We're Letting the 'Vegetarians' Win

On permitting reform

This is a guest post from my colleague Josh T. Smith. We’ve been talking about NEPA, vetocracy, and how to get more things built in the US. Check out his immigration newsletter, Entry Point.

At the CGO, I am the problem child. By which I mean I don’t eat meat.

This doesn’t matter, except daily at lunch. Most places have an option for me. But not every location that people would like to go to. The local chicken food truck, for example.

How often should I use my vegetarian veto power? Does it really make sense for me to insist, every day, that we don’t go? 

After some reflection on this question, you start to see how we (speaking for all vegetarians) got our reputation. 

It’s pretty easy to manage this dynamic in the office. You eat some bad salads, you skip some communal lunches, and a few rare times, you even play your veto card. 

Outside of the office and deciding where to eat lunch with coworkers, managing veto powers is a lot more difficult. For example, building transmission lines for hydroelectric or solar plants often get caught up in fights by local interests despite their global importance as part of the solution to climate change. In these more important areas, we are entirely and totally under the thumb of “vegetarians” using their veto power to decide where to go to lunch every day. Except in this case, “lunch” is deciding where housing is built and where energy developments can be built. 

Our systems of regulation, at every level from the city to the entire country, need these excessive veto points pulled out by the roots. 

Everywhere and all the time, we are under the thumb of vegetarian tyrants

We have set up rules around environmental reviews, housing, and too many other topics, so that a tiny minority can stop nearly everything from moving forward. Sometimes these are comically silly—such as Jerusalem Demsas’s investigation of how a single person has pushed to remove trees in a Washington, D.C., neighborhood. When Demsas interviewed other neighborhood residents about the trees, they were a bit baffled—instead pointing her to other problems like trash and holes in roads and parking lots. 

Most of the time, however, these vetos are about more than lunch or a handful of trees—and their outcomes are tragic. Vetoes against new housing means fewer places for people to live. Housing costs price out low-income people and make living in successful places harder. Being locked out of these successful places also usually means being locked out of the best educational and job opportunities. So it’s a struggle for people to break out of poor situations. 

In energy policy and environmental policy, endless reviews kill projects before they start. The key issue is that projects need to document every potential harm, or face a challenge. So they write longer and longer reports to justify their choices. If anything is left out, then almost anyone can bring a suit against the project.

This analysis paralysis is an issue for every kind of energy project, including solar and wind. My colleagues Jennifer Morales and Steffen Rigby published a study of how current National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) regulations encourage years-long and encyclopedic impact studies. As shown in their figures here, should it really take 1,600 pages to permit a solar farm? Or 1,400 for a wind farm? 

Or is it possible that there are too many vegetarians involved here?

The review process tabulated in the CGO study is only one of many reviews that apply to these energy developments. In other words, those thousands of pages are often just the start.

Take geothermal, for example. Jennifer and Steffen’s study doesn’t include geothermal plants because there were too few of them in the data to make meaningful comparisons or statements. But we know from Department of Energy (DOE) researchers that geothermal energy projects are subject to an array of reviews. 

Layers and layers of reviews are required for geothermal projects. Once you complete a NEPA review required by the federal government, you may still need to complete reviews required by state governments or other laws. The DOE concludes what you’d expect about these layers of review, that “inefficient and protracted permitting processes can, in some cases, determine the success of a geothermal project.” For a sense of the scale of losses from these layered reviews, lost revenues range from $64 million to $227 million, according to the DOE’s estimates for one project. 

After you do all of these, you’re probably still at risk of lawsuits under the Administrative Procedure Act. In part, lawsuits are particularly common here because these environmental reviews are held to a higher standard than other kinds of reviews. On top of this higher standard, environmental lawyer Mark Rutzick points out that case law and other legislation that apply to NEPA-related cases make the costs of lawsuits lower for those bringing actions against the government and the potential rewards higher. For example, you don’t need to post a bond before bringing suit against a defendant, and environmental lawyers can receive higher than usual rates from the Equal Access to Justice Act.

The rollout of solar, wind, and geothermal will help reduce carbon emissions—if only vegetarians would let them be built!

Overthrowing the vegetarians

Comparing the endless delays facing energy projects to an office lunch choice obscures a fundamental part of the problem. We should take the analogy one step further. I’m no longer simply saying, “Let’s go somewhere with better options for me.” Instead, the current rules are more like me stepping into your meals at home to prohibit you from eating something that I wouldn’t eat. We aren’t just taking into account what vegetarians want, we’re letting them determine what we all eat. 

Paralysis by over analysis is a serious problem because climate change is a serious problem. Our inability to build energy infrastructure and increase generation makes us vulnerable. Dealing with climate change will require more energy and more energy-related development. That’s not something we can shy away from. Nor is it something we should leave open to the vagaries of vegetarians. 

The root of the problem is that our current rules create too many places where someone can object. We need new rules that internalize environmental harms but also allow us to press forward and build environmentally friendly infrastructure. Charging for emissions and requiring mitigation and remediation are two examples of superior policy options. They allow us to build, but still acknowledge external costs from energy development and use.

If you are tired of of living under the thumb of the vegetarians endemic in the system, then you’ll want revisions like these: 

1. Decisions to be made by the relevant experts and agencies, and 

2. Fewer opportunities for random people to veto choices made by the relevant experts and agencies.

Who should and shouldn’t be included in decisions is not always a straightforward question. CGO’s Eli Dourado goes into nitty-gritty detail on how to make it easier to build the technologies that will power a bright and clean future in his testimony to Congress along with his other writings on clearing out veto points in energy development. 

Still, the moral of the story is simple, we need to make it easier to build. Opposition will never disappear. Think about these changes like a kind of meatless Monday rather than a ban on all meat consumption—society at large isn’t coerced into following the whims of a minority group. Yet “vegetarians” still have enough influence to make progress on the goals they care about. 

In the end, we’ll all be better off with updated rules slightly more in favor of action and against the vegetarian veto.