Why the US right and left are blocking progress on clean energy. Report Ft
Left-wing Democrats and Republicans have teamed up to scuttle a law that would have cut red tape for clean energy projects. Here because. The deepening of the Financial Times
Joe Biden’s clean energy bill rightfully made headlines when it passed in August. It was America’s biggest move to tackle global warming. Alas, there were few headlines last week to signal the torpedoing of that law’s substantive hopes. An unholy alliance of left-leaning Democrats and Republicans scuttled a companion bill that would have cut the red tape to ensure clean energy projects happen. The Republican motive was obvious: to kill everything that bears Joe Biden’s name. The Democratic Left’s motif was self-defeatingly familiar: “If it’s not perfect, we’re against it.” Writes the Financial Times .
This trait is a feature, not a flaw, of the American progressive left. In this case, the 72 opposing Democratic lawmakers, including Vermont’s Bernie Sanders, objected that the bill would also allow for a natural gas pipeline to be built in West Virginia, which means fossil fuels. But it would also have reduced the Kafkaesque delays that hinder the construction of new solar plants, clean-tech transmission lines and wind farms funded by last summer’s law. The net impact of the end of the permit law is that it will now be virtually impossible for Biden to achieve his goal of reducing US net carbon emissions by 50% by the end of this decade.
This highlights two problems of the American left. The first is the instinct for moral gesture rather than practical action. Many philosophers judge the goodness of an action by its result – in this case, a large reduction in carbon emissions. Others argue that the morality of an action should be judged by its intent – in this case, refusing to compromise one’s reputation. If you want to know why New York still lacks a congestion pricing system or why California’s high-speed rail system is a white elephant, you have to grapple with the moral preferences of the left. In none of these blocked projects are Republicans the main problem.
The second flaw of the left is hypocrisy. The “not in my backyard” instinct is hidden everywhere in plain sight. It explains why San Francisco’s ultra-liberal housing is unaffordable: The wealthy don’t want their property values eroded by construction or their neighborhoods filled with the wrong people. It explains why residents of the wealthy resort island of Nantucket are blockading an offshore wind farm on the flimsy argument that it would disturb local whales. The reality is that they don’t want their vision ruined. This could have been America’s first major offshore wind farm. The earlier attempt on nearby Cape Cod was partially crushed by the late Ted Kennedy, a local senator and scion of the Hyannis Port family.
Nimbyism captures both of the worst traits of the left: often those who loudly profess their principles are the quickest to veto any disturbance to their lives. Economist Tyler Cowen calls the “Banana” problem: build absolutely nothing next to nothing. The left and Republicans are peppering America’s clean energy transition with banana peels.
Under a 1970 environmental policy law, projects take an average of 4.5 years to complete impact assessments. This is before disputes and other expenses. The main flaw of this law is that it favors the point of view of local communities over the benefits for millions of people living elsewhere. Time and time again experience has shown that “community participation” is being captured by wealthy retirees and lawyers with time running out. The law was written before global warming became a problem.
The same goes for US nuclear regulations. Virtually nothing has changed in the US civilian nuclear industry since the 1979 loss of Three Mile Island. Although no one died in that accident, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in Washington has made building a new plant nearly impossible. Germany’s former chancellor Angela Merkel’s biggest mistake was shutting down the country’s nuclear energy sector in 2011. This gave Russia an even tighter grip on German energy and helped bolster Vladimir Putin .
America’s allergy to the new nuclear power is the slow-burning equivalent of Merkel’s mistake. Only 10 Americans have been killed by civilian nuclear power, none by radiation. Last year tens of thousands of Americans died from air pollution. It is more than obvious that the United States must expand nuclear power if it is to reach level zero. Wind and sun alone will not be enough.
US progressives rightly insist that global warming poses the “greatest existential threat” to humanity. This sentence should be extended to “except for our exaggerated fears of a nuclear meltdown”, or “but not if it damages the value of our properties”. At some point, the American left must choose between having its cake and eat it too.
(Excerpt from the press release of eprcommunication)
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/energia/repubblicani-democratici-burocrazia-energia-pulita/ on Sat, 17 Dec 2022 06:24:58 +0000.