The clean energy economy has a NIMBY problem

Make Me Smart February 28, 2023 Transcript

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Kai Ryssdal 

Oh and there we go. Engineers are always in charge ask anyone here. Hi everybody I’m Kai Ryssdal. Welcome back to make me smart, where none of us is as smart as all of us.

Kimberly Adams 

And I’m Kimberly Adams, thank you for joining us on this Tuesday, which is the day that we do our weekly deep dive. And today we’re going to get into climate nimbyism or we might also say climate not in my backyard-ism. Yes, that’s it. Anyway, the basic idea is this that just like we see people fighting housing development in communities of across the country, because they don’t want it in their area. There are NIMBYs voting down big renewable energy projects, which we are going to need someplace in order to build at a scale that makes us actually serious about fighting climate change.

Kai Ryssdal 

So how bad is nimbyism impeding the fight for no fight against, not fight for. You don’t want to fight for climate change. You want to fight against climate change? And we’re gonna talk about what we can do about that. Ted Nordhaus is the founder of the Breakthrough Institute, that’s a group that researches tech solutions to environmental problems. Ted, welcome to the podcast.

Ted Nordhaus 

Thanks for having me.

Kai Ryssdal 

All right. So here’s a news item that I saw literally this morning. Greta Thunberg, the Swedish environmental activist, is taking part in a protest against a wind farm that would displace the Sami people who are the native peoples of the Northern Scandinavian countries, Finland specifically, I believe. So not that that’s not Not that that’s nimbyism. But there is a challenge here in reconciling climate change with some things that are maybe you know, more problematical, or at least a challenge to other things that people want to do.

Ted Nordhaus 

That is true. The, you know, today 80% of the global energy system is fossil fuels. If you want to get rid of all those fossil fuels, you basically have to build an entirely new energy system. And if you’re going to do that, primarily, as a lot of people want to with renewable energy, which has many good things about it. But one of the challenges of it is that it has a really, really big land use footprint. All those wind turbines and solar panels, and then all the transmission lines that you need to build to move them all over the place to get the electricity to people where they need it, has a big footprint. And that creates lots of land use conflicts. And if you’re going to build this system, and if you’re going to build it quickly, you need to figure out how you’re going to manage all those conflicts.

Kimberly Adams 

So what is driving sort of the conflict right now? Who is driving the conflict? You know, who are the groups particularly that are saying, “Hey, we don’t want these projects where we are?”

Ted Nordhaus 

Well, I don’t think you can point your finger at any, you know, one particular group. I mean, sometimes it’s, you know… A lot of times it’s just local communities, whether they’re an Indigenous group, like the Sami people, or just like, you know, local people in communities, like, you know, in places like Indiana. You know, a lot of people are not wild about the idea that the way that we need to solve climate change is to basically industrialize the landscape that they live in the middle of. So, you know, sometimes that’s people who, you know, in coal or gas or other communities that actually tend to like fossil fuels. Sometimes it’s environmental groups that care a lot about wildlife and ecosystems and various things that are being disrupted by energy development, even when it’s renewable energy development. And, you know, sometimes it’s Indigenous groups. Sometimes it’s homeowners who don’t want a big offshore wind farm in their view shed, which is happening up and down the Atlantic Coast right now. So I think that the sort of effort to be like, well, “it’s all the environmentalists”, or “it’s all these just stupid homeowners”, or it’s all just sort of fossil fuel, Koch brothers funding people to oppose renewable energy sources that they don’t like. I don’t think any of those stories is, is really the whole story or even most of the story. It’s really just, there’s a huge footprint, there’s a huge impact here. There are going to be trade offs that we need to be willing to make if we’re going to build this energy system. And when you get on the ground, a lot of people don’t like the trade offs.

Kai Ryssdal 

So how do we reconcile this right? Because this does seem kind of existential. It’s an existential problem to an existential problem, right? The existential problem of climate change, but then also the existensial problem of not in my backyard, don’t build a wind farm where I can see them and let’s protect wildlife while building, you know, green energy.

