2025 Battle Plan

Good morning and happy Friday,

This week, Ocean City, NJ – known as “America’s Greatest Family Resort” – has become the epicenter of opposition to offshore wind energy in New Jersey and along the East Coast. Meanwhile, solar developer BrightNight aims to transform the Starfire coal mine into Kentucky’s biggest solar facility, with electric truck manufacturer Rivian as its anchor customer. And the Biden Administration’s efforts to beef up Big Agriculture’s involvement in the fight against climate change have garnered both praise and skepticism.

Read on for more.

2025 Battle Plan

Most observers agree that Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential transition was chaotic and disorganized. Led by the arch-conservative Heritage Foundation, far-right groups have taken steps to ensure that if a Republican candidate wins the White House in 2024, they will be fully prepared to “take power day one and deconstruct the administrative state” – including dismantling environmental legislation and erasing progress on climate change.

• Dubbed “Project 2025,” the nearly 1,000-page “sprawling battle plan” addresses many areas of policy, but provisions dealing with energy and climate represent some of “the most severe swings away from current federal policies.”
• The plan calls for “shredding regulations” to reduce greenhouse gas pollution, including repealing the IRA, gutting the EPA, and shuttering the DOE’s Loan Programs Office, which has the authority to issue $400 billion in loans to help emerging clean energy technologies.
• More than 350 “right-wing hardliners” helped write the plan, which also includes a database of 20,000 potential officials “akin to a right-wing LinkedIn.”

?? The Takeaway

Dire consequences. An NRDC executive noted that “This agenda would be laughable if the consequences of it weren’t so dire.” The GOP may wish to reconsider whether this backward-looking agenda is a viable roadmap for the future. Although about 70% of Republicans say global warming is “either a minor threat or no threat at all,” polls show that among Republicans aged 18 to 39 years, nearly two-thirds agree that “human activity contributes a great deal to climate change,” and “the federal government has a role to play in curbing it.”

An Organized Campaign

As Dispatch readers well know, federal goals to expand clean energy production are often stymied at the local level. Much of this activity is the result of “an organized campaign,” driven in large part by the fossil fuel industry, to discredit renewable energy with false or misleading information – which has led to the “swift propagation of ordinances across the country.” Here are some of the impacts:

• An NREL study found that between 2018 and 2022, the number of counties with zoning restrictions that target wind development more than quadrupled, from 105 to 461. Approximately 315 municipalities had restrictions on solar panels.
• Wind ordinances – some of which place as much as 87% of available land off-limits – tend to proliferate in areas that have already attracted development because of the quality of the resource. As such, these ordinances may have an asymmetric effect on the ability to harness the best wind resources.
• On a related note, a new report from Regulatory Research Associates finds that proceedings related to renewables are dominating the agendas of U.S. utility commissions, and across 54 jurisdictions, “23 regulatory bodies have at least one case featuring renewable energy matters currently under review.”

?? The Takeaway

Tower power. Passed at a time when mobile phone usage was growing, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 shifted decision-making regarding the siting of cell towers away from local governments to the Federal Communications Commission – a model that some say could be applied to clean energy. Some say it’s also worth re-examining the “relative value proposition” of hard-to-site onshore wind and solar compared to alternatives like offshore wind and nuclear energy.

• Hurry up and Wait: Wisconsin power lobbies legislators to stall clean energy transition
• Solar’s China Problem: Many of the industry’s key materials are made with forced labor
• Gale Force Winds: Soaring costs threaten offshore wind farm projects
• Golden Coasrs: Offshore wind power could be California's economic solution
• Substation Optimal: Avangrid unveils U.S. first offshore wind substation

• Ohio Supreme Court Unanimously Affirms Siting Board Certificate for New Wind Farm
• The leader of Stop Solar Farms in Mississippi claimed at a community meeting on a proposed solar farm in Mill Creek, Mississippi that solar panels can cause carcinogens to be released into the environment.
• Page County, Iowa officials have extended a temporary hold on commercial solar energy construction permits.
• Residents of the Seatack neighborhood in Virginia Beach are speaking out against a battery storage facility in their community.

See Spot Distort the Facts

Everything you need to know about “The Kids Guide to the Truth About Climate Change,” produced by Mike Huckabee’s children’s publishing company, can be summarized in two graphs.?

The first image is from the guide, and purports to show carbon dioxide levels throughout history, leading one to believe current levels are nothing out of the ordinary. In fact, “the data the graph labels as ‘present day’—peaking at a little over 280 parts per million—actually represents levels from 2,300 years ago, around 391 BC.”

The second graph, from NASA and NOAA, shows actual present day levels, which are over 420 parts per million – and reflect the fact that “the vast majority of the carbon dioxide driving climate change has been emitted only since the Industrial Revolution.”

As a science professor quoted in the article notes, the issue goes beyond the fact that the information presented is highly misleading – “it fosters complacency by promoting the notion that climate change is not as dire a problem as it truly is.” It’s essential that we continue to counter falsehoods with facts.