On a bright, sunny Monday in the summer of 2016, Massachusetts governor Charlie Baker sat outside the Bay State’s gold-domed statehouse to sign a bill designed to ensure that “Massachusetts and New England can remain a leader in clean and renewable energy production.”1 The bill, passed after a year of wrangling among the state’s overwhelmingly Democratic legislators, sought to curtail the region’s carbon emissions without driving up electricity bills. To that end, the Baker administration was authorized to coordinate the purchase of clean electricity generated from, among other potential sources, wind turbines planned for the shallow water off the state’s southern coast, and from hydropower generated by dammed rivers in Canada.2 But because Massachusetts did not share a border with Canada, the new hydropower would have to travel through a neighboring state. And that, many quickly realized, would add several complications.
Climate change was a particularly potent political issue in New England, a region then, as now, dominated by progressive legislators. The nation as a whole had seen energy prices drop dramatically after fracking enabled nearby states to tap new stores of domestic natural gas. But if consumers elsewhere were happily taking advantage of the new bounty, New England was loath to embrace yet another fossil fuel—while it was cleaner than coal, burning gas still emitted carbon.3 And so Massachusetts, the largest and most powerful of New England’s six states, had been eager to identify affordable clean energy alternatives. Quebec’s government-owned power company, Hydro-Québec, had been using a fleet of sixty-three hydropower plants to produce almost all of the province’s electricity for decades.4 Now, Bay Staters wanted to draw from Canada’s surplus—reformers proposed purchasing enough to cut 3.5 million metric tons of greenhouse emissions, the rough equivalent of taking 700,000 cars off the road each year.5
To do that, someone would need to build an enormous transmission line—something the functional equivalent of a giant extension cord—from north of the Canadian border, across New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, or Maine, and into the power grid serving Massachusetts.6 A whole range of companies submitted proposed routes, each bidding for Baker’s support. And after evaluating the proposals, Baker’s administration decided in 2018 to move forward with a plan submitted by the enormous energy company Eversource. “Northern Pass,” as the proposal was named, would build a 192-mile transmission line south from Canada, through New Hampshire, and into Massachusetts.7 The challenge would be to get the Granite State to agree.
Eversource had actually proposed much the same project before Baker signed his 2016 climate bill.8 But without the newly authorized incentives, utilities would have had to raise consumer rates more than regulators were inclined to approve. Now, with Massachusetts offering to subsidize the expense, the project seemed financially viable. Unfortunately, as details became subject to greater public scrutiny, New Hampshire began to balk. Northern Pass was slated to cut through the iconic White Mountain National Forest. Interest groups, perhaps most boldly the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests, began to raise environmental concerns. Residents of the Granite State, famous for both their independence and simmering resentment of their haughty neighbor to the south, eventually concluded that their natural landscape was being sacrificed to serve the Bay State’s thirst for clean power. Late in 2018, an obscure New Hampshire siting board killed the project by declining to authorize its construction.9 And that was it—Massachusetts would have to look elsewhere.
Baker quickly pivoted to see if Maine might step up. Situated right across a long border from New Hampshire, the state that styled itself as America’s “Vacationland” was led at the time by a bombastic Republican who governed in much the same mold as Donald Trump. Governor Paul LePage viewed Massachusetts’s thirst for Canadian hydropower less as a scourge than as a point of leverage. If the Bay State was willing to pay the cost, he could demand concessions. The line was poised, after all, to be constructed by Mainers. The line’s owner would pay Maine in perpetuity to lease the land. Maine might even be able to purchase and divert some of the Canadian power on the cheap. And so LePage was supportive when Central Maine Power, a subsidiary of the Spanish-owned Avangrid, proposed to step in for Eversource with an alternative to Northern Pass, this project to be called New England Clean Energy Connect (NECEC).
Slated to cost a mere $950 million—a bargain when compared to Northern Pass’s $1.6 billion—NECEC turned out to be more than a big extension cord. Engineers proposed that the new infrastructure also connect to several additional wind farm projects in western Maine.10 Avangrid, estimating that the new infrastructure would create 1,700 jobs, promised LePage that cheap power imported from Canada could act as a check on rising prices for traditional fuel, taking roughly $40 million off Maine’s utility bills. The communities touched by the new lines, Avangrid proposed, would harvest more than $18 million in new local tax revenue—payments made essentially as rent for the utility poles set up nearby.11 And perhaps best of all, as LePage and Avangrid were keen to remind Mainers, Massachusetts would foot the entire bill. By almost any standard, this was poised to be a bonanza for Vacationland.
But like their neighbors in New Hampshire, Mainers soon came to worry that they were being “used” by the Bay State. Early on, a group concerned about those proposed wind farms—a purported threat to western Maine’s natural beauty—formed an advocacy group, Saving Maine, to fight the new connection.12 Initially dismissed as self-serving, their concerns began to have real purchase when a collection of more reputable environmental groups began expressing similar reservations—the North Woods demanded protection.13 And that wasn’t the only complaint. The new line not only threatened to gash through beautiful woodland, it would cross the Appalachian Trail three separate times. It was slated to run over the region’s purported crown jewel, the Kennebec River Gorge.14 Vacationland was a draw for its natural beauty, and NECEC appeared increasingly like a scourge to the state’s tourism industry.
There were financial complications as well. Avangrid was proposing to supply as much as a sixth of Massachusetts’s electricity—enough to power 1.2 million homes. That new supply promised to claim market share from the older, dirtier, less efficient power plants that had long served many of the same consumers. The president of a trade group representing the incumbent generation plants complained that his members had invested more than $13 billion in various facilities on the presumption that they would be able to recover those costs over future years of service.15 And that prompted an archetypical “politics makes strange bedfellows” moment: those wanting to preserve the beauty of Maine’s North Woods were aligned with advocates wanting to protect the fossil fuel industry. Both viewed the roughly one thousand steel structures Avangrid would erect through western Maine as a serious threat.
Initially, NECEC’s supporters appeared to have a leg up, having proactively nurtured relationships with the communities slated to host the line. Setting aside the global benefits of bringing more clean power online, Avangrid’s representatives had gone town by town, carefully delineating all the benefits that would accrue to each municipality. Enhanced reliability. Portions of a $50 million fund established to offset electricity bills. Tax revenue to renovate schools, or improve roads, or even cut local levies. Details in hand, town boards in twenty-nine separate communities adopted resolutions proactively supporting the line.16 And to some outsiders, that made the venture appear like a slam dunk: if a Trump-like populist like Governor Paul LePage and the host of climate-focused interest groups were both supportive of a proposal that promised to be both a financial boon to Maine and a powerful blow against carbon emissions, could it realistically be defeated?
As it turned out, quite possibly yes. Once the motley crew of conservationists, not-in-my-back-yard localists, and entrenched oil, coal, and natural gas–burning electricity generators organized themselves, they emerged with a series of well-articulated counterpoints that echoed the same complaints that had scuttled New Hampshire’s Northern Pass.17 NECEC’s development hinged on approvals from a whole range of government bureaucracies. Maine’s Public Utilities Commission would have to determine whether there was sufficient demand for the new line. The state’s Department of Environmental Protection would have to ensure the wilderness was properly preserved. The Army Corps of Engineers would have to ensure that the project would not unduly impact navigable waterways. Even the Department of State in Washington would have to approve because the wires crossed an international border.18 If opponents could get any of these various bureaucracies to reject the project—any single one—they might prevail. The race was on to find a veto.
