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A guide to the year’s biggest environmental fight — and some of the most important changes that could result.
Pending catastrophe, the most important environmental policy debate in Washington this year will be about a set of questions that have come to be known as “permitting reform.”
Essentially, the government is poised to change the laws and procedures that govern how it approves new infrastructure, from highways to subways, wind farms to oil pipelines. The outcome of the debate will alter how America fights climate change and builds clean energy — and whether it further embraces fossil fuels.
Some of the oldest ideas in American environmental law are up for grabs. For the first time in decades, both parties want something to change about the country’s permitting process: Republicans want to loosen federal environmental reviews; while Democrats want to simplify and speed up how new electricity transmission is built, which would inherently boost renewables. That should make a deal possible — and indeed, lawmakers have entertained striking a bargain in a deal to raise the debt ceiling.
Yet permitting reform is unusually hard to follow. As of May 2023, at least six different bills are floating around Congress: House Democrats,Senate Democrats,House Republicans, andSenateRepublicans have each proposed a bill (or two), as has Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, a key moderate who leads the Senate’s energy committee. Each of these bills consists of dozens of unique policies and proposals, and their goals range from hastening the end of oil to rejuvenating fossil fuels.
Below we’ve compiled a cheat sheet on some of the biggest questions in the 2023 permitting-reform debate without getting into the weeds of each separate bill. We’ll update it as the process continues.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images
It’s really hard to build new power lines in the United States — especially the kind of long-distance, high-voltage power lines that can move electricity across the country.
Because a shortage of power lines is holding back America’s renewables revolution. With a bigger, more interconnected grid, you can link the country’s windiest, sunniest areas to its power-hungry cities and suburbs, and balance out electricity demand across regions.
If America doesn’t double its rate of power-line construction, then 80% of the carbon benefits from Biden’s climate law will be lost, according to an analysis from Jesse Jenkins, a Princeton engineering professor.
Building a new transmission line requires getting approval from dozens of organizations along a proposed route, including every city, county, and state government. (Building a pipeline is much easier.) And utilities along the route have to agree about how to divide up its costs.
They want to give the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, a bipartisan panel usually called FERC, the authority to decide where new interstate power lines should go and who should pay for them. (FERC already has that power over natural-gas pipelines.)
Democrats also want FERC to require each region to have a baseline amount of transmission with its neighbors, and to open an office that will manage and coordinate new transmission projects.
They haven’t proposed much, although the Senate GOP’s bill would prevent a president from blocking a cross-border pipeline or transmission line — a not-so-veiled attempt to help fossil fuels and avert another Keystone XL debacle.
His proposal would let FERC approve a new power line — but only if a state government has already blocked it for a year or more. He also wants FERC to set rules about who pays for a transmission project.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images
Every new power plant or renewable project has to enter the “interconnection queue” — effectively, a waiting list to get plugged into America’s jammed and overloaded power grid.
Because it keeps the grid from decarbonizing. The longer that new clean-energy projects have to wait in line, the longer that existing, dirty energy sources provide most of our electricity.
It now takes about four years for new projects to clear the interconnection queue, and more than 75% of renewable projects get canceled before they get to the front of the line.
At root, it’s because America doesn’t have enough power lines. But it’s also because in some places where the grid is clogged, utilities will force a wind or solar developer to pay not only for their own grid hookup, but also for crucial upgrades across the power grid — even those hundreds of miles from a project. That’s partially because the interconnect rules were written for companies building big coal and nuclear plants, not smaller renewable farms.
They want FERC to issue some ground rules about who can pay for grid upgrades, so that utilities can’t force renewable developers to foot the entire bill for them.
They haven’t proposed anything.
He hasn’t proposed anything.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images
Before a federal agency can build, approve, or change almost anything — whether it’s authorizing a space port or banning cars from a road in a city park — it must study how that action will impact the environment. It also must seek public comment and publish alternatives to its plan.
These studies, which are required by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), can run thousands of pages long and take years to finish.
It’s not … depending on who you talk to. NEPA doesn’t require that the government actually change anything because of its study; only that it publishes it and seeks public comment. While environmentalists can’t use NEPA to block a polluting project, they can sue the government to get it to add information to an environmental-impact report, which can sometimes delay a project long enough for it to get canceled.