Ted Nordhaus 

Yeah, well, there’s, you know, a couple of different ways that you can deal with it and you’ll probably have to do all of them. I mean, the first is, at least in the United States, we have a thing called the National Environmental Policy Act. In California, we have a version of it called the California Environmental Quality Act. A lot of other states have similar statutes that just make it really, really difficult to build things that people locally don’t want. That can be hard enough as it is. But the statutes basically allow private interests to sort of endlessly litigate and re-litigate public infrastructure decisions that often have been made by elected representatives. So we send our members of… we elect our congressmen that go to Congress, they have this deliberative democratic process, they decide to spend lots and lots of our money to build all this infrastructure to solve climate change. And then we basically have these statutes on the book that allow private interests in communities and localities all over the country to just kind of almost endlessly litigate those decisions in ways that sort of I would argue, undermine, sort of the actual sort of democratic, democratically accountable decision making. So that’s part of the problem. I think the other thing, when you just look at the scale of the land use necessary to do a very heavy renewable energy grid, which is primarily powered by these variable sources of energy, wind turbines, solar panels, where you really to make that work, you have to not only build, really overbuild the system, you’ve got to move that electricity, you know, very long distances, so you get all the problems with building the transmission. So, you know, you look at nuclear energy, you look at some of the carbon capture technologies, you know, all of these things have their own sort of NIMBY and other opposition. But I think a more balanced mix of low carbon technologies is one way that you can really reduce the land use footprint because both nuclear and if you can capture the carbon from fossil fuels, fossil fuels have actually much, much lower land use impacts, because they’re denser sources of energy.

Kimberly Adams 

You know, you were talking just now about sort of the endless litigation by groups opposed to, you know, big projects that might have been determined by elected officials, but litigation costs money and time, and which is another form of resource. And it reminds me almost of sort of how our highway system got rolled out in this country, where the groups with the least amount of power and resources in our country ended up with these highways through their communities. And if the way that nimbyism is being, you know, is happening in this sector, is based on litigation, is that not also creating this dynamic where if you’re low income, or hold less political power, you’re more likely to end up with these projects in your area as opposed to somebody else?

Ted Nordhaus 

Absolutely. And you know, one of those sorts of folks who just sort of defend, you know, things like the National Environmental Policy Act will often do start saying, “Well, no, no, this is the thing that we have. And we need to sort of protect these sort of low income, marginalized communities that otherwise get all the bad, dirty infrastructure foisted on them.” But the evidence is quite the opposite. What the evidence points to is exactly what you say, which is the folks who are using these statutes are actually, you know, wealthy, upper income, very privileged communities that have the resources, the legal resources, and otherwise, to fight these projects, and to do it for years or even decades on end. So you’re right that like the way we do this, now, even, you know, often sort of low income, marginalized communities are, are sort of invoked, and in whose name we need these things, because otherwise the elected officials are just going to sort of jam these things down the throat of the low income communities. But it doesn’t work that way at all. In fact, the way that these laws work now, they just sort of tilt the playing field even more towards high income wealthy communities that have the resources to fight projects.

Kai Ryssdal 

Here’s another slice of of that part of using these laws. A very quick google here tells me that CEQA, California Environmental Quality Act, but you hear about in the news all the time out here, as you know, dealing with big projects, was passed and signed into law in 1970. So I don’t think in 1970, people could spell climate change, let alone understand what it was. And now here we are 53 years later, trying to save the planet while adhering to a state environmental law, and also, the National Environmental Policy Act, which was passed before CEQA, that are from literally a different time?

Ted Nordhaus 

Yeah, well, you know, I mean, one of the ironies in this moment, is that, you know, we are sort of, you know, these environmental laws that were passed a generation ago, and there were often very good reasons why those laws were passed at the time are now in a lot of cases, the primary obstacle to building the clean energy infrastructure that we need to take on climate change.

Kimberly Adams 

And it’s coming, all of this is coming at the time, and we have so much more public money available for these projects. The Inflation Reduction Act has billions of dollars in grants and loans for clean energy project. I know there was some money for that in the Infrastructure Law as well. There’s probably some leftover COVID relief money for that, uh, how significant of a problem is this going to be in actually getting those funds out the door to help us meet our climate goals?

Ted Nordhaus 

Well, the inflation reduction act alone put up close to a half trillion dollars over the next decade to build clean energy infrastructure. And if you look at, you know, there’s all sorts of sort of estimates and modeling and forecast of all the emissions reduction that that will create. But if you look at those models, and you look at, for instance, the Princeton model that Jesse Jenkins, who’s an old colleague of mine at Princeton, runs on sort of how much emissions reduction do we get from the Inflation Reduction Act. Well, he finds that if you can’t reform these laws and get all the transmission lines, just the transmission lines built, you lose 80% of the emissions reductions. So a half trillion dollars, and we don’t get most of the emissions reductions that are anticipated and intended, because we literally can’t build the infrastructure.