Admittedly, the line was going to exact real costs. Some portion of Maine’s vast wilderness was going to be affected. So, to head off public frustration, Avangrid began making additional concessions. Executives agreed to invest $22 million in conservation projects to compensate the state’s tourism industry.19 Responding to concerns that the power line would somehow ruin the grand vista of the Kennebec River Gorge, the company abandoned its plan to build the line over the river, promising to bury the wires below—a shift that would cost $37 million.20 And when opponents began complaining that the package of compensation Maine would receive was paltry compared to what New Hampshire had been promised through Northern Pass, Avangrid offered to sweeten the pot even further.21 Nevertheless, it wasn’t clear that these additional concessions would suffice. And as Governor LePage was set to end his second term, Democratic attorney general Janet Mills, poised to be installed as his successor, began to criticize the project on the campaign trail.22 Perhaps this was going to end up like Northern Pass.
As it was, Mills came around after her inauguration. Soon thereafter, her administration negotiated and signed what became known as “the stipulation,” a new pot sweetener that saw Avangrid agree to invest $140 million in “rate relief” for ordinary Mainers, with an additional $50 million for low-income families. Avangrid promised also to invest $15 million to subsidize the installation of heat-pump furnaces—alternatives to the gas- and oil-burning boilers that prevailed throughout Maine. The company threw in $15 million to enhance the facilities required to accommodate electric cars, like charging stations.23 And executives agreed to specific concessions targeting the economically strained areas of western Maine touched by the new line. In total, the package came to $258 million—$17 million more than had been offered to New Hampshire. For a state that had long struggled economically, the infusion of capital appeared to represent a true lifeline.
The concessions had a powerful political impact, inducing the Conservation Law Foundation and the Acadia Center, both leading environmental groups, to endorse the venture.24 It gave Governor Mills cover to come out publicly in support as well, her endorsement helping to convince the state’s Public Utility Commission to grant the project a certificate of public convenience and necessity in April.25 By then it seemed as though the whole thing was settled. But, again, the notion that Maine was being hoodwinked, as opponents would argue with heightened fervor, proved effective in stirring up public opposition. Various environmental groups and competing energy companies had no incentive to wave the white flag. And so, by some measure, the battle had just begun.
NECEC’s detractors came to understand that convincing any government body to exercise a veto would depend primarily on their ability to turn public opinion. So they organized what turned out to be a very sophisticated public relations campaign. Funded largely by a series of fossil fuel–burning energy companies concerned about losing market share—Calpine Corporation, Vistra Energy, and NextEra Energy, among them—local conservation groups served as the mouthpieces for what became known as “Stop the Corridor.” The coalition published reports detailing the potential impacts of the new transmission line, arguing that it would gash through wetlands and cross streams, and bisect globally significant bird-breeding habitats with a clearance “as wide as the New Jersey Turnpike.”26 They managed to get Patagonia, the environmentally focused clothing company, to encourage its customers to sign a petition opposing approval.27 And they paid particular attention to the towns along the corridor, hoping to spark anger among the Mainers most likely to have vistas interrupted by the towers and lines.
This last move was particularly audacious because many of these same towns had endorsed the project just a few months earlier. Local officials had in many cases spent significant time weighing the pros and cons of Avangrid’s proposal, concluding that the localized benefits would outweigh the costs even before Governor Mills had negotiated the stipulation. But now, in the summer of 2019, with many of their constituents and neighbors mobilized by the Stop the Corridor campaign, some changed their minds.28 Those withdrawals then put pressure on the state’s Department of Environmental Protection and Land Use Planning Commission to look anew at whether the line violated the state’s Natural Resources Protection Act and land use standards.29
By the end of 2019, NECEC’s opponents had settled on what was essentially a two-pronged strategy. The first centered on the regulatory bodies that would have to issue permits and approvals for the project—Stop the Corridor would aim to compel regulators to question whether approving the project would amount to their dereliction of duty. The second, however, was further afield and, ironically, a vestige of early progressivism. More than a century earlier, the movement had fought to reform government so that citizens would have a new mechanism for legislating over the heads of captured machines—reformers being of the mind that robber barons and corporate interests had too powerful a hand among elected officials. Now, NECEC opponents hatched a plan to have the legislature pass a bill giving every bisected community an opportunity to kill the project via local referendum.30 And while that idea did not gain a foothold, it laid the seed for another obstructive strategy: upending the project via a statewide referendum.
Stop the Corridor strategists remained hopeful it wouldn’t come to that—that regulators would kill NECEC without their having to put the project up for a popular vote. The corporation running a gas-burning plant in Yarmouth, Maine, argued before the Public Utilities Commission that the alternatives to NECEC had not been sufficiently vetted, and that previous reviews had been “replete with errors.”31 An ecologist with the Maine Natural Areas Program voiced concerns that the chosen route might impact terrain serving as a home to the small whorled pogonias, orchids considered “threatened” by the federal government.32 A member of the state’s congressional delegation berated the Army Corps of Engineers for failing to be more transparent about its study of the route.33
Eventually it came time for Maine’s ten-member Land Use Planning Commission to pass judgment on Avangrid’s efforts to avoid spoiling three natural treasures: the Kennebec River Gorge, the Appalachian Trail, and the little-known Beattie Pond. The company’s vow to dig below the gorge had eliminated that issue of contention.34 Commissioners then accepted, however grudgingly, that there was no alternative to crossing the Appalachian Trail. But when it came to Beattie Pond, the commission deadlocked, frustrated that there was a better alternative but that Avangrid had refused to accede to a local property owner’s demand that the company pay fifty times market value for land in a way that would reduce sight lines from the pond. After further search, Avangrid discovered a way to snake the wires over a strip of land nearer to the Canadian border owned by Yale University. For the cost of a single dollar (and other considerations kept hidden from the public), Yale granted Avangrid permission to erect towers through their property. And with that, the Land Use Planning Commission certified that the project met Maine’s standards.35
Approvals in hand, Avangrid began making the investments necessary to break ground.36 The company contracted for $12 million in wooden mats that would be used to ferry heavy equipment through the North Woods.37 But opponents, still holding the threat of referendum in their back pocket, now endeavored to take the project to court. Several towns along the corridor joined a lawsuit to overturn the Department of Environmental Protection’s decision-making process. Several environmental groups claimed that the wrong state bureaucracy had granted the project’s approval. And NextEra Energy, still operating both an oil-burning power plant in Yarmouth and a nuclear plant nearby in New Hampshire, filed suit claiming that the state’s approvals had been granted without substantial evidence.38 But none of these cases went anywhere. And so, as a last-ditch effort, NECEC’s opponents turned to what seemed almost like a nuclear option.
In early 2020, opponents submitted a petition with seventy-five thousand signatures in support of holding a referendum to demand that the state’s Public Utility Commission withdraw the new line’s certificate of public convenience and necessity.39 Avangrid objected in court, claiming that Maine’s constitution did not allow for a public voice to overturn a regulatory decision—that the proposed referendum “exceed[ed] the scope of the legislative powers reserved to the people” under the state’s constitution.40 In a remarkable turn, the state’s Supreme Court ruled that the referendum could not go before the voters. “What is proposed here is not legislation,” the ruling decreed. “Directing an agency to reach findings diametrically opposite to those it reached based on extensive adjudicatory hearings and a voluminous evidentiary record, affirmed on appeal, is not ‘making’ and ‘establishing’ a law.”41 It seemed, for a moment, as though Avangrid had finally run the gauntlet. But, again, no.