Some environmentalists say that NEPA is an important tool to waylay fossil-fuel development. (It’s how activists delayed the Dakota Access Pipeline for a year or so.) But others say that NEPA is now mostly slowing down the green transition, and that it has given “corporate interests and rich NIMBYs” a veto over rapid climate action.
It takes 4.5 years on average to finish an environmental-impact statement, the most stringent kind of NEPA review — but that’s an average. The NEPA review of renovations to Washington, D.C.’s main public-transit hub has taken eight years and counting.
When NEPA was first passed in 1969, supporters believed that it would give Americans an expansive new right to a healthy environment. Liberal lawyers hoped that NEPA might reorient all of federal policy in a greener direction, like the Civil Rights Act did for race and gender discrimination a few years earlier.
That didn’t happen. By the mid-1970s, the court system had hemmed in NEPA, turning it into a paperwork mandate, not a substantive right. That means NEPA lawsuits — of which there are more than 100 every year — feature a lot of bickering over procedural details.
Senate Democrats would impose a one-year deadline for light NEPA reviews and a two-year deadline for the most stringent reviews — but those deadlines would only apply to projects that fight or adapt to climate change, and there would be no penalty for missing them. The House bill asks the White House to write new rules for NEPA studies.
The GOP would require one- and two-year deadlines for NEPA studies, but for all types of projects, not just those related to climate change. If an agency missed those deadlines, then under the Senate GOP bill, the project being studied would immediately and irrevocably get approved. (The House GOP, meanwhile, would charge the offending agency a fine.)
Republicans would also impose a 300-page limit on NEPA studies for complex projects and a 150-page limit on most projects. Today, the average NEPA study is more than 500 pages long.
He’s proposed the same page limits and deadlines as Republicans, but with weaker penalties and no automatic approval.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images
Technically, NEPA doesn’t require that agencies look into whether a proposed federal project would worsen climate change. The Biden administration has required agencies to take it into account, but that could be reversed by a future administration.
It’s a little silly that the government would write a 500-page report about a project’s environmental impact — but not say anything about its carbon emissions.
Because every administration — and every agency — implements NEPA in a different way. The courts also set some ground rules about what a NEPA study must include, but the extremely conservative Supreme Court is unlikely to require NEPA studies to include climate effects anytime soon.
They want to require agencies to consider a project’s impact on the climate, including whether not doing the project would raise emissions.
House Republicans want to block agencies from considering climate change — or any negative environmental impacts more than 10 years in the future — when preparing a NEPA study.
Senate Republicans would also forbid FERC from considering whether any project would raise or lower emissions.
He hasn’t proposed anything.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images
NEPA fights never end. Americans generally have up to six years to sue the government over a NEPA study, and the ensuing court battles can take years to resolve.
Depends on who you ask. The lack of a deadline can create an aura of uncertainty around public projects: Years after a federal agency approves an infrastructure project (including a clean-energy project), that project can still be challenged and blocked in court — even if construction on it has already started.
For some progressives, that doesn’t seem so bad, because it lets environmental lawyers drag fossil-fuel companies into lengthy NEPA lawsuits over proposed pipelines or refineries. But other progressives argue that most new energy projects will be zero carbon anyway, so NEPA fights allow conservatives and NIMBYs to veto clean energy.
Because Congress didn’t envision the modern permitting process when it first passed NEPA, and the law doesn’t contain a statute of limitations.
Senate Democrats want to impose a three-year limit on bringing a NEPA lawsuit, and they’d immediately elevate a NEPA suit to the local federal appeals court. House Democrats haven’t proposed anything.
Republicans in both chambers want to add a three- or four-month statute of limitations to NEPA. Senate Republicans would go further and require the courts to rule on any NEPA case within six months. These litigation deadlines could sharply limit environmentalists’ ability to fight fossil-fuel infrastructure.
His bill would add a five-month statute of limitations to NEPA.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images
The federal offices that handle most of the NEPA-related paperwork don’t have enough employees and suffer high staff turnover, which slows down their ability to quickly finish the easiest studies.