Kimberly Adams 

How do you change people’s minds about not wanting this stuff in their backyard?

Ted Nordhaus 

You know, I mean, it’s hard. I think that everybody wants the stuff in someone else’s backyard, which is why I think the only way to fix the problem is that you have to deal with it at a state and national level. You’re not… there’s an idea that you can kind of go in and if you do better community engagement, and, and you really are kind of like, get everybody invested, and we’re going to take input from everybody and all the feedback, and then everyone will be like, “Okay, let’s build a massive will wind farm in my community.” There’s just no evidence that that actually works. And we got lots of cases where developers just by the book, did everything that everyone says they should do, and they still can’t get the projects approved. So ultimately, like, we’re going to have to make a decision at a federal level, in places like California at the state level, that we want this infrastructure. We want to build it now. We want it quickly. And I think at that level, it’s possible to actually sort of drive some change and sort of change the rules. And it’s entirely appropriate. I mean, the local level is not necessarily the right level to make these decisions. And there’s a national interest in building this infrastructure. So if we think that there’s a national interest interest in spending this money, building the infrastructure, building a clean energy economy, then members of Congress and you know, I think one of the ironies here is that most of the opposition to this comes from the Democrats, who are the ones who on a straight party line vote, you know, decided to spend all this money on this clean energy infrastructure, but then they you know, they can’t kind of get them sit, get out of their own way to make a decision to expedite the siting and permitting of these, of all this infrastructure so that we can actually build it. So, you know, I think there are sort of some hard choices that folks in the environmental community and frankly, you know, in the Democratic Party in Congress and in the Democratic, big Democratic majorities that we have in here in California are going to have to make it they will actually want to see this infrastructure built.

Kimberly Adams 

Okay, Ted Nordhaus is the founder of the Breakthrough Institute. Thank you so much.

Ted Nordhaus 

Thank you guys so much for having me.

Kai Ryssdal 

Thanks a lot. Thanks a lot. Yeah, it’s a little bit intractable. Right? It’s a little bit intractable, because nobody ever said, build that big wind farm in my backyard.

Kimberly Adams 

Right. And it sounds like the solution is that you’re just gonna have to force people to accept it. But that’s the kind of thing that costs you an election. And people in state and federal government really like to keep those jobs. So you’d be kind of just eating it.

Kai Ryssdal 

Yep. As I said, existential problem to an existential crisis. What do you think? If you want a wind farm in your backyard, let us know. Have renewable energy projects in your town been voted down? Let us know. You know how to do it. 508-827-6278. 508U-B-SMART. Or you can just plain old email us makemesmart@marketplace.org. We’re coming right back. News. Kimberly Adams go.