A continuing flurry of abortive legal efforts won opponents some continued delays. They argued, for one, that the Army Corps of Engineers had not been sufficiently thorough when evaluating the project’s environmental impact. But when these various process-oriented objections faltered, opponents were left to focus again on the public referendum.42 This time, rather than force a regulatory agency to reverse its own determination, they designed an initiative that would erect new political hurdles. If passed, this second referendum would require any proposed high-power transmission line to earn the support of two-thirds of the state legislature, and would furthermore ban wires through the remote portions of northern Maine. The language was explicitly legislative. And so, when a petition in support of the referendum was submitted with sufficient backing, the new statewide vote was deemed appropriate for the November 2021 ballot.43 Finally, an advantage for NECEC’s detractors.
The battle over what became known as “Question 1” became an almost all-consuming political affair through 2021, with $70 million spent on campaigns for and against passage.44 Opponents of the proposition—those campaigning to see the new transmission line through—pulled out all the stops. Governors Mills and Baker, a Maine Democrat and a Massachusetts Republican, respectively, both endorsed the plan. Biden administration secretary of energy Jennifer Granholm made a public pitch. Both of the state’s major daily papers wrote editorials dismissing the opponents’ objections. And the nation’s broader clean energy community—those bent on bringing more renewable energy sources online—weighed in, fearful that passage would chill clean energy efforts across the country. Advocates were nervous about the precedent.
This last part was particularly profound. There were, at that point in 2021, at least twenty-one high-voltage transmission lines nearing approval throughout the United States—enough to grow solar and wind power by 50 percent. But if regulatory approvals like the one in Maine weren’t considered ironclad—if this one project could be overruled post hoc by referenda—lenders might think twice about making loans to companies proposing similar projects elsewhere. Alternatively, to account for the risk, they might raise interest rates, putting promising projects beyond financial reach. And that could set back the transition to green by years, if not decades. NECEC, was, in essence, a test case. Those interested in building out the nation’s clean energy grid were watching the doings in Vacationland with studied concern.45
The project’s opponents almost inarguably had the more compelling pitch. As in New Hampshire, resentment toward Massachusetts was woven deep into Maine politics—the supposition was that the Bay State was somehow trying to take advantage of its provincial neighbors. Vacationers who drove up the Maine turnpike each summer in their Land Rovers and BMWs were now attempting to exploit Maine’s natural assets for their benefit. And so, in the end, by a wide margin—nearly 60 percent in favor—Mainers passed the referendum.46 Suddenly, and for the first time since the campaign had begun a half decade earlier, opponents of bringing hydro to New England seemed to have the upper hand.
In the immediate aftermath, Avangrid issued a statement refusing to abandon the project, and the company quickly filed suit arguing that the referendum had violated Maine’s constitution by reneging on a valid lease. The company’s chief executive, noting that Avangrid had already spent $450 million on the project, cleared 80 percent of the right-of-way, and erected more than 120 electrical towers, vowed to complete the project by the end of 2023.47 But executives nevertheless agreed to halt construction until the litigation played out. Despite Avangrid’s contention that they could find an alternative route to avoid the Upper Kennebec Valley, the Department of Environmental Protection suspended the company’s license.48 Opponents were, by this point, elated. It appeared like their Hail Mary strategy had paid off.
The better part of a year later, in August 2022, the Maine Supreme Court weighed in. The justices wanted a lower court to decide whether the work Avangrid had done before their license was suspended was sufficient to protect the endeavor from being upended retroactively by the referendum. The case was tried in April 2023, nearly a year and a half after the opponents’ victory at the ballot box.49 Avangrid’s lawyers argued that the company had “vested rights” to finish the line. The state of Maine, now litigating against a project it had once championed, argued that Avangrid had sped up its construction explicitly to rob Maine voters of the opportunity to work their will.50 At the end of a seven-day trial, nine jurors took a mere three hours to return with a unanimous verdict: Avangrid, they determined, did in fact have a vested interest in completing the approved route. The company could proceed with NECEC despite the referendum.51
By then, however, another problem had emerged. The line, when initially approved, had been slated to cost $950 million—an amount that ratepayers in Massachusetts had agreed to cover. Now, however, Avangrid estimated that inflation and delay had driven the costs up to $1.5 billion.52 It had by then been seven years since former governor Charlie Baker had signed the climate law promising to finance the project, and Massachusetts was now halfway through the period it had given itself to reduce its carbon emissions to 50 percent below its 1990 levels. It wasn’t clear, even then, that this cornerstone of the most ecologically progressive state’s plan to address climate change was actually viable.
By the point that NECEC’s financing became the subject of renewed debate, the project had been the focus of no fewer than thirty-eight reviews. The trial in April 2023 had generated two million documents.53 Vegetation had begun to grow in parts of the corridor that had previously been cleared.54 And despite all that, not a single watt of additional clean Canadian power had flowed into the American grid.55 To further cloud the picture, a Connecticut-based company filed suit to stop the project because, in their view, the line was not available for use by other small energy projects. The new governor of Massachusetts wanted to review whether Bay Staters were getting a fair deal.56 And it was anyone’s guess what further obstacles opponents might throw in the project’s way. As of March 2024, the project was not slated for completion before late 2025.57
NECEC is just one project, running through just one state, tucked into one corner of an enormous country. Its fate, by itself, will not determine whether America can stem the global threat of climate change. But the barriers thwarting construction of this one high-voltage transmission line aren’t unique—they were, and are, indicative of a more typical rigmarole. Not all transmission lines are worthwhile. Not all efforts at conservation—of neighborhoods, of forests, of species—are self-interested. Preposterous as some of NECEC’s opponents may have been, others presented legitimate gripes. That said, the system’s inability to metabolize concerns, let alone come to an expeditious decision on whether to build the new line, poses what is perhaps the most important cut against efforts to stem climate change. Even if we have the will to overcome our addiction to fossil fuels, is there actually a way?
If the process for approving new transmission lines appears almost entirely inscrutable today, the initial build-out of the nation’s electricity grid must have appeared to many Americans like some zany plot out of a science fiction novel. Here, at the turn of the twentieth century, was a newfangled technology, operating almost akin to magic, transporting some invisible force into people’s homes by dint of nothing but metal wire. In the early days, this magic was delivered almost haphazardly by competing companies, each having to string or bury wires along public routes and between private properties. These companies weren’t endeavoring to build out the nation’s electrical grid for the greater good; they were sending electricity across publicly owned spaces, through private technology, in ways that were notoriously dangerous, all in efforts to turn a profit. And, in many cases, enfeebled government was cowed by them—public authority wasn’t sophisticated enough to ensure against private-sector abuse.
The results were largely predictable—electricity’s emergence sparked public anger. And while some of that fury was directed at the electric companies themselves, a great deal focused on public-sector incompetence. What if an electricity company wanted to build a little power plant on a block adjacent to your house? What if executives wanted to string wires across your backyard? What if they were preparing to bring electricity to the house attached to yours—one that, if it caught fire, might spread an inferno? What if a local power company refused to serve your block? What if they charged an unreasonable fee? Who would ensure that the two competing power producers didn’t collude to drive prices up? No bureaucracy existed capable of imposing order on the prevailing chaos.
In an age when the entire electrical marketplace was immature—when, in many cases, little companies were setting up their own little plants, importing the raw materials required to manufacture power, and then serving that “load” through largely unregulated networks of wire—these sorts of disputes were rampant. In 1889, the mayor of New York City was so incensed by rooftop wires that he dispatched city employees to chop them down with axes. One journalist, describing the “copper and steel wire octopus that has so encircled our streets,” reported that crowds cheered on Broadway when electrical poles fell.58 And the growing tension between the private and public interests presented a classic Progressive Era dilemma. Reformers began to ask how the miracle of electricity might be deployed to the masses without trampling the rights of individuals. And in an age of rising Hamiltonianism, many were drawn to the same potential salve: centralizing power in the hands of disinterested experts.
