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Two years ago this month, President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act, which both his allies and adversaries agree is the most significant climate legislation in the country’s history. Yet despite this accomplishment, the urgency of the crisis, and the consensus within the Democratic Party on the need for aggressive climate action, you would have had to listen carefully to this week’s Democratic National Convention to catch much discussion of the issue.
It’s not that none of the speakers mentioned climate, but “mentioned” is about as far as most of them went. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, an original sponsor of the Green New Deal, didn’t mention climate in her DNC speech. Nor did Tim Walz, who has been one of the most aggressive governors in the country on the issue; among other things, he signed a bill requiring utilities to provide 100% clean electricity by 2040. Barack Obama, whose Clean Power Plan so angered his opponents that they set out to destroy the entire U.S. regulatory state, said only that “America can be and must be a force for good, discouraging conflict, fighting disease, promoting human rights, protecting the planet from climate change, defending freedom, brokering peace.”
There were meetings on climate strategy that occurred around the convention, but it wasn’t until the convention’s final night that climate really took the stage, with presentations from Interior Secretary Deb Haaland and Rep. Maxwell Frost of Florida, the youngest member of Congress. In Kamala Harris’ acceptance speech, it received only a single line, in which she said that Americans deserve “the freedom to breathe clean air and drink clean water and live free from the pollution that fuels the climate crisis.” That was all.
One might conclude (and some certainly have) that as a policy priority, climate has fallen a few rungs down on the Democratic agenda. But to my mind, that wouldn’t be quite correct. There has been an undeniable change in the party’s political calculus at moments like this one, but it needn’t cause those who care about the issue to panic.
Every activist would like their issue to be at the top of the political agenda, but especially in our current state of polarization, that usually means a big fight, with high stakes and the chance of both victory and defeat. At the moment, abortion is the issue Democrats want to elevate into that kind of fight, since they believe it can be used to pull voters from the middle and even the other major party into their camp. Republicans believe the same thing about immigration.
Democrats may not believe climate change has the same kind of power in voters’ minds. But that may not be such a bad thing.
After all, starting a big fight on an issue is only one path to policy change. Another is to place it within a broader agenda, keeping the part of your coalition that cares about it on board and ready to move forward should you win, without generating too much energetic opposition from your opponents. And that’s what climate wound up being at the Democratic convention: not a main course, not even a side dish, but rather an appealing political crouton tossed into a salad full of other policies and priorities.
That’s partially a product of Democrats’ legislative success: The passage of the IRA may have encouraged them to place the climate issue somewhat to the side. Many in the party feel that they got away with passing a sweeping law without the kind of knock-down, drag-out battle we saw around something like the Affordable Care Act, another important bill that squeaked by without a vote to spare. The debate within Congress over the IRA may have been intense — remember all the wrangling over whether Joe Manchin would give his assent? — but most Americans barely noticed. It was too complicated and too fraught with dull procedural details. That’s one reason that today, most voters say they haven’t heard much about the law (and some who claim they have are probably lying). Yet when its provisions are described to them, it garners overwhelming support.
In some ways, the IRA resembles the ACA, which Democrats correctly believed would grow more popular as its effects were felt. In climate as in health care, Democrats don’t have much appetite for another big battle; they’d rather make incremental additions in future legislation that build on what they managed to put into law. And they hope the Republicans who tried to defeat the bills won’t want to take the political risk of unwinding them.
Kamala Harris’ slogan may be “When we fight, we win,” but she doesn’t seem to want too much of a fight on climate. Likewise, environmental groups are pouring millions of dollars into ads supporting her candidacy, but many of them don’t actually focus on climate and mention “clean energy” only in passing. The people producing them have clearly calculated that what’s most important is not having their issue discussed in the campaign, but rather getting an administration that will allow the IRA and other laws with climate provisions such as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to continue to unspool, while regulatory agencies including the Environmental Protection Agency keep working on reducing emissions. If those bills do what they’re supposed to, they’ll create their own constituencies and political armor.
And if most of the public takes only occasional notice at campaign time? There’s nothing wrong with that. Campaigns are almost always superficial, and this one isn’t any different. It’s what happens afterward that matters.
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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…
Talking with the director of the Energy Department’s Solar Energy Technologies Office, the CEO of Empact Technologies, and more
This week I’m in Anaheim wandering the halls of RE+ for the first time. It’s been a thrill to learn about the cavalcade of companies working on the frontlines of the energy transition. I’ll have a LOT more to say about my trip in next week’s edition of The Fight. But during my first day there I decided to ask a few impressive individuals to sit in my hot seat. Here’s what they said!
Becca Jones-Albertus – Director of the Energy Department’s Solar Energy Technologies Office
Kevin Diau – CEO of 1Climate, an AI permitting assistance tool
Charles Dauber – CEO of Empact Technologies, policy consulting firm