Kimberly Adams 

So every day, there’s a new Chat-GPT story and AI story. And businesses are just scrambling across the board to figure out how to incorporate this technology into their workflows, how to protect themselves from the technology. And as we were discussing the other day, I think we are going to be hearing stories about our kind of lurching adjustment to this new reality for some time to come. But there was a piece in Wired that, you know, kind of reminded me of the value of taking the moment to really sit and think big picture about, you know, what it all means. So there’s a… Wired has a spiritual advice columnists talking about technology, and somebody wrote in a letter, and the letter was “I can’t code and this bums me out. Because with so many books, and courses and camps, there are so many opportunities to learn these days. I suspect I’ll understand the machine revolution a lot better, if I speak their language Should I at least try?” And you know, the columnist gets back to them with this idea that, you know… We were taught for so long that coding is a future learn to code and you’re always going to have a job. And now we have AI that can write its own code. And so many computer and technology interfaces that you can build things with, that don’t require you to use code. But if coding is sort of the fundamental language on which all of the building blocks of our new economy and social system, to some extent, are built, there may be an intrinsic value of just kind of knowing how it all works. So even if we don’t need to learn to code to accomplish a task, there may be value in having coding as part of our base level education so we know that, we understand better the building blocks of how our world works, kind of like they used to teach people Latin, so you can understand a little bit better how the English language works, right? And if we don’t sort of understand the fundamentals of the back end of so many of the systems that we use, it limits our ability to question those systems, to see other potential outcomes to those systems. And you end up with this kind of fatalism that it has to be this way, because this is how it is because you don’t understand how it came together, and how it could possibly be different. It’s a really thoughtful piece. And I just think, as we all kind of run around like chickens with our head cut off related to, you know, all of our adjustments to AI. Like, let’s take a minute and really think about what it’s going to mean for our society. And somewhat related to that. There was a survey by a website called “Resume Builder,” and it’s one of these online surveys of business leaders. So they they “surveyed 1000 US business leaders to see how many companies currently use or plan to use Chat-GPT.” And one in four of the companies they surveyed said that they’ve already replaced workers with Chat-GPT. Now, again, one of one in four of the companies that they surveyed, you know, which you have to look at the methodology because it’s usually a subset of a subset and depends on how they selected it. But regardless. There’s a lot of companies that are starting to use the software that are already rolling it out and already figuring out things that it can do that they don’t need workers for. And some of those things are: hiring, writing code, and copywriting. So I’m looking “of the companies that currently use Chat-GPT 66% use it for writing code, while 58% use it for copywriting content creation, 57% for customer support, and 52% for creating summaries of meetings or documents.” Things that used to be somebody’s job. So yeah, it’s changing things already, probably faster than we imagined. And I do think there’s value to kind of understanding the back end.

Kai Ryssdal 

Yeah, I think that’s totally right. I think that’s totally right. And it’s, wwow, one out of five, one out of four, what was it?

Kimberly Adams 

One out of four.

Kai Ryssdal 

One out of four. Wow

Kimberly Adams 

Of the companies they surveyed.

Kai Ryssdal 

Yeah, that’s wild.

Kimberly Adams 

Like, if you look at they’re like using it to write job descriptions or draft interview questions.

Kai Ryssdal 

One does wonder what a certain company based in the Upper Midwest might be thinking about this, but anywho. Okay. But along those lines, the four of us who are regulars here at Marketplace World Headquarters, which I would hasten to add is about a 20 or 25,000 square foot office space. The four of us who are here on a daily basis, used to ask a lot, “Hey, I wonder when people are going to start coming back.” And now we say, “Yeah, nobody’s ever coming back.” And the data bears that out. There’s a fascinating piece in The Wall Street Journal today, based on data from JLL. That’s a property services firm the managers 4.6 billion square feet of real estate globally. Here’s what it says: “Asians and Europeans are going back to work at really high percentages. Office occupancy rates in Asia range from 80 to 110%, of pre-pandemic levels.” Right? More people are going back to the office than actually there were before. In Europe, it’s 70 to 90%. US office occupancy stands at 40 to 60% of pre-pandemic levels. And I think it just goes to show that ain’t nobody going back to the office full time. Right? It’s just really interesting. A lot of reasons for that. One is, you know, bigger homes in the United States, longer commutes to work, so it’s just easier to stay at home and more painful to go in. It has changed the face of American office space. And it’s… I don’t think it’s going back. I don’t think it’s going back. And that obviously has tremendous effects. Marielle Segarra did a great piece for us before she left about the restaurants around our New York Bureau. And what they were going through in Manhattan with nobody around. Lots of trickle down effects. And it’s a little bit. I t gets empty and lonely around here sometimes. I’ll tell you that. I kind of miss it. You know?

Kimberly Adams 

Yeah, there’s so many, you know, we… There have been discussions pretty much ever since this trend started of converting so much of this office space to housing, which we desperately need in this country. And I hope those projects just start to get going. Like, I know that there are a lot of companies still holding out hope that people are really going to come back to the office, but we need the housing more than we need people in the offices.

Kai Ryssdal 

Yeah good point.

Kimberly Adams 

Okay, that’s it for the news fix. Let’s do the Mailbag.

Mailbag 

Hi Kai and Kimberly. This is Godfrey from San Francisco. Jessie from Charleston, South Carolina. And I have a follow up question. It has me thinking and feeling a lot of things.

Kai Ryssdal 

Alright, so we talked about early school start times and how that keeps teenagers from getting enough sleep. Forget, you know, staying up too late on the back end because they didn’t do their homework on time. Hello, my two oldest children.