In the first decades of the twentieth century, progressivism’s centralizing impulse spurred many reformers to recommend public ownership of the entire industry.59 Referenda favoring arrangements authorizing municipalities to assume control of private infrastructure were so pervasive that private companies often became the most vociferous advocates of regulation—they viewed public oversight as the less radical alternative to municipal ownership. Electricity investors worried about suffering the same fate that had befallen many trolley (or “traction”) companies—Chicago’s 1906 municipal election had been won by the candidate promising to take ownership from the private corporations running various routes. Amid the uncertainty rife within the early electricity marketplace, it wasn’t clear which approach—municipal ownership or public regulation—was more likely to prevail.
Fortunately for private industrialists, support for public takeovers flagged when the bottom fell out of the municipal bond market in 1907. To that point, small towns and cities had found it fairly affordable to borrow capital at low rates, with that easy money enticing mayors and city councils to buy out private interests (sometimes forcibly) on the presumption that they could then expand and improve the various grids put under City Hall’s control. In many cases, these had proven to be shrewd investments: a city that purchased a couple of small and inefficient generators located near bustling neighborhoods could replace them with more efficient facilities set further away—a win-win-win for consumers, residents, and investors alike. But when, in 1907, lenders began to worry more acutely that cities were investing those borrowed funds haphazardly—that elected officials weren’t astute enough to avoid municipal bankruptcy—higher interest rates induced many city officials to back off that strategy altogether. Reformers, in turn, began to seek alternative ways to exert control. Public oversight presented itself as the obvious solution.60
The stampede to regulate the electricity industry did not, of course, emerge in a vacuum. This was the same moment that standard-issue Hamiltonian progressivism was coming into full bloom, with Wisconsin, New York, and Massachusetts imbuing new public-sector regulatory commissions, staffed by expert professionals, with the authority to establish standards across a range of industries. These commissions will, to the contemporary ear, sound like incarnations of the sort that corporate interests openly revile—the kinds of bureaucracies subjected to regular broadsides from organizations ranging from the US Chamber of Commerce to the American Enterprise Institute. But, in fact, not only were these explicitly progressive institutions often welcomed by many in the private sector—they were, at the outset, celebrated as a way to pry private industry from the tentacles of machine-controlled legislatures.61
Perhaps most profoundly, many reformers came to believe that professionalized commissions were better positioned to balance the competing interests of profit-seeking investors and a price-sensitive public.62 Experts frequently appeared open to experimentation—to modifying regulatory regimes as conditions changed in the marketplace. And that was the essence of their public value proposition: in exchange for allowing a private company the opportunity to provide some utility—electricity, telephone service, sewers, and more—regulators could demand certain concessions.63 They could benchmark reasonable rates of return for investors. They could set reasonable rules limiting the company’s license to install, say, electrical poles on the edge of a citizen’s private property. They provided a venue for warring parties to air their disputes and have them resolved.64
These arrangements had their critics, but the potential upside was clear for the private and public sectors alike. Absent the power yielded by regulatory commissions, early electricity providers might have chosen to serve only the better-off neighborhoods equipped to purchase the service. They might have provided poor customer service without any fear of sanction. But if, in the case of regulated electricity providers, a utility agreed to work within a public commission’s regulatory regime, and often to serve every potential customer within a limited geography, they were granted in exchange an exclusive franchise. In other words, if the company promised to connect wires to all the homes and businesses in a certain region, executives could be freed from the concern that a competing venture would cut into their revenue.
The public return from these sinecures was substantial. Perhaps most important, progressive regulation opened the door for private money and public power to work in harmony. The nation’s electrical grid expanded in ways that would have been much less likely if private companies had been incapable of leaning on public authority—if there had been no way for a utility to put up a pole when a recalcitrant property owner was determined to keep a lot pristine. Commissions could expeditiously bless a utility’s claim on that private property. On the other hand, municipally owned systems might have been unable to tap private capital to expand service to poorer or more remote corners of their various jurisdictions. Here, in the end, was a compromise arrangement where everyone had something to gain.
Take, as an example, the story of Samuel Insull, a British immigrant who arrived in the United States to serve as Thomas Edison’s secretary and subsequently rose to lead Chicago Edison. Insull noted at one point that Lake County, Illinois, located just south of the Wisconsin border, was dotted with a whole phalanx of inefficient power plants, each serving a small, localized grid. The county’s patchwork system even included a small plant run by a “gentleman farmer” who sold power to his immediate neighbors. Insull proposed to replace the jerry-rigged network with a top-down system powered by a single, efficient plant sited along Lake Michigan. It was an audacious suggestion—one that, most notably, promised to benefit the consuming public by providing cheaper, more reliable electricity. But seizing the opportunity required business and government to work in harmony. A company alone would not have had sufficient authority to impose its network across public and private interests alike; a government alone might not have had access to the huge sums of money required to get the project constructed. Working with the government, however, Insull’s new operation managed to turn a profit even while lowering the consumer’s price of electricity from 7 cents per kilowatt-hour to 2.9 cents.65
Insull’s success was a near-perfect distillation of Hamiltonian progressivism’s great promise—professional expertise and public authority combined to do for ordinary people what neither the market nor the government was capable of doing on its own.66 By 1930, every state but Delaware had established some sort of public utility commission regime—each charging some group of experts with overseeing water, gas, or electricity systems, among other large enterprises serving the public.67 And while they varied on the specifics—some were elected, others appointed, some with huge staffs (940 in California), others much smaller (15 in Utah)—the core of the proposition remained the same everywhere. Independently powerful government bureaucrats maintained the power to grant private industry sufficient runway to operate at a reasonable profit, assuming they provided good service to everyone within a designated geography.68 This represented order from chaos in a way that served the greater good.
Beyond marrying government and industry in common purpose, Hamiltonian regulatory schemes worked because they were malleable. Progressive theorists presumed that, as technology changed, the commissions would evolve with it—that as new, more efficient power plants, wires, and appliances became available, these public bodies would abandon old arrangements and, in an orderly way, improve service.69 That malleability was crucial because the electricity marketplace remained immature. What might happen, for example, if a company wanted to sell power across state lines—namely, that is, from a market regulated by one commission into a market regulated by another?
The issue came to a head in the 1920s when the Narragansett Electric Lighting Company, based in Rhode Island, reached an agreement to supply power to the customers of Massachusetts’s Attleboro Steam and Electric Company. When Narragansett subsequently asked Rhode Island’s public utility commission for permission to charge a higher rate, officials in Providence agreed. But Massachusetts objected, arguing that Rhode Island regulators had no authority to approve a rate change in a neighboring jurisdiction. In a key 1927 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that neither state had proper authority—that interstate commerce was exclusively a federal responsibility. But the federal government had not, to that point, made any provision for exercising federal authority in this arena. And despite the progressive answer to this problem being almost blindingly obvious—a federal agency—conservatives in the Coolidge administration had no real interest in growing the federal bureaucracy.
Only amid the horrors of the Great Depression was Washington finally propelled to grant regulators more control over the energy marketplace. And here, as in other realms, the Establishment took hold. Together, the New Deal–era Federal Power Act of 1935 and the Natural Gas Act of 1938 established fairly bright lines between what states could regulate and what was the domain of the federal government. But the two laws were different in at least one key respect. Because natural gas, once extracted, had to be transported across state lines for burning, the executive branch was granted pipeline siting authority. Federal legislators made no similar provision for transmission lines because electrical current wasn’t being sent vast distances, meaning that the siting of electrical equipment would remain the province of state and local regulators.70 And that, then, established a foundation for a complex but largely centralized regime that would guide the electricity industry during the postwar era. Few would argue that the system was perfect—but it was balanced.
