This is the third installment in a four-part series critiquing Matt Yglesias’ support for deregulating the permitting process.
All emphasis (bold text) is mine.
Despite ample evidence that ongoing fossil fuel expansion threatens to derail whatever climate progress is made, Yglesias claimed in a Slow Boring blog post titled “The case for more energy,” published on October 7, 2021, that “making as much zero-carbon electricity as possible as quickly as possible is substantially more important than trying to stamp out fossil fuel use.”:
Making as much zero-carbon electricity as possible as quickly as possible is substantially more important than trying to stamp out fossil fuel use. In part, that’s because energy abundance has important upsides for humanity. We’ve been talking here about the upside for rich countries, but in some parts of the world, people don’t have any electricity at all.
Beyond that, it’s the scarcity of clean electricity that prevents us from unleashing some of our most promising technologies for both the mitigation and adaptation sides of things. An important question, of course, is how you actually accomplish this. That’s going to have to wait for later posts.
But the big picture question of how we orient ourselves is important. We shouldn’t be looking at our current energy usage and asking, “How can we get this much energy, but cleaner?” We should be looking at a 45-year energy diet and asking, “How can we use clean energy technology to shatter this barrier and open up incredible new vistas?”
In a post published on November 22, 2022, Yglesias wrote that “the Biden administration should prioritize removing barriers to deploying zero-carbon energy over creating barriers to fossil fuels”:
I think the Biden administration should prioritize removing barriers to deploying zero-carbon energy over creating barriers to fossil fuels. We should have faith in the decarbonization potential of electrifying buildings and vehicles, and we should acknowledge that we don’t yet have the technology we need for zero-carbon industry, air travel, maritime shipping, or other key sectors.
Yglesias repeated this assertion in a piece about “why the IRA is falling short (so far),” published on March 1, 2024. In it, he wrote that the Inflation Reduction Act “has put zero-carbon electricity on a path to outcompete fossil fuels if and only if complementary regulatory changes are made,” and that will require Democrats “to make concessions”:
The problem, per Rhodium, is that zero-emissions electricity hasn’t been growing enough to keep pace with IRAs goals. Why is that? Well, as Rhodium explains, the problem is that even though the IRA provides large financial incentives to deploy zero-emissions electricity, there are tons of non-price barriers to actually deploying it… Ooops! How did the modelers miss this? Well, it turns out they didn’t miss it. If you look at the REPEAT Project’s models, for example, they do, in fact, say that this is all contingent on a gigantic expansion in transmission capacity.
[…]
Thanks to the wisdom of senate procedure, it is possible to create a lot of subsidies for clean energy in a budget reconciliation bill, but it is not possible to rework permitting for electricity transmission projects or renewables siting. Thus, if you want to write a reconciliation-eligible climate bill, which Democrats certainly did, you basically have to do it the way they did it — spend the money in one bill, and then negotiate a bipartisan deal to address the non-cost issues on a separate track.
[…]
“This legislation WILL NOT GENERATE STEEP DECARBONIZATION unless you make COMPLEMENTARY POLICY CHANGES TO ADDRESS TRANSMISSION” and “this legislation WILL GENERATE STEEP DECARBONIZATION as long as you also make complementary policy changes to address transmission” have the exact same truth conditions. But they deliver different messages to the public and to congress. There was a critical moment at which delivering a positive framing about the benefits of the IRA was important to getting progressives on board with a compromise heavily shaped by Joe Manchin, and I don’t have a problem with people running with an effective political message. And there’s a reason that both Manchin and the White House immediately turned around to work on permitting legislation. The key actors did get what was going on.
That said, I am not sure that backbench safe seat Democrats or the environmental advocacy groups whose approval they crave get this.
The actual thing the advocacy community has pivoted to is a renewed focus on pipeline fights and this new battle over LNG exports. They need to understand, though, that the IRA really has put zero-carbon electricity on a path to outcompete fossil fuels if and only if complementary regulatory changes are made. Those can be changes on transmission, changes on geothermal, changes on nuclear, or ideally all three. But we do have to make changes — changes that can’t pass the senate on a reconciliation vote, changes that need to take into the account the needs of Democrats from energy producing states like Pennsylvania and Colorado, and, very likely, changes that require buy-in from House Republicans as well.
The good news is that unlike the idea of “spending a ton of money on subsidizing low-carbon energy,” the idea of “engaging in targeted deregulation to help low-carbon energy” is an idea that Republicans don’t necessarily hate. At the same time, it’s not an idea they love. To get them on board for a bill, Democrats will need to make concessions. And for that to happen, they need to understand how much the IRA’s success hinges on these additional changes.