According to some progressives, a lack of funding for the agencies that implement NEPA is the biggest driver of permitting-related slowdowns. They argue that the most common kind of NEPA studies are completed in a year or so, and that only the most stringent NEPA studies regularly drag on. (Plenty of federal actions, such as building a new train station or transmission line, require a stringent NEPA study.)
When legal scholars at the University of Utah looked at 41,000 NEPA decisions of all kinds made by the U.S. Forest Service, they found that most delays were caused by agency understaffing, turnover, or delays in getting information from applicants. They also blamed unstable budgets, inadequate technology, and conflicting guidance from other laws, such as those governing historical preservation.
A decade of federal cost-cutting, among other reasons. The Department of the Interior lost 6% of its staff during the Trump administration and has only gained 2% since. FERC has also struggled to hire qualified workers.
Senate Democrats would make every agency identify its NEPA workforce needs annually and then give it the power to hire accordingly. House Democrats would let FERC pay people more than normal federal law allows.
House Republicans would require the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and the U.S. Forest Service to prepare an outreach plan for hiring new permitting employees.
He’s proposed allowing FERC to exceed the federal payscale, too.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images
New geothermal plants could generate a huge amount of zero-carbon electricity. Yet securing a permit to install a geothermal plant on federal lands — where the richest geothermal resources exist — can take years.
Because it’s comparatively easy to drill for oil and natural gas on federal land: Oil and gas drilling is categorically exempt from parts of NEPA, and a special office in the Bureau of Land Management handles fossil-fuel permits. So even though geothermal firms use the same equipment as oil and gas companies — but don’t create the same carbon emissions — it is much harder to drill for geothermal energy, and therefore much more expensive.
About 90% of “viable geothermal resources” — places where it makes sense to drill for Earth’s heat — are located on federal lands in the West. This isn’t parkland, to be clear, but government-owned land now used for ranching, hunting, mining, or recreation.
Because geothermal is a new industry. Until recent improvements in drilling, geothermal only made sense in a few parts of the country. Now it could be used more widely.
Senate Democrats want the Interior Department to make sure geothermal drilling permits are handled in the same way that oil-and-gas drilling permits are.
House Republicans would exempt some geothermal projects from having to get permits at all. And Senate Republicans would tell the Interior Department to defer to state law when granting new geothermal permits.
While supportive of geothermal power, he hasn’t proposed anything on this issue.
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What if, instead of maintaining old pipelines, gas utilities paid for homes to electrify?
California just hit a critical climate milestone: On September 1, Pacific Gas and Electric, the biggest utility in the state, raised natural gas rates by close to $6 due to shrinking gas demand.
I didn’t say it was a milestone worth celebrating. But experts have long warned that gas rates would go up as customers started to use less of the fossil fuel. PG&E is now forecasting enough of a drop in demand, whether because homeowners are making efficiency improvements or switching to electric appliances, that it needs to charge everyone a bit more to keep up with the cost of maintaining its pipelines.
Shortly after the rate increase went into effect, however, Governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill aimed at addressing this exact problem. The new law gives PG&E and other utilities permission to use money they would have spent to replace aging, leaky pipelines to pay for the electrification of the homes served by those pipes — as long as electrifying the homes is cheaper. Instead of investing millions of ratepayer dollars into the gas system, utilities can start to decommission parts of it, shrinking gas use and fixed costs in tandem.
PG&E actually already has the freedom to do this, and has even completed a fair number of projects. But the utility has had limited success, mainly because of an anti-discrimination law that gives building owners the right to stick with natural gas. It only takes one gas stalwart to thwart a whole neighborhood’s prospects for free electric appliances, since in order to keep delivering gas to that one household, the utility has to invest in the entire section of pipeline serving the area. A 2023 report showed that while PG&E had completed more than 100 projects, it hadn’t been able to convince clusters of customers larger than five at a time to convert.
The new law doesn’t fundamentally change the anti-discrimination rule, known as a utility’s “duty to serve,” but it does relieve PG&E and others of this duty if at least two-thirds of the homeowners served by a given section of pipeline consent to getting off gas. For now, the legislation limits utilities to executing 30 such projects. But for those 30, as long as two-thirds consent, the utility can now tell the holdouts that it is retiring the pipeline, and that they have no choice but to get on the electric bandwagon.