Over the course of the following several decades, federal and state regulators would often tangle over who was authorized to control various elements of the system, and everyone had their gripes. Consumers sometimes complained that the system was “captured”—that various regulators were too wedded to the interests of the companies they oversaw. Private industry griped that the regulators were too strict—that they prevented innovation and experimentation.71 But through the 1970s, the nation enjoyed what some termed the “utility consensus.” In service of growth, the government encouraged the consumption of more energy. In service of expanding prosperity, reformers wanted that bounty of cheap energy to be distributed to the farthest corners of the nation.72 For all the hiccups and complaints, the downsides were a far cry from what might have prevailed had progressives not divined an architecture of shared authority. Progressivism had crafted a system capable of wielding power over power. The country was happy enough to rely on that balance—until, that is, circumstances changed once again.
During the immediate postwar era, electricity had typically been generated near the places it was used—coal would be shipped from, say, West Virginia to Massachusetts, and then burned at a generating plant near the homes and businesses it powered around Boston. But alternative models seemed within grasp. In response to Soviet innovation, Eisenhower administration officials endeavored to construct a new American transmission system that would enable energy companies to send the electricity itself vast distances—allowing, for example, coal burned in West Virginia to power homes and businesses in Massachusetts directly. They proposed, as a demonstration, to erect this sort of transmission line between the Pacific Northwest and Southern California, allowing underutilized hydropower generated by the Columbia River to keep air conditioners humming around Los Angeles during the hot summer.
For years, logistical and political questions kept the proposal in check—the natural gas suppliers who traditionally supplied utilities in and around Los Angeles weren’t keen to compete with hydroelectric power wired in from Oregon. But the Johnson administration worked through the details, and when an 865-mile transmission line known as the Pacific Intertie finally opened in 1970, the Los Angeles Times declared that the $700 million project “ranks with the pyramids as an engineering feat.”73 More consequential, the line offered a window into an entirely different way of organizing the nation’s electricity infrastructure. During the consensus era, most of the nation’s electrical marketplace had been “vertically integrated”—that is, responsibility for generating the power (burning the gas, coal, or oil) and then distributing that electricity to homes and businesses fell within the purview of a single institution. Now, it appeared, the electricity could come in from the outside, and that might open the door to more competition.
The Pacific Intertie represented one among a broad array of cuts against the old consensus. The fees regulated utilities were permitted to charge local ratepayers had typically been determined in some part by the cost of importing coal, oil, or gas and maintaining the plant that burned that fuel. If electricity could be brought in directly—and if that electricity was cheaper to generate—the local utility would no longer be able to justify the same rates. Having been outcompeted for the business of generating electricity, long-staid utilities risked being incapable of eliciting the same profits. And that created a novel problem: utility executives had largely cheered public regulation when it served to protect them from the threat of municipal ownership. But now those same regulatory commissions were poised to compel utilities to purchase cheaper electricity in the name of lowering rates.
The upheaval extended beyond the relationship between utilities and their local regulators. Through part of the 1960s, the industry had been focused almost exclusively on exploiting economies of scale—making improvements along the lines Samuel Insull had instituted in Lake County decades earlier. Consumers, regulators, and energy companies had all benefited when electricity prices fell and the market demanded ever more load. But now two things changed that: First, absent finding entirely new sources of power, America was beset with fewer small, inefficient generating plants to replace. Second, and perhaps, more important, during the 1970s, the market for fuel changed. In the wake of the Yom Kippur War, America faced an oil crisis. Supply shocks sent utility bills up, and consumers began to cut back.74
This was yet another reflection of the nation’s increasingly cynical view of the power brokers who controlled the often shrouded institutions governing American life. In 1969, nine days after Richard Nixon had been sworn into office, a privately owned oil platform off the coast of Santa Barbara exploded, leaving muck to leak across eight hundred square miles of the Pacific Ocean. Less than a half year later, the chemical film sitting atop Ohio’s putrid Cuyahoga River erupted into flames.75 These two events, having preceded the oil crises that would define much of the following decade, burnished the growing notion that the nation’s economic growth was coming at too high an ecological cost—that consumerism was denuding the nation’s natural bounty. Put another way: the people who had been put in charge appeared not to be holding a torch for the greater good after all.
These various indignities worked to a variety of effects. For one, a slew of academic studies delineating the tendency of utility commissions to rubber-stamp industry requests for rate hikes spurred broad-based skepticism that they were seen in earnest as guardians of the public interest. Separately, reformers began to wonder more pointedly whether the fee-for-service model that had served to incentivize energy consumption perversely cut against designs on reducing energy use. Finally, during and after the oil crisis, many critics began to express concern that the country’s thirst for cheap power had fed a national dependence on foreign countries that did not share America’s best interests.76 While progressives began to consider the wisdom of steering more generally in a new direction, it wasn’t immediately clear where that new direction might point. No new consensus seemed right at hand.
The problem was that the nation’s new priorities all cut against each other. Energy “independence”—that is, weaning the nation from its reliance on foreign oil—was bound to require either more drilling at home or else replacing cheap foreign oil with more expensive sources of clean power. The first option appeared sure to denude the environment, the second to worsen inflation. Unsure of the top priority, well-intentioned reformers often found themselves at odds. But perhaps even more frustrating for progressives was their inability to determine how to address the potpourri of problems. Would solutions emerge from centralizing power so that clean energy projects like the Pacific Intertie could overcome pushback? Or, alternatively, were they better advised to hack at the dynamics that had allowed the incumbent cabal of energy executives and regulators to lead the country down a primrose path? Who, in the end, should be assigned the difficult task of choosing how America would refashion the electricity marketplace: regulators, market forces, or some new amalgamation of the two?
As in other realms, the impulse to decentralize proved more appealing. By the 1970s, reformers were embracing an almost reflexive notion that the Establishment was prone to put profit above everything else. Some among the same coterie of federal judges then putting guardrails around highway engineers (see Chapter 7) began tightening the screws on the energy companies and the associated regulatory bureaucracies. A 1971 opinion drafted by DC Circuit Court of Appeals judge J. Skelly Wright criticized the Atomic Energy Commission’s “crabbed interpretation” of environmental law. And his criticism of the lax manner in which expert bureaucrats oversaw a nuclear power plant in Maryland compelled the energy industry to engage in many of the same analyses that highway departments were now obligated to complete before starting new projects. Building new energy infrastructure became subject to many of the same process-centered limitations.77 The guardrails being built for highway engineers were coming for energy executives too.
By some measure, this shift happened at the most inopportune moment: The infrastructure required to keep the old vertically integrated system in operation—the rail lines required to ship coal across the country so that it could be burned in plants located near the homes and businesses—had already been built. But the transmission lines that would be required for clean electricity to be sent long distances had yet to be constructed. And that bifurcation had profound implications. With oil prices on the rise, Minnesota utility executives began looking for alternative sources of power; they eventually keyed in on coal being mined in North Dakota. But mining that coal and shipping it to be burned near the Twin Cities made less economic sense than burning the coal near the mine and sending the electricity by wire. As with the Pacific Intertie, they proposed a plan, subsidized by the federal government, to have consumers nearer Minneapolis and St. Paul pay for the 1,650 towers that would connect the 430 miles by wire.