Yglesias reiterated his argument that decarbonization cannot be achieved without a bipartisan permitting deal in a post published on May 31, 2024. According to Yglesias, a) confronting the “regulatory barriers” holding back clean energy production “is more important than fighting Big Oil,” and b) therefore, a compromise containing “meaningful concessions to the fossil fuel industry” is inevitable:
If addressing regulatory barriers is more important than fighting Big Oil and addressing regulatory barriers requires bipartisanship, it follows that you need to be willing to make a deal on energy regulation that includes meaningful concessions to the fossil fuel industry.
Why Yglesias Is Wrong
Energy policy should be informed by climate science. The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the International Energy Agency, and other experts have been unequivocal: increased fossil fuel production is incompatible with preventing the climate emergency’s worst consequences. If clean energy use grows but dirty energy use doesn’t rapidly decline, then we’re not actually halting global warming. To do that, fossil fuels must stay in the ground.
My colleagues Hannah Story Brown and Dylan Gyauch-Lewis in November 2023 pointed out in The Nation that “deregulators of the permitting process hang their hat on the hope that new subsidies for clean energy technologies will make them cost-competitive enough to crowd out the old infrastructure, without actually implementing a plan to phase out dirty energy.” But as economic geographer Brett Christophers has explained, the declining cost of renewables is insufficient on its own to dislodge oil and gas.
Wind and solar may be relatively cheap, Christophers notes, but since the fossil fuel industry is so much more well-established than the clean energy industry, it puts the latter at a disadvantage when it comes to making capital-intensive investments in green infrastructure. In the short term (which is hugely consequential from the standpoint of mitigating climate change!), this makes renewables less profitable than fossil fuels and thus less attractive to profit-maximizing investors (with high interest rates compounding this problem).
To prevent the fossil fuel industry’s advantage vis-à-vis financial returns from resulting in the further entrenchment of oil and gas, Christophers argues that the state can’t just subsidize and derisk the transition to a low-carbon economy but must play a greater role in building and operating a publicly owned green energy system.
Meanwhile, imposing restrictions on fossil fuel production is a corresponding imperative, as outlined by economists Mark Paul and Lina Moe of the Climate and Community Institute and also by Roosevelt Institute fellow Kate Aronoff. On its own, increased clean energy production won’t crowd out fossil fuels. As predicted by Jevons’ Paradox, “efficiency gains may paradoxically spur increased consumption.” To ensure that renewables replace—and don’t just complement—coal, oil, and gas, policymakers will have to phase out dirty energy production.
In his May 31 piece, Yglesias cited an article, authored by former Biden advisor Brian Deese and published in The Atlantic on May 24, as if it supported the all-carrot and no-stick approach favored by supply-side liberals like himself. Yglesias highlighted this line from Deese: “The climate movement must recognize that its primary target is no longer just Big Oil; it’s the regulatory barriers that keep clean energy from getting built and delivered efficiently to American homes.” But there’s a big difference between Deese’s contention that Big Oil should not be climate activists’ only target and Yglesias’ insistence that “addressing regulatory barriers is more important than fighting Big Oil” (emphasis added.)
Yglesias’ assertion that pro-clean energy lawmakers must necessarily compromise with pro-fossil fuel lawmakers on permitting if they want to achieve decarbonization is also flawed. It is possible to boost green electricity transmission “without massive giveaways to the fossil fuel industry,” as House Natural Resources Committee Ranking Member Jared Huffman (D-Calif.), a vocal critic of former Sen. Joe Manchin (I-W.Va.) and Sen. John Barrasso’s (R-Wyo.)’s Energy Permitting Reform Act, has pointed out. “We’ve got to stop dignifying this notion that to take one step forward on clean energy, we’ve got to take two steps backward on fossil fuel production,” Huffman added.
Why is bipartisan compromise on “permitting reform” not required to achieve decarbonization? For one thing, there are alternative ways to improve the permitting process that don’t rely on the wholesale rollback of regulations aimed at promoting environmental justice and democratic accountability. For instance, as The American Prospect’s David Dayen explained, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) in May 2023 approved changes aimed at accelerating the approval and construction of interstate electric transmission lines.
Ironically, Sen. Joe Manchin (I-W.Va.) himself undermined FERC’s efforts to expedite transmission permitting when he delayed the confirmation of a new FERC leader after ex-chair Richard Glick’s term expired in 2022. Manchin also vowed to reverse the Department of Energy’s updated rules allowing categorical exclusions from NEPA for transmission upgrades and rebuilds that could increase the amount of energy capable of moving across existing power lines. In Dayen’s words, such moves raise questions about “whether Manchin cares all that much about bolstering domestic energy production, or if he is more myopically interested in getting particular fossil fuel projects in West Virginia approved and built, over local objections.”
The photo above is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.