications. Rumery said developers trying to build on farmland should consider adopting dual-use strategies and focus on community engagement and education to avoid triggering future moratoria.
“One of the open-ended responses that best encapsulated the problem was a developer who said until the cost of permitting is so high that it forces us to do this, we’re going to continue to develop projects as they are,” he said. “That’s a cold way to look at it.”
Meanwhile, who is driving opposition to solar and other projects on farmland? Are many small farm owners in rural communities really against renewables? Is the fossil fuel lobby colluding with Big Ag? Could building these projects on fertile soil really impede future prospects at crop yields?
These are big questions we’ll be tackling in far more depth in next week’s edition of The Fight. Trust me, the answers will surprise you.
Here are the most notable renewable energy conflicts over the past week.
1. Worcester County, Maryland –Ocean City is preparing to go to court “if necessary” to undo the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s approval last week of U.S. Wind’s Maryland Offshore Wind Project, town mayor Rick Meehan told me in a statement this week.
2. Magic Valley, Idaho – The Lava Ridge Wind Project would be Idaho’s biggest wind farm. But it’s facing public outcry over the impacts it could have on a historic site for remembering the impact of World War II on Japanese residents in the United States.
3. Kossuth County, Iowa – Iowa’s largest county – Kossuth – is in the process of approving a nine-month moratorium on large-scale solar development.
Here’s a few more hotspots I’m watching…
The most important renewable energy policies and decisions from the last few days.
Greenlink’s good day – The Interior Department has approved NV Energy’s Greenlink West power line in Nevada, a massive step forward for the Biden administration’s pursuit of more transmission.
States’ offshore muddle – We saw a lot of state-level offshore wind movement this past week… and it wasn’t entirely positive. All of this bodes poorly for odds of a kumbaya political moment to the industry’s benefit any time soon.
Chumash loophole – Offshore wind did notch one win in northern California by securing an industry exception in a large marine sanctuary, providing for farms to be built in a corridor of the coastline.
Here’s what else I’m watching …