Kimberly Adams 

Wow under the bus!

Kai Ryssdal 

Well first of all, they don’t listen. Second of all, even if they did, they’d be like, “yes, so I did find I got into college.” Anyway. And I talked about how late start times were good for my kids for the aforementioned reasons. Here is another point of view.

Erin 

Hi Kai and Kimberly. It’s Erin calling from Middleton, Wisconsin. As the mother of two middle school teenagers, I agree wholeheartedly with this. On Wednesdays, our school has a late start date. And the day doesn’t start until nine o’clock. And we all feel so much better on those Wednesdays. We have time to have a proper breakfast. I make the kids a hot lunch to take to school because we’re not rushing to get out the door. Classes start at 9:10 instead of 8:20. And that 50 minutes makes all the difference in the world. Thanks for making me smart.

Kai Ryssdal 

Yeah, can confirm. Can confirm. Totally true.

Kimberly Adams 

Yeah. But are they going to do anything about it?

Kai Ryssdal 

Well, you know, it’s a state by state thing and California is working on it but it makes a huge difference. Just makes a huge difference for the kids.

Kimberly Adams 

Yeah. All right. One more Amanda called to join in to our never ending conversation about what to call mocktails

Amanda 

Hi Kai, Kimberly at all. This is Amanda from Columbus, Ohio, and I have stayed silent for many months now on the mocktail debate, but have decided it is finally time to chime in with my defense of the term mocktail. I think that people are assuming that mock means something derogatory, like mocking, but to me, I hear it and I think of the older mock recipes of ye’olden days like mock apple pie and mock turtle soup, where it just meant that it was a fake variety or a faux variety. So unless we come up with like, faux tails, which just sounds like a weird animated show. I think we’re stuck with mocktails

Kai Ryssdal 

My mother used to make mock stroganoff. It’s true.

Kimberly Adams 

Yeah, you know what, it’s probably easier just to stick with that. Although faux tails can be fun.

Kai Ryssdal 

That’s a, that’s a whole different podcast. Alright, we’re going and before we do as we always do, the make me smart question and answer: “What is something you thought you knew, but later found out you were wrong about?” Here comes Judy in San Diego.

Judy

What is something I thought I knew that found out I was wrong about? I thought eggs should always be kept refrigerated. After a recent trip to Mexico where they are not, my hosts explain that in the US we wash off the protective sheen or cuticle coating that repels pathogens. Wnwashed eggs last three weeks. That seems plenty of time and should make eggs cheaper, save energy, and maybe even tastes better. Apparently, America, Japan, Australia and some Scandinavian countries are the only ones who refrigerate their eggs.

Kai Ryssdal 

What?!

Kimberly Adams 

You didn’t know this?

Kai Ryssdal 

I didn’t know this.

Kimberly Adams 

Oh, yeah, it’s that’s why they, we say our eggs are pasteurized. Thats the process.

Kai Ryssdal 

Really?

Kimberly Adams 

Yeah. And have you ever gotten like farm fresh eggs from like the farmers market or somebody in your area who might like have chickens?

Kai Ryssdal 

I havenot. I have not.

Kimberly Adams 

Okay, well, nevermind. No, it’s uh. They feel different on the outside and I think it has to do with like factory farming and because the eggs are running through in such interesting facilities they have to take that extra step.

Kai Ryssdal 

Where there is a whole lot of chicken poop.

Kimberly Adams 

Yeah.

Kai Ryssdal 

Okay, well, we’re gonna end it there. Your answers to the make me smart question come to us at 508-827-6278. 508-U-B-SMART.

Kimberly Adams 

Make Me Smart is produced by Courtney Bergsieker. Ellen Rolfes writes our newsletter. Our intern is Antonio Barreras. Today’s program was engineered by Juan Carlos Torrado with mixing by Jayk Cherry.

Kai Ryssdal 

Ben Tolliday and Daniel Ramirez, who apparently will be in our credits in perpetuity, composed our theme music. Our acting senior producer is Marissa Cabrera. Bridget Bodnar is the director of podcasts. Francesca Levy is the executive director of Digital. And Marketplace’s Vice President and General Manager is Neal Scarbrough.

Kimberly Adams 

It’s like the guy who wrote all the music for NPR whose getting credits like decades later. He followed me on LinkedIn and I was really surprised. Yeah.