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He’s got the best climate record of any president in history. Few voters have any idea.
The presidential election next year is, alas, already kicking off. Several Republicans are trying, and thus far totally failing, to oust Donald Trump as the presumptive GOP nominee. President Biden is laying the groundwork for his campaign.
As far as subjects for campaign discussion, it’s a decent bet that climate change might be a major one for the first time. Scientists say it’s highly likely that 2023 will be measured as the hottest year ever recorded, and America is no exception. Practically the entire summer has seen a brutal heat wave across the South, and extreme weather has hammered many states. Most recently a sudden devastating firestorm in Hawaii, likely fueled by climate change, burned much of the city of Lahaina to ashes and killed a reported 53 people. And hurricane season has barely started.
But Biden is struggling to sell his climate record. A recent Washington Post poll found that 57 percent of Americans disapproved of his record on climate change. At the same time, large majorities both favored the core elements of his major climate achievement, the Inflation Reduction Act, yet also had no idea what it was. This fits with a Heatmap poll conducted earlier this year.
Convincing Americans Biden has done something big about the biggest problem facing America and the world is vitally important. But it won’t be easy.
On first glance, this is rather strange. After all, one of the biggest political dramas of the 21st century centered around the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act last year. Indeed, much of the 117th Congress was taken up with Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia slowly and agonizingly tearing out each piece of Biden’s Build Back Better agenda, and then seemingly killing the entire thing. Democratic officials, climate activists, and liberal voters alike fell into despair.
Then out of nowhere Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Manchin came back with a last-minute climate bill. And despite Manchin insisting on a few distasteful handouts to fossil fuel companies, overall the IRA was a huge success. It included for the first time a full 10 years of subsidies for renewable power construction and production, giving industry the confidence to invest. It made nonprofit utilities and government entities like the Tennessee Valley Authority eligible for subsidies as well, also for the first time, along with dozens of smaller initiatives.
That, together with the CHIPS Act and the infrastructure bill, plus interlocking IRA rules requiring investment and raw materials be sourced from the U.S. or certain friendly countries, has fueled a massive boom in domestic construction. Solar and wind farms, battery factories, and other installations are shooting up across the country. Much remains to be figured out, but overall the IRA is arguably the greatest accomplishment of a Democratic president since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs.
But voter ignorance probably shouldn’t be surprising. While political junkies were obsessed with the drama in Congress, such people make up a tiny minority of the population. For average people, this was just one more inscrutable political drama out of hundreds that seemed to have little bearing on their lives, if they noticed it at all.
That confusion is made worse by the deliberately misleading title of the bill. The IRA might actually have eroded inflation on the margin by encouraging more energy investment, but let’s be real: This is a climate bill. It was so named because inflation was the obsession of the moment, and pretending that it would cool prices helped get it over the finish line.
The problem is made worse still by the dire state of local journalism across the country. A core political element of the IRA structure is that it spreads green investment out all over the place, so as to build broad support. (Indeed, more investment is going into conservative states than the administration apparently expected.) Before Google and Facebook devoured the advertising industry that used to support journalism, there would have been detailed local coverage of each new project, but now only the largest cities have extensive local coverage, and even there publications have suffered.
This wouldn’t be a problem for Republicans, because they have a vast propaganda apparatus that blasts party messaging across the country through Fox News, local news channels owned by right-wing oligarchs, tabloids, and so on. But the Democratic Party establishment failed to build something comparable. (In fact, it did the opposite when it shut down ThinkProgressin 2019, apparently because CAP executives were irritated by the unionized lefty staff.)
As Alex Pareene writes, “The Democratic Party, by and large, relies on corporate mainstream media to do its messaging work and is then constantly furious when this strategy fails or backfires.” It’s a dubious strategy when it comes to, say, The New York Times, but it is completely impossible when it comes to local publications that don’t even exist anymore.
The 2022 midterm election cost almost $9 billion — or nearly half the value of the entire newspaper industry — split roughly equally between the parties. The 2020 election cost $14.4 billion, and in that one Democrats outspent Republicans by about half. Kentucky Democrat Amy McGrath alone raised $88 million for that state’s 2020 U.S. Senate race, only to lose by almost 20 points.
If I were a wealthy liberal who donates ungodly sums to the Democrats, or someone running their PACs that raise billions in small-dollar donations, I would consider spending some of that money buying or setting up journalism publications in strategic locations— not to provide vulgar shrieking propaganda a la Fox News, but straightforward liberal-leaning coverage. Another option would be to conduct consistent messaging operations around the IRA in general, rather than a sudden blast of ads keyed to specific races when election day comes around.
It’s the kind of thing that doesn’t pay off immediately, but the strategic value would be immense, especially given the low marginal value of a dollar spent on traditional campaign efforts. Again, just think of the political power of Fox News. President Biden has a strong climate record, but to get any credit, voters must first hear about it.
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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.”