“If a supermajority wants it, it can move forward,” Matt Vespa, a senior attorney from Earthjustice who worked on the legislation, told me. “Which I think is probably a good place to start from. You want to have a place where there’s significant buy-in.”
This strategy, sometimes called “zonal decarbonization” or “targeted electrification,” is one that many climate groups are advocating for as a way to achieve an orderly and equitable transition off of natural gas. The approach most states have taken so far — providing subsidies that gently prod consumers into going electric — results in a random pattern of adoption that can benefit some homeowners while harming others. It also does nothing to deter gas utilities from investing hundreds of millions of dollars in maintaining, replacing, or building new pipelines each year — investments that are set up to be recouped from ratepayers over the course of decades.
California isn’t the first place in the world to experiment with targeted electrification. The Swiss city of Zurich began systematically shutting down sections of its gas system in 2021, giving affected users about a decade of warning and offering partial compensation for the cost of new equipment. In Massachusetts, the utility Eversource is piloting a unique neighborhood-scale electrification project. The company hooked up 32 residential buildings and a few commercial businesses in the city of Framingham to a new underground network of pipes that carry water rather than natural gas, which in turn connect to geothermal heat pumps that use the water to heat or cool the air inside. There are more than a dozen such “thermal energy network” pilot projects in various stages in Massachusetts, New York, Colorado, Washington, Vermont, Maryland, and Minnesota.
But the new California program is unique in its scale and approach. For one thing, it applies to all gas utilities in the state. Beginning next summer, they will each need to submit maps to the utility commission that identify potential pipeline replacement projects; then, in 2026, regulators will use those maps to designate priority areas, giving precedence to low-income communities and households that lack heating or cooling. By July of that year, the commission must establish the rules of the pilot program, including a methodology for utilities to determine when electrification is more cost-effective than pipeline replacement, and rules for how utilities can pay for the projects and recover costs.
PG&E supported the bill and worked closely with its authors on the language. The utility declined an interview, but emailed me a statement saying the legislation “enables cost-effective, targeted electrification projects which will help avoid more expensive gas pipeline replacements, reducing gas system operating costs, and support the state’s and PG&E’s decarbonization goals.”
Utilities will still be spending ratepayer money on the electrification projects, but far less than they would have spent on pipeline infrastructure. For the remaining gas customers, it’s still possible rates will go up, though by less than they would have otherwise. Mike Henchen, a principal in the carbon-free buildings program at RMI, told me these pilot projects alone are not going to pull so many customers away from the gas system that it will put upward pressure on rates. The law caps the program at no more than 1% of a utility’s customers.
Vespa, the Earthjustice attorney, told me he originally worked on a more ambitious version of the bill that would have required utilities to avoid any new investments in the gas system when electrification was a cheaper alternative. But it was pared back and made voluntary in order to get it through the legislature. “The hope is that we'll get projects off the ground, we’ll get proof-of-concept,” he said. “I think there was a need to demonstrate some successful stories and then hopefully expand from there.”
While these pilots make sense, economically, for a dual gas and electric company like PG&E, one big question is whether the state’s gas-only utilities like Southern California Gas will take the initiative. (SoCalGas did not respond to my inquiry prior to publication, but the company did support the legislation.)
Looking ahead, even if lawmakers do expand the program to authorize every cost-effective project, this model can’t transition the entire state away from gas. These projects are more likely to pencil out in places with lower housing density, where a given section of pipeline is serving only a handful of homes. A fact sheet about the bill published by its lead sponsor, state senator David Min, says that “zero emissions alternatives” to pipeline replacement are only technically feasible and cost effective for about 5% of PG&E’s territory. “Gas customers won't be able to pay for the decommissioning of the whole gas system, or even 50% of it,” said Henchen.
In the meantime, however, there’s lots of low-hanging fruit to pluck. Targeted electrification of just 3% to 4% of gas customers across the state could reduce gas utility spending by $15 billion to $26 billion through 2045, according to an analysis by Energy and Environmental Economics.
“It’s a modest step,” said Vespa of the new law. “But I do think it’s meaningful to start moving forward and developing the frameworks for this.”
Revoy is already hitching its power packs to semis in one of America’s busiest shipping corridors.
