Not Everyone Should Have a Say

... The aforementioned “green groups” empowered at the expense of permitting reform aren’t just national organizations; they’re grouchy people with time on their hands in communities large and small. And they’re not just blocking fossil-fuel infrastructure; they’re blocking everything.

Their weapon of choice is often the National Environmental Policy Act and its state equivalents, which require developers to issue environmental-impact statements prior to any large-scale project. These reports have become behemoths, averaging 1,600 pages and taking years to complete. (Developers for small projects don’t have to complete the onerous EIS, but even the less taxing analyses can take hundreds of days if not more than a year to complete.) NEPA also provides legal grounds for private actors to sue to block projects they consider harmful.

Delays run up the cost of vital infrastructure and exert something like a chilling effect on new projects, as developers may not want to contend with the expensive legal battles that lie ahead. These laws have been used to stymie wind farms in Nantucket (residents dubiously claim that offshore wind kills whales), Martha’s Vineyard (the owner of the solar company that opposes the project lives near the proposed site part-time), and dozens of other purportedly progressive communities across the country.

Key to understanding the undemocratic nature of “community participation” is defining who is actually meant by “community.” First, the types of people who have the time and money to sue developers under federal environmental statutes are not representative of the broader community. Second, the costs of construction (noise, a disrupted view) are localized, whereas the benefits of renewable energy are large and diffuse. That means if the process for green-lighting a project prioritizes local voices, it will miss a much larger piece of the picture: all of the millions of people who will benefit from a greener future. The environmental-justice movement’s response to this problem has been to propose expanding opportunities for litigation for marginalized communities. But research has shown that even when community leaders reduce the barriers to entry, input meetings remain just as unrepresentative as before.

Anyone who spends time talking with renewable-energy developers knows that NIMBY-ism—people opposing new projects not in principle, but in their backyard—is a major barrier to building a clean-energy economy. And the permitting process creates ample opportunity for localized unhappiness to turn into legal or procedural barriers...

So now we have enviros complaining that other enviros are using NEPA to delay or halt projects. Welcome to the club. You built this house of restriction and obstruction, now live in it.