When I spoke to Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, it was clear that he was very disappointed. “This is ridiculous,” he said. “These people write reports and they protest. But we need to build. You can’t get serious about climate and the environment without reforming licensing and procurement in this state.”
It hurts to be beaten by friends. And that’s what’s happening with Newsom. More than 100 environmental groups — including the Sierra Club of California and the Center for Conservation of the Environment — are Join together against a Newsom package designed to make it easier to build infrastructure in California.
For Newsom, it was a heartbreak. “I licked envelopes for these nonprofits as a kid. My father was on the board of the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund for over a decade,” he told me. “This is my life. But this rigidity and ideological purity will actually harm progress. I made climate bills last year, and these very groups are celebrating it. But that means nothing unless we can deliver. That’s what; This is the way.
Today, the environmental movement is dealing with a bit of confusion between dogs and cars. Hundreds of billions of dollars are pouring into clean energy infrastructure, and decarbonization targets that were once out of the question are being put into law. That’s especially true in California, which has committed to being carbon neutral and running the grid on 100% clean energy by 2045.
Achieving these goals requires California almost four times the amount of electricity it can generate — and convert what it already has from polluting fuels to clean sources. That means turning large tracts of land into solar farms, wind turbines and geothermal systems. It means building transmission lines to move that energy from where it is generated to where it is needed. It is meant to be dotted with enough electric vehicle charging stations to make it possible for the state’s proposed ban on cars with internal combustion engines. All in all, it’s a larger construction task than any construction mission the state has ever attempted, and it needs to be completed at a rate like nothing in recent state history. shown to be possible.
California has become notorious not for what it built, but for what it failed to build. And Newsom knows it. He told me: “I have watched as mayor, then vice-governor and now governor as years turned into decades of high-speed rail development. “People are losing faith in our ability to build great things. People always look at me and ask, ‘What the hell happened to California in the 50s and 60s?’”
But Newsom’s immediate problem is the Biden administration. Because it also focuses on how difficult it is to build—and not just in California. “These delays are common at all levels of government – federal, state and local,” said John Podesta, President Biden’s senior adviser on clean energy. speech last month. “We’re so good at stopping projects that we forget how to build things in America.”
The Biden administration is pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into decarbonisation. And it wants to make sure it gets a return on that money. So it makes states compete for federal grants, and one way it measures them is whether the state makes building easy. That has become a problem for California.
“We don’t know where these investments are going,” said Jennifer Granholm, energy minister, speak Silicon Valley Leadership Group. But California is competing with states that have implemented permitting reforms, and they are doing it. Her advice is straightforward: “I think anything you can do to help keep costs down to increase competitiveness and speed things up, I think will go a long way to generating more activity. more productive in this sector.”
Adding to Newsom’s problems is that California’s recent surplus has transition to deficit. He needs federal money, and lots of it, to make good on his climate promises. If California doesn’t hit those subsidies, it won’t meet its goals. “We will lose trillions of dollars in the status quo,” he told me. “The state cannot fill that. And we are losing part to the red states! I am outraged about that. The beneficiaries of this lot of dollars are the red states that don’t care about these problems and they are getting the projects. We’re not getting the money because our rules are getting in the way.
The breadth of opposition and Newsom’s protective feelings made me a little unprepared for his actual package of permissiveness, which is a set of mostly modest, concrete policies. When a lawsuit is brought under the California Environmental Quality Act, are all emails sent between agency employees part of the record or only communications that decision makers see? Should environmental litigation be limited to 270 days for certain types of infrastructure? Should the California Department of Transportation contract jobs by type, or should a new contracting process be implemented for each assignment? Should the 15 endangered species currently classified as “fully protected” be reclassified as “threatened” to make building near them less difficult? And on that go.
This is not a root-to-branch reform of California’s environmental protection bills. It does not follow recent housing reforms that use statewide planning processes to bypass local governments. Proposed changes to the California Environmental Quality Act are said to be more modest than changes madehardly any notice, for the National Environmental Policy Act as part of the debt ceiling agreement.
Much of the war is being framed as a dispute over process. Newsom, as he usually does, is pushing the package through an expedited process. It can pass in just a few weeks. Opposition groups speak that moving too quickly “excludes the public and stakeholders, and avoids open and transparent discussion of important and complex policies.”
Newsom rolled his eyes at this. It was those same groups that supported us when we passed environmental bills last year through the same process, he told me. And those goals mean nothing without this.”
I spoke with David Pettit, senior counsel at the National Resource Defense Council. His organization opposes Newsom’s package, but he doesn’t describe it as particularly consequential. He mostly sounded confused. “I don’t think this is going to make the governor come to the federal government and say, ‘let’s see how fast we can build.’”
Pettit has filed numerous lawsuits under the California Environmental Quality Act, and he thinks the courts will ignore Newsom’s attempt to speed up their rulings. He told me: “It is the judges who will decide whether it is possible or not. And he seemed offended by Newsom’s attempt to short-circuit the process. “Wouldn’t it be better to invite everyone to the table and pass the Legislature?” he asks. “Ask environmental justice groups, tribes, to find out what this means? It could be done in regular session later this year.”
have merit arguments that Newsom was trying to get his package through the Legislature. But it is clear that groups opposing his package do not want to use a broader, slower process as an opportunity to reinforce the terms of the package. They wanted to use it as an opportunity to weaken or block Newsom’s package.
The coalition’s letter is concerned that Newsom’s package “reduces the application of environmental assessments,” that it “will undermine the California Endangered Species Act,” etc. Environmental Justice Coalition The California school sent me a statement in bold, “Getting the court to resolve a case within 270 days to the extent feasible is harmful to low-income communities and EJs” — stands for environmental justice — “communities. “It doesn’t get much clearer than that.
Here’s the hard part: All of these concerns are justified, at least for some time. Laws like the California Environmental Quality Act have been used to prevent countless harmful projects. A faster, more streamlined process could make it easier to build solar farms and rail systems, but it could also make it easier to build the infrastructure that communities have. reason to object.
Pettit told me: “I am here to try to take care of and represent my clients who live next to a proposed development and want a protected species and do not want more roads. the highway is congested.
The claim Newsom is making is not that every development is good but that it has become too easy to stop or at least delay. Is he right? You can say it depends on the project in question. But policymakers must establish broad rules. The harder the development is to stop, the more likely it is that bad projects will be built. The easier the development is to be halted, the more likely it is that good projects will be stopped. And even that simplifies it. Often the question is not whether a project is good or bad, but who it helps and who bears its costs. A wind farm may be good for the state but a real nuisance for its neighbours.
I somewhat doubt that Newsom’s package is consequential enough to cause the controversy it has created. But the fight isn’t just about this pack. Everyone involved believes that there is still plenty of reform to allow, as the world warms and the clock ticks California’s goals, and the federal government begins to put more pressure on.
These are the early stages of the transition from spending liberalism to a constructive liberalism. It will be messy. So far, progressives have mostly united in the fight against climate change. They wanted more money for clean energy and more ambitious goals for phasing out fossil fuels, and they got there. Now that new energy system needs to be built and fast. And the progressives have no agreement on how to do that.