Battery swaps used to be the future. To solve the unsolvable problem of long recharging times for electric vehicles, some innovators at the dawn of this EV age imagined roadside stops where drivers would trade their depleted battery for a fully charged one in a matter of minutes, then be on their merry way.
That vision didn’t work out for passenger EVs — the industry chose DC fast charging instead. If the startup Revoy has its way, however, this kind of idea might be exactly the thing that helps the trucking industry surmount its huge hurdles to using electric power.
Revoy’s creation is, essentially, a bonus battery pack on wheels that turns an ordinary semi into an EV for as long as the battery lasts. The rolling module carries a 525 kilowatt-hour lithium iron phosphate battery pack attaches to the back of the truck; then, the trailer full of cargo attaches to the module. The pack offers a typical truck 250 miles of electric driving. Founder Ian Rust told me that’s just enough energy to reach the next Revoy station, where the trucker could swap their depleted module for a fresh one. And if the battery hits zero charge, that's no problem because the truck reverts to its diesel engine. It’s a little like a plug-in hybrid vehicle, if the PHEV towed its battery pack like an Airstream and could drop it off at will.
“If you run out of battery with us, there's basically no range anxiety,” Rust said. “And we do it intentionally on our routes, run it down to as close to zero as possible before we hit the next Revoy swapping station. That way you can get the maximum value of the battery without having to worry about range.”
To start, a trucker in a normal, everyday semi pulls up to a Revoy station and drops their trailer. A worker attaches a fully charged Revoy unit to the truck and trailer—all in five minutes or less, Revoy promises. Once in place, the unit interfaces seamlessly with the truck’s drivetrain and controls.
“It basically takes over as the cruise control on the vehicle,” he said. “So the driver gets it up to speed, takes their foot off the gas, and then we actually become the primary powertrain on the vehicle. You really only have to burn diesel for the little bit that is getting onto the highway and then getting off the highway, and you get really extreme MPGs with that.”
The Revoy model is going through its real-world paces as we speak. Rust’s startup has partnered with Ryder trucking, whose drivers are powering their semis with Revoy EVs at battery-swap stops along a stretch of Interstate 30 in Texas and Arkansas, a major highway for auto parts and other supplies coming from Mexico. Rust hopes the next Revoy corridor will go into Washington State, where the ample hydropower could help supply clean energy to all those swappable batteries. Happily, he said, Revoy can expand piecemeal like this because its approach negates the chicken-and-egg problem of needing a whole nation of EV chargers to make the vehicles themselves viable. Once a truck leaves a Revoy corridor, it’s just a diesel-powered truck again.
Early data from the Ryder pilot shows that the EV unit slashed how much diesel fuel a truck needs to make it down the designated corridor. “This is a way we can reduce a path to reduce the emissions of our fleet without having to buy anything — and without having to have to worry about how much utilization we're going to have to get,” Mike Plasencia, group director of New Product Strategy at Ryder, told me.
Trucking represents one of the biggest opportunities for cutting the carbon emissions of the transportation sector. It’s also one of the most challenging. Heatmap has covered the problem of oversized SUV and pickup truck EVs, which need larger, more expensive batteries to propel them. The trucking problem is that issue on steroids: A semi can tow up to 80,000 pounds down an American highway.
There are companies building true EV semi trucks despite this tall order — Tesla’s has been road-testing one while hauling Pepsi around, and trucking mainstays like Peterbilt are trying their hand as well. Although the EV model that works for everyday cars — a built-in battery that requires recharging after a couple hundred miles — can work for short-haul trucks that move freight around a city, it is a difficult fit for long-haul trucking where a driver must cover vast distances on a strict timetable. That’s exactly where Revoy is trying to break in.
"We are really focused on long haul,” he told me. “The reason for that is, it's the bigger market. One of the big misconceptions in trucking is that it's dominated by short haul. It's very much the opposite. And it's the bigger emission source, it's the bigger fuel user."
Rust has a background in robotics and devised the Revoy system as a potential solution to both the high cost of EV semis and to the huge chunks of time lost to fueling during long-distance driving. Another part of the pitch is that the Revoy unit is more than a battery. By employing the regenerative braking common in EVs, the Revoy provides a redundancy beyond air brakes for slowing a big semi—that way, if the air brakes fail, a trucker has a better option than the runaway truck lane. The setup also provides power and active steering to the Revoy’s axle, which Rust told me makes the big rig easier to maneuver.