The same dynamics that would later emerge in Maine quickly now came to the fore. Engineers assigned an algorithm to determine the course, lest anyone complain that the routing had been clandestinely manipulated by political insiders. But before any algorithm could set a path, planners had to assign values to different categories of terrain. Residential neighborhoods, for example, were assigned a value that would induce the algorithm to avoid them. So were unspoiled forests. The land that was deemed least valuable, and therefore most likely to be utilized, or even seized, was agricultural. The result was a route that claimed farmers’ livelihoods much more readily than it impacted animal habitats. Unsurprisingly, residents of rural Minnesota were incensed, with one farmer noting wryly, “I guess a skunk is worth more than a farmer.” Here was yet another instance where the Establishment appeared to be up to its old tricks.
What emerged in the subsequent months amounted to a cultural battle between Twin City suburbanites, many of whom prized the wilds of the state’s parks and forests, and the farmers of rural western Minnesota. The ensuing unrest—what future liberal senator Paul Wellstone would call “America’s energy war”—eventually turned violent. After the farmers sabotaging the poles were eventually compelled by state police to relent, the underlying tensions remained. Here, as in other venues, the old narrative emerged: Establishment figures had imposed their will over the protests of communities that were helpless to defend themselves—this population being one that was largely white and rural.78 And for many progressives watching the story unfold, the inescapable conclusion was that the transmission line could have been erected along some less obtrusive route. Here, as in the story of Robert Moses, progressives could grasp the David-versus-Goliath dynamics. And so, much as they had done in the realm of highway construction, they determined to establish for potential victims a new set of Jeffersonian protections.
The Carter administration was, once again, caught in the middle. Even if the president might have wanted to upend the old regime, it wasn’t always clear that hacking at the Establishment would guarantee an effective result. In the market for natural gas, for example, a crazy quilt of tax privileges and subsidies protected non-gas-producing states in the Midwest and Northeast from suffering under the weight of high prices. As a result, energy companies tapping reserves in Texas and Louisiana could sell the gas at higher local prices than if they sent it elsewhere via pipeline. When OPEC curtailed America’s oil supply, leaving much of the country desperate for additional gas, Washington was in a bind: deregulating would subject various markets to much higher prices; but keeping prices low, or imposing more regulation, seemed likely to disincentivize the pipeline expansions.79
What emerged, per Carter’s impulse to marry progressivism’s Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian impulses, was a hodgepodge that satisfied almost no one. The president signed a bill allowing federal regulators, once limited to manipulating interstate gas markets, to control intrastate pricing as well—an archetypical Hamiltonian effort to place more power in the hands of centralized figures.80 But he also signed into law a little-known but influential law designed to empower the small-time energy producers to bring alternative sources of electricity online. Wind and solar energy were, at that point, expensive and unreliable—neither appeared capable of producing power at the scale the nation required. Given that technological reality, rate-conscious state and local utility commissioners had been loath to build out the sorts of lines and substations required to let these operations serve the grid. The 1978 Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act, or PURPA, required utilities to purchase energy from “qualifying facilities” at a benchmarked price.81 Here, Carter was pushing power down.
The better part of a half century later, the energy battles of the 1970s can be hard to decipher. But the underlying dynamics in this realm resembled those in other areas of progressive thinking. What few questioned by 1980 was that the old regime had failed—that America’s faith in the Establishment that had crafted the energy consensus had been misplaced. All the ideological lodestones of the incumbent model—the drive to induce the public to consume more electricity, for companies to exploit economies of scale, for regulators to nurture vertical integration—appeared suspect. Reformers, eager for something new, simply wanted to liberate the nation’s energy policy from the energy octopus that had sold out the nation’s natural resources in the name of profit. And as the movement’s abiding concerns continued to evolve—environmental and climate-centered concerns were rising up the progressive agenda—the desire to pull power away from the Establishment rose more decisively to the fore.
By the 1990s, environmental concerns had emerged as the beating heart of progressivism’s energy agenda. Not that costs weren’t of any residual concern—they were. But the underlying presumption was that high prices were born less from market conditions than from a conspiracy of deep-pocketed corporate interests and captured regulators. It had been one thing to centralize power during the 1930s such that the TVA could extend service to impoverished pockets of the Upper South. But most every community was, six decades later, entirely wired up. So, amid concerns about pollution and global warming, progressives began thinking more expansively about how to get electricity providers to adopt cleaner forms of generation. The technology required to create power from wind and solar wasn’t what it would become, but reformers were willing to pay some premium to begin “greening” the energy sector. The challenge was to speed up that transition.
Once again, progressives, faced with a variety of options, might have proposed to do for electricity what the federal government had done with retirement savings in the 1930s: establish a bureaucracy that would take responsibility from incumbent actors much as the Social Security Administration had assumed some share of the burden for guaranteeing Americans’ income in old age. Rather than permit local utilities to choose the manner to generate electricity, or allow state public utility commissioners to decide where to invest, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) might have been given authority to dictate how Americans would get their electricity, and what they might be charged for it. That approach, however, was anathema to a whole range of interests, many of which were explicitly progressive.
To be sure, few among the power companies themselves were eager to embrace new rules that might imperil the returns they owed their investors. And state regulators had no real interest in being bigfooted by their federal counterparts. But the innate instinct among progressives wasn’t to use command-and-control regulation to drive environmentally friendly reforms; it was to incentivize everyone in the sector to make these decisions on their own. To nudge them. To make dirty energy more expensive and cheaper energy more affordable. To set targets that states and utilities could strive to meet, potentially with sticks to punish those who fell short. To make it economically attractive to be environmentally responsible.
This alternative strategy, a desire to green the energy sector from the bottom up, was not only aspirational—it made intuitive sense. During the peak of the consensus era, when the energy sector had been vertically integrated nearly everywhere across the United States—that is, when a single company generated power and distributed it to the homes and businesses in its coverage area—incentives issued from on high were metabolized by utility executives who wielded real power over all aspects of their regional monopoly. A government mandate might compel an energy company to shut down a dirty coal-burning plant, but the regulator overseeing that transition might then allow the utility to charge its customers to cover the costs of the switch. In a system composed of centrally administered fiefdoms, there was a clear path to reform.
But the cultural aversion to power had spurred progressives not only to want to green the energy sector, but to strip the energy establishment of its traditional sinecure. The same impulse that had induced Jimmy Carter and Ted Kennedy to deregulate the airline and trucking industries in the 1970s now informed a progressive desire to give alternative energy producers opportunities to compete with the old guard. Here, reformers weren’t eager to take control of the market; they wanted instead to force the old guard to compete in ways that would serve the greater good. And so, with the support of a whole phalanx of conservative voices eager to hack at government almost wherever its tentacles extended, progressives began angling to create a competitive, deregulated marketplace among those generating electricity.82 The first trick would be to find leverage sufficient to steer utilities away from exploiting their own old, cheap, fossil-burning power plants. The second would be to convince those same utilities to spend the resources required to build transmission lines accessing that newly generated electricity. From a policymaker’s perspective, that was no easy task.
Energy “deregulation” took off in the 1990s, with a bill signed by President George H. W. Bush giving independent power generators new access to the grid, and FERC moving to create markets for wholesale electricity. And while the nature of deregulation varied from place to place—in some cases, ordinary consumers were given the power to choose between energy suppliers; in others, local utilities were simply compelled to consider purchasing power from different power generators—by the late 1990s, nearly half the states had initiated some effort to create some competition. Then, however, when a crisis hit recently deregulated California in 2000 and 2001—Pacific Gas and Electric found itself unable to pay for the electricity required to meet demand, leaving the state mired temporarily in blackouts—the transition began to trail off.83 And this created an odd dynamic. Everyone wanted to green the economy, but no one had sufficient leverage to drive the transition.
