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With emissions from transportation rising, it’s up to the states to fix it.
Last September, Jeanie Ward-Waller, a deputy director at California’s state transportation department, was called into her supervisor’s office and told she was being removed from her role, no explanation given. But Ward-Waller thinks she knows what happened.
A few weeks earlier, she’d threatened to blow the whistle on the agency for a highway repaving project that she believed was covertly — and illegally — going to widen the road. Under state law, highway expansions require environmental review and public input. It was also exactly the kind of project the agency was supposedly moving away from, according to its climate action plan, which said it would prioritize alternative forms of transit.
“Caltrans leaders believe they are widening highways in the public interest, despite decades of empirical research proving otherwise, and the agency’s own policies requiring solutions that reduce driving,” Ward-Waller wrote in an essay for the San Francisco Chronicle after leaving the agency.
Ward-Waller’s firing riled up climate advocates and sustainable transit proponents, and not just in California. (Multiple people I interviewed for this story mentioned it to me.) State transportation agencies all over the country are stuck in this kind of outdated thinking, critics say. Transportation is the biggest source of emissions in the U.S., and one of the only sectors where emissions grew last year. But most state transportation agencies are still funneling most of their budgets into road expansion projects. Few have taken on addressing climate change as part of their mission.
“State departments of transportation are kind of the next frontier for climate advocacy to conquer,” Justin Balik, the state program director for Evergreen Action told me. “There’s a lot of blue states where the transportation decisions are still divorced from the climate conversation.”
It’s a pivotal moment to change that, Balik argued. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, signed in 2021, has been sending billions of dollars of flexible funding into states for transportation projects. The Biden administration will also soon begin requiring these agencies to set greenhouse gas reduction targets. Although the targets are non-binding and states won’t be penalized for failing to achieve them, they will have to regularly report on their progress.
States have until February 1 to submit their initial plans to the federal Department of Transportation. So on Monday, climate and clean transportation advocates around the country sent letters to the governors of 22 states urging them to set targets consistent with reaching net-zero emissions by 2050. The letters ask officials to consider what’s achievable both through vehicle electrification and by reducing highway expansion.
“Electrification is critical and essential, but it’s not enough, just looking at the math, in terms of how long it's going to take for the vehicle fleet to turn over,” said Balik. “We need to think about the transportation system holistically and stop digging the hole deeper when we’re making transportation investment decisions.”
He directed me to a report published by the Georgetown Climate Center after the infrastructure law passed. The policy think tank modeled two scenarios, one where about a third of the $600 billion of flexible funding went to highway expansion, and one where states put more toward public transit and road maintenance. It found that the first scenario would increase emissions 1.6% by 2032, compared to business-as-usual, whereas the second would enable deeper emissions cuts — 1.3% more — than would otherwise have been expected with market forces and existing policies.
The reason is an effect called “induced demand,” and it’s at the center of this whole story. When state departments of transportation evaluate projects, they use models that assume building new roads or adding lanes increases the flow of traffic — thereby reducing congestion and reducing emissions. But real-world evidence has shown that expanding highways, especially in dense areas, actually encourages more people to drive — and within a few years, the traffic is just as bad as before.
“They’re vastly overestimating the benefits of expansion projects,” Miguel Moravec, a senior associate at RMI told me. “If the models are not capturing the reality that expanded lanes lead to more traffic, then you can’t really seriously engage with the pollution problem.”
The modeling is a symptom of a more entrenched issue. State Departments of Transportation are big agencies that can have thousands of staff, many of whom have been in their roles for decades. (Caltrans, for example, has more than 22,000 people.) The culture of these offices is built around an old paradigm where the primary metric of performance is to relieve traffic congestion — to help people drive places more quickly and easily.
“There’s a new movement to say, maybe it’s about helping people get to where they need to go efficiently, affordably, and safely,” Matt Frommer, the senior transportation advocate at the Southwest Energy Efficiency Project, told me. “But that is a really hard shift to make in a giant institution like a state DOT. Because all of the models and all of the policies and funding decision processes have been set up around the old paradigm.”
Even in places where that’s beginning to shift, there are still long-term challenges. California, for example, has had a law on the books for a decade that says the state must assess the impacts of transportation projects by measuring the amount of driving they induce or reduce — not by their effect on congestion. But local advocates like Jamie Pew, a climate advisor at NextGen Policy, say this has failed to move the state meaningfully away from highway expansion.
Ward-Waller’s firing brought long-simmering criticisms of the state’s climate strategy to a boil, he said. “For all of the money that we’re investing in new transit infrastructure, electrification, and green mobility options, as long as we continue to invest in freeway expansion, we’re not going to see the progress in emissions that we need to see.”
There are a few states that are starting to do things differently. Colorado, for example, has seen a significant shift in the way the state approaches transportation projects. In 2021, the state legislature passed a law directing its transportation agency to set regional greenhouse gas reduction targets and incorporate them into project planning. Frommer said the new approach has already resulted in real changes. In 2022, the state scrapped a long-planned highway expansion through downtown Denver after it was found that it would undermine the agency’s targets.
“That freed up hundreds of millions, if not over a billion dollars for other multimodal projects to help enable transit, biking and walking,” said Frommer.
The state that is leading the nation in innovative transportation policy, however, is Minnesota. Like Colorado, it has transportation-specific greenhouse gas targets. But it also has a specific goal to reduce “vehicle miles traveled” — a measure of how much people drive. Last year, lawmakers passed a big transportation package that gave more teeth to these goals, requiring the state’s DOT take them into account in decision making. It also went a step further and said that if the agency moves forward with any projects that induce demand, it has to offset them with additional projects that get people out of their cars.
The new federal rule requiring state transportation departments to report on their progress achieving declining greenhouse gas targets could help nudge more states in this direction. As climate advocates tell me on a weekly basis, “you can’t manage what you don’t measure.”
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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.”