Fast-Tracking Alternative Energy Development is Wrong.

Three reasons why

With more than three hundred billion dollars in the pipeline for alternative energy infrastructure, which is known to require huge amounts of land, we now confront the ecological reality of what all that industrial development means for our non-human cohabitants trying to survive on America’s increasingly fragmented landscapes.

A recent study by the organization NatureServe throws the matter into grim relief. “Biodiversity in the United States is in crisis,” it says, with 40 % of animals in the US headed for extinction along with 34% of plants. Of America’s ecosystems, 41% “are at risk of collapse.” The main cause, say the authors, is “land conversion,” otherwise known as habitat destruction, describing it as “a major contributor to the alarming numbers of species at risk.” NatureServe’s CEO, Dr. Sean Obrien, describes his own organization’s report as “terrifying.”

This is the context within which we must consider the current Democratic push for “clean” energy permitting reform: collapsing ecosystems, vanishing species and a permitting regime not nearly robust enough to stop the hemorrhaging.

Last August Bill McKibben tweeted “Lets reform permitting so we can build clean energy projects, not dirty ones,” laying out a peculiar orientation to the land. In this formulation, it’s bad to develop land for fossil fuel infrastructure, but good to develop land for “clean” energy infrastructure. The land itself, meanwhile, seems to disappear, reduced to a factor in a global carbon calculation. And quite a lot of land is involved.

It’s hard to put a firm number to all the acreage poised for development, given the many variables, but let’s go with Princeton’s 2019 Net Zero America Report, which predicts a range of .25 to 1.1 million square kilometers of land needed for the US to reach net zero by 2050, depending on the extent of nuclear, biomass, carbon storage, and land restriction. Since that’s a big range, and to avoid quibbling over numbers, let’s split it down the middle and call it 675,000 square kilometers.

To put that number in context, America’s biodiversity crisis is currently being driven by an amount of development equal to around 6,200 square kilometers per year. How, we must ask, will ecosystems currently unable to handle 6,200 km2 of land destruction per year cope with 675,000 km2, or 25,000 km2 per year for twenty-seven years? Already, even without fast tracking, and at a fraction of full buildout, the ecological damage is heartbreaking. As Patrick Donnelly, Great Basin Director for the Center for Biological Diversity, puts it, “I’m a triage nurse in a desert endangered species emergency room and we’re in the middle of a patient surge.”

Thus the first reason it’s wrong to fast-track non-fossil energy is it’ll fast-track the “patient surge.” And the patient is barely hanging on as it is.

The second reason has to do with science. Though the “clean” energy narrative treats carbon emissions as the sole human cause of climate change, science has always known that land destruction also causes climate change, only in different ways having to do with water cycles, soil health and landscape ecology. It’s why one of the first international scientific climate reports, produced by MIT and the Swedish Academy of Sciences, contained an entire section devoted to “The Climatic Effects of Man-Made Surface Change.” Decades of research since have made those effects increasingly clear. When we damage land we damage its ability to cool climate, make clouds, produce rain, moderate temperature extremes and absorb/store moisture against flood and drought. The result is higher temperatures, increased drought and flooding, and greater climatic extremes. Sound familiar?

The scientific understanding of Earth’s climate is changing, and more and more scientists are dissatisfied with what is increasingly derided as a “CO2-only” view of climate, calling for broader inclusion of water cycles and ecological processes in the analysis. Though still ignored by those pushing the industrial, “clean” energy solution, the climate is increasingly recognized as more than a physical machine with a carbon dial. Rather, it’s a complex, interrelated living system, which we are just beginning to understand. Scientifically speaking, permitting should involve more scientific review, not less.

Lastly, has anyone considered what fast-tracking such a vast scale of industrial development would do to environmentalism? The tensions, already deep, will only increase as more and more people find their landscapes threatened. And when they realize those landscapes also help cool and hydrate their local climates, while buffering drought and flood cycles, what will prevent them from drawing the conclusion they’ve been misled? And if climate leaders succeed in fast tracking that development, thereby disempowering them, why should they feel anything but betrayed? No movement can maintain such contradictions and hope to persist.

I realize the point of this infrastructure is to lower carbon emissions. I share that goal and recognize the good intentions of many people who advocate this technology. But I’m also aware that the only two times we’ve actually reduced emissions were during periods of reduced economic activity, due first to the Great Recession and then COVID. It only takes a little observation and common sense to realize that if we really want to cool down we need to slow down. Fast tracking, of course, calls for the opposite: acceleration.

I also agree there are better and worse ways to do this. Placing solar panels on roof tops is better than clearing forests—the true infrastructure of climate—for solar arrays. But if we fast-track permitting, we’ll lose the very leverage needed to push the development in that direction.

Republicans must be pinching themselves over all this Democratic talk of “permitting reform.” We can guess the outlines of the compromise being worked out. Republicans will offer Democrats their support for “clean” energy fast tracking in exchange for Democrats allowing a certain amount of petroleum fast tracking. Fast-tracking on both sides! This will be presented as a win-win for the climate and the economy, a positive example of bipartisanship.

But it’s the woodlands, fields, prairies and deserts, and the creatures trying to live within their shrinking ranges, that will pay the price.