The ensuing paralysis reflected a unique dynamic within the nation’s electricity system. If the officials running a state highway department want to build a new road, they may face steep public resistance, but they are empowered, in theory, to push their project forward. In the realm of electricity, however, no similar figure exists. Utilities in the 1990s had few incentives to build transmission lines to new generation facilities likely to put their generating plants out of business. Government, in the main, did not have the planners or engineers required to construct or maintain the electrical superhighways needed to transport the power created by, say, a new wind farm. In the old vertically integrated model, a regulator might have had the leverage to lean on that utility to build the required transmission line—promising, most likely, to allow that utility to charge customers higher fees to cover the costs. But in a deregulated marketplace, that leverage was gone.
In some cases, energy companies did want to build transmission lines—and they were blocked from doing so by the same barriers erected to stop government from razing whole neighborhoods while preparing to site a new expressway. At one point in the early 2000s, a private utility proposed to build a transmission line between Connecticut and Long Island. But local utilities threatened by the transfer of energy from one market to the other raised a whole host of environmental objections. Where exactly would the line come ashore? What impact would the wires have on the shellfish beds in Long Island Sound? How might the whole project impact New Haven’s harbor? Arizonans raised similar objections when Southern California Edison proposed building a transmission line across state lines.84 For every proposal to green the grid, or make it more resilient, there were interests who stood opposed. But those eager to build transmission lines suffered from more than a bevy of ordinary veto points. They were hampered by the reality that so many people could say no—and no one, ultimately, could push through to yes.
Remarkably, this problem was significantly less vexing in other realms of the energy industry. In 1999, FERC set a policy of approving nearly any gas pipeline for which there was market demand, meaning that if a natural gas company could demonstrate that a power plant was prepared to buy more natural gas, FERC would (with the exception of one project) not only approve the plan but also bequeath to the gas company the federal government’s power of eminent domain. As such, if a farmer did not willingly offer to let a gas company erect the pipeline across his field, the gas company could “take” the property for what was deemed fair-market value.85 But because the Federal Power Act, passed during the 1930s, had not anticipated the demise of vertical integration, a company proposing to site a new transmission line could not turn to the federal government for siting authority. And so when it came to greening the economy, the onus fell on the states, few of which wanted to impose transmission lines on their own residents simply to serve populations across the border.
Unfortunately for those eager to build up the renewable side of the industry, not every state was eager to set policy based on environmental concerns. Governors and legislators in coal-exporting states saw very little upside to siting new transmission lines carrying wind-powered energy from one neighboring state to another. Even if they believed that the new transmission line promised to strike a blow against climate change, it simultaneously threatened to undermine their local economies. And absent another figure powerful enough to drive the new line through the inevitable political opposition, many worthwhile proposals died on the vine. Deregulating the energy marketplace sounded good to progressives averse to coercive political power—and so did the idea of investing in the nation’s electrical grid. But the two goals cut against each other in ways that often left the green economy wallowing in good intentions.
During the George W. Bush presidency, Republicans at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue acted largely to protect the incumbent players. Conservatives stood in the way of efforts to make it easier to build new, cleaner electricity infrastructure. And that wasn’t just a frustration for progressives; it was an irritation for many energy executives as well. At one point, the chief executive of American Electric Power, a conglomerate operating power plants in seven states, noted that, between 1966 and 1986, his company had built and begun operating huge facilities in West Virginia to burn locally mined coal that created power that reached all the way to Indiana. Now, he explained, new sources of power were coming online, but it was almost impossible to get that power from one place to another.86 For all that the private sector bristled at regulation, the absence of public authority was also a big problem.
In 2005, reformers tried again. Sections of a massive energy bill passed that year created what were called National Interest Electric Transmission Corridors. Under the new provision, if the Department of Energy determined that there was good reason for energy to flow across state lines, FERC was now empowered to use eminent domain to site the line if any given state failed to accommodate a right-of-way—insiders termed this “backstop authority.” But soon after that energy bill was passed into law, a ruling by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals seated in Richmond determined that backstop authority only applied if a state failed to come to a decision; if a state affirmatively rejected a transmission line, Washington was powerless to intervene. And so, yet again, those proposing to build transmission lines across noncooperative states were without any real leverage.87
Frustrating as it might have been, most reformers would have had to acknowledge by the mid-2000s that there was no realistic way to green the grid from the bottom up. Market forces could potentially play a role speeding the transition from fossil fuels—that was the impulse behind a policy called cap-and-trade, which sought to induce dirtier forms of electricity generation to subsidize cleaner alternatives. But the nut was harder to crack in the realm of electricity transmission. In a deregulated environment, the chain connecting those who harvested clean energy and those who used it was simply too complex.88 As in the realm of infrastructure, no single entity had the leverage required to force the changes needed to bring clean power into the nation’s convoluted energy system. And unfortunately, progressivism’s Jeffersonian orientation was fundamentally allergic to establishing the Hamiltonian authority required to push the system toward environmental sustainability.
In December 2008, with the economy in the throes of the Great Recession, President-elect Barack Obama convened his senior aides for a meeting at his transition office in Chicago. They were, together, wrestling with the question of what the new president should propose as a stimulus. Soon-to-be chief of staff Rahm Emanuel was arguing, famously, that “you should never let a crisis go to waste.” And in that vein, Obama was eager to entertain bold ideas that might have seemed outlandish before the crisis. A longtime resident of Illinois, the president-elect noted almost in passing that the administration could help connect the plentiful supply of wind power available in the Dakotas to the almost limitless demand in Chicago. What if the federal government proposed to build a big new clean transmission line? Vice President–elect Joe Biden liked the idea. Construction jobs. Clean energy. A way to integrate America’s blue and red economies. A proposal that seemed to have something for everyone.
But Carol Browner quickly interjected. A Washington veteran who was poised to be the incoming administration’s climate czar, she argued that it would be difficult to acquire the right-of-way—the line, she noted, would have to run through Iowa, Minnesota, and rural Illinois. Sure, Chicago would get power and the Dakotas would get jobs—but what would the in-between states get for hosting the wires? Moreover, Browner argued, the line would take years to build, offering few benefits until after all the requisite environmental studies and siting issues were resolved. The stimulus was supposed to get money out into the economy in the short term. Building a smart grid was all well and good, but it would take time. Her points were well-taken, and by the time the meeting had adjourned, Obama had abandoned the idea. On to more promising proposals.89
It was at roughly this same time that an energy industry entrepreneur named Michael Skelly alighted on a similar idea elsewhere in the country. Skelly believed that the barren and wind-swept panhandle of Oklahoma was poised to be a fount of clean energy. He also presumed that the incoming Obama administration was going to be on the lookout for ways to green the grid. So he sketched out a plan to build wind farms in the Sooner State and deliver the power those turbines generated to the (federally owned) Tennessee Valley Authority. His Clean Line would cross Oklahoma, Arkansas, and finally the Mississippi River, connecting at its endpoint to the TVA’s grid near Memphis. The whole operation would deliver power at $40 per megawatt—competitive with natural gas, and only slightly more expensive than coal.90 To Skelly’s mind, the project appeared to be a win-win-win. The Tennessee Valley would get cheap, clean energy. The United States would take another step toward reducing its emissions. And per Skelly’s intentions, those who gave right-of-way to the new transmission line would get a slice of the project’s earnings.
But if the project appeared promising to some, others saw it as a threat. For one, the legions of blue-collar workers employed at various fossil fuel–burning generation plants in and around the Tennessee Valley viewed wind power as unwelcome competition. To that same end, much as the Clean Line might eventually represent cost savings to the TVA and its customers, the whole endeavor threatened to undermine the government-owned utility’s solvency—the TVA made a bundle running existing power plants. And of course there were implications for the communities in Oklahoma and Arkansas that would host the hulking towers lining the hundred-foot cut traversing intervening farms and forests alike. These same communities were, in many cases, hosts to coal-fired and nuclear power plants that served the TVA, meaning that they were being asked to give right-of-way to a project poised to put locals out of work.