Plasencia agrees. “The feedback from the drivers has been positive,” he said. “You get feedback messages like, it felt like I was driving a car, or like I wasn't carrying anything.”
As it tries to expand to more trucking corridors across the nation, Revoy may face an uphill battle in trying to sell truckers and trucking companies on an entirely new way to think about electrifying their fleets. But Rust has one ace up his sleeve: With Revoy, they get to keep their trucks — no need to buy new ones.
On the DOE’s transmission projects, Cybertruck recalls, and Antarctic greening
Current conditions: Hurricane Kirk, now a Category 4 storm, could bring life-threatening surf and rip currents to the East Coast this weekend • The New Zealand city of Dunedin is flooded after its rainiest day in more than 100 years • Parts of the U.S. may be able to see the Northern Lights this weekend after the sun released its biggest solar flare since 2017.
The Energy Department yesterday announced $1.5 billion in investments toward four grid transmission projects. The selected projects will “enable nearly 1,000 miles of new transmission development and 7,100 MW of new capacity throughout Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas, while creating nearly 9,000 good-paying jobs,” the DOE said in a statement. One of the projects, called Southern Spirit, will involve installing a 320-mile high-voltage direct current line across Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi that connects Texas’ ERCOT grid to the larger U.S. grid for the first time. This “will enhance reliability and prevent outages during extreme weather events,” the DOE said. “This is a REALLY. BIG. DEAL,” wrote Michelle Lewis at Electrek.
The DOE also released a study examining grid demands through 2050 and concluded that the U.S. will need to double or even triple transmission capacity by 2050 compared to 2020 to meet growing electricity demand.
Duke Energy, one of the country’s largest utilities, appears to be walking back its commitment to ditch coal by 2035. In a new plan released yesterday, Duke said it would not shut down the second-largest coal-fired power plant in the U.S., Gibson Station in Indiana, in 2035 as previously planned, but would instead run it through 2038. The company plans to retrofit the plant to run on natural gas as well as coal, with similar natural-gas conversions planned for other coal plants. The company also slashed projects for expanding renewables. According toBloomberg, a Duke spokeswoman cited increasing power demand for the changes. Electricity demand has seen a recent surge in part due to a boom in data centers. Ben Inskeep, program director at the Citizens Action Coalition of Indiana, a consumer and environmental advocacy group, noted that Duke’s modeling has Indiana customers paying 4% more each year through 2030 “as Duke continues to cling to its coal plants and wastes hundreds of millions on gasifying coal.”
The Edison Electric Institute issued its latest electric vehicle forecast, anticipating EV trends through 2035. Some key projections from the trade group’s report:
Tesla issued another recall for the Cybertruck yesterday, the fifth recall for the electric pickup since its launch at the end of last year. The new recall has to do with the rearview camera, which apparently is too slow to display an image to the driver when shifting into reverse. It applies to about 27,000 trucks (which is pretty much all of them), but an over-the-air software update to fix the problem has already been released. There were no reports of injuries or accidents from the defect.
A new study published in Nature found that vegetation is expanding across Antarctica’s northernmost region, known as the Antarctic Peninsula. As the planet warms, plants like mosses and lichen are growing on rocks where snow and ice used to be, resulting in “greening.” Examining satellite data, the researchers from the universities of Exeter and Hertfordshire, and the British Antarctic Survey, were shocked to discover that the peninsula has seen a tenfold increase in vegetation cover since 1986. And the rate of greening has accelerated by over 30% since 2016. This greening is “creating an area suitable for more advanced plant life or invasive species to get a foothold,” co-author Olly Bartlett, a University of Hertfordshire researcher, told Inside Climate News. “These rates of change we’re seeing made us think that perhaps we’ve captured the start of a more dramatic transformation.”
Moss on Ardley Island in the Antarctic. Dan Charman/Nature
Japan has a vast underground concrete tunnel system that was built to take on overflow from excess rain water and prevent Tokyo from flooding. It’s 50 meters underground, and nearly 4 miles long.
Carl Court/Getty Images