At the outset, Skelly thought he could amicably work out these various concerns. He was prepared to cut deals with property owners who were reluctant to let him site towers on property they controlled. What he found, however, was that many of Clean Line’s opponents were entirely intractable—there was no deal to be done. In Arkansas, only utilities could erect transmission lines, and only companies serving customers could be considered utilities. As a result, Clean Line, which planned purely to pass electricity through Arkansas, needed a regulatory exception. But the state’s regulators had no real incentive to provide one. And that left the project in a kind of catch-22. In the absence of regulatory approval, investors viewed Skelly’s ideas with skepticism; absent the stated interest of those investors, regulators were loath to consider an exception. Clean Line had made so much sense on paper, but the process of making it happen seemed fanciful.
Skelly kept working at it nevertheless. In the spring of 2012, Obama administration Energy Department officials agreed to let Clean Line use the federal government’s siting authority, so long as Clean Line reimbursed the federal government for any expenses and used eminent domain as sparingly as possible. And by 2015, Skelly had managed to prevail on the powers that be in both Oklahoma and Tennessee to buy in. But even with federal siting authority, Arkansas remained an obstacle. Early in 2015, Arkansas’s two conservative senators, John Boozman and Tom Cotton, jointly introduced a bill designed explicitly to curtail the backstop authority that Congress had given FERC in 2005, scaring off at least one of Skelly’s investors. Obama’s energy secretary, Ernest Moniz, backed Skelly up, brokering a deal that exacted additional concessions. Subject to the new agreement, construction was scheduled to commence by 2018. But then, as Obama’s presidency came to a close, the whole thing unraveled.
The Trump administration, once in office, showed no real interest in Skelly’s project. And without support from Washington, Skelly was almost entirely without leverage. The project’s opponents pounced: Senator Lamar Alexander, an influential Tennessee Republican closely aligned with the fossil fuel interests selling power to the TVA, resolved to put the whole matter to bed. Taking to the Senate floor, he brazenly threatened the TVA’s leaders with investigations and recriminations if the utility refused to relent—and the TVA almost immediately caved. After working to make the project a reality for nearly a decade Skelly abandoned the whole endeavor.
Blame for the downfall typically centered on climate-denying conservatives. Donald Trump, Lamar Alexander, John Boozman, and Tom Cotton were, and are, after all, hardly at the vanguard of efforts to save the planet from the scourge of fossil fuel.91 But Republican intransigence hadn’t been the sole root of the problem. If, in eight years of Obama’s presidency, a project to replace carbon-emitting generation with wind power couldn’t prevail, the system was more fundamentally broken. This was, at root, a failure of process. The succession of hurdles a proposal like Skelly’s had to clear, and the absence of any centralized authority capable of pushing past entrenched resistance, made it practically impossible to pursue. In a system full of vetoes, no one has sufficient power to push through a worthwhile endeavor. And Clean Line’s failure was more the rule than the exception.
The hit parade of potentially worthwhile clean energy projects undermined explicitly or implicitly by the legacy of progressivism’s Jeffersonian impulse is too long to list in full. But the most blatant examples make clear that the problem isn’t just climate denialism. Progressives mobilized, for example, to fight a developer’s plan to build a 690-megawatt solar plant northeast of Las Vegas, with the detractors claiming the new facility would imperil a desert tortoise habitat.92 The Audubon Society sued to block wind farms in California.93 The Sunrise Movement, a youth-oriented project whose tagline is “We are the climate revolution,” mobilized to fight solar projects in Amherst, Massachusetts, for fear that new paneling might lead to deforestation.94 And the local chapter of the Sierra Club would play a crucial role in the fight against NECEC in Maine.
The problem, at root, isn’t that these groups are mobilizing against phantom concerns—the costs born from renewable energy and transmission are real. Moreover, the spirit of conservation, which many of these groups were established to promote, is legitimately at odds with what would be worthwhile efforts to reduce carbon emissions.95 But if progressives might once have had faith that government officials could be trusted to weigh the pros and cons, Jeffersonianism’s cultural aversion to power has denuded the system’s capacity to make tough calls. The movement had very purposefully granted various countervailing concerns with what amounted to vetoes. And while each veto may serve to protect a worthwhile interest, piled together they almost inevitably foment paralysis. Almost worse, the contemporary impulse to limit creativity has had the perverse effect of incentivizing projects less likely to take climate concern into account.
For years, for example, Florida Power and Light (FPL) harbored designs on building a high-voltage transmission line from the state’s northwestern panhandle, near its border with Alabama, south toward Orlando, Tampa, and Miami. The utility’s ability to move power around the state would allow executives to purchase energy from a broader range of generating plants—and perhaps some would eventually be greener than others. But the Sunshine State’s Transmission Line Siting Act, passed years earlier to prevent utilities from erecting unsightly metal towers in neighborhoods that might otherwise be powerless to fight back, stood in the way. The law hadn’t been intended to preclude new lines entirely; it simply required that any proposed high-voltage line be approved not just by the state’s Department of Environmental Protection and Public Service Commission, but by the state’s cabinet as well, a body that included several independently elected officials.96 And, in this instance, FPL hadn’t been able to clear that hurdle.
To be sure, the process had been designed to be politically treacherous, to impede any governor inclined to rubber-stamp a utility’s requests to seize land or erect unsightly or unwelcome infrastructure. And FPL had earned a reputation for being insensitive to local concerns. The result was gridlock: much as it might have made economic and environmental sense to connect power available in Florida’s panhandle to consumers further south, interests opposed to the line were always able to pick off members of the cabinet inclined to heed an objection. Having given veto power to many political figures eager to play the hero to communities worried about new towers, the law made it impossible for the state’s electricity utility to move forward.
Eventually, however, the utility alighted on a loophole. The Transmission Line Siting Act, FPL lawyers realized, only applied to high-voltage lines—the bill did not preclude utilities from erecting the sorts of ordinary distribution lines that customarily connect buildings. As such, FPL was permitted to build a transmission line to a lesser voltage—161 kilovolts instead of 230—along the same proposed route without having to seek approval from the cabinet. The new lower-voltage line would bisect most communities in the same disruptive way, but it would not boast nearly so many of the benefits: it would be less efficient, losing more electricity mile upon mile thereby forcing the company to purchase more power to get the same load to customers. Perhaps most galling, ratepayers would be forced to cover the cost of that lost electricity, in addition to the $692 million required to build the line.97
The Transmission Line Siting Act hadn’t been passed with bad intentions—legislators had wanted to protect communities from FPL’s penchant for imperiousness. The loophole for lower-transmission lines had been included for good reason as well—to allow energy companies some flexibility to move energy around with less obtrusive poles. But the combination had left progressives with the worst of several outcomes. As it was, everyone lost. The line was built with nearly all the attendant disruptions but few of the benefits.
If some conservatives have spent decades questioning climate science, few who have studied the evidence harbor any real doubt. The facts are clear: Temperatures are rising. Polar ice caps are melting. Melted ice caps will drive up sea levels, imperiling coastal communities, changing weather patterns, and sparking more destructive storms. The deluge of effects will spread more famine and disease. The movie Don’t Look Up set the right analogy: climate change is an asteroid speeding straight toward Earth—but it’s one that we’re capable of avoiding if we act in time. And yet, to this point, humanity hasn’t proven capable of making the sacrifices necessary to save what Al Gore once famously termed “our only home.”98 Too many disagreements in the ranks. Too much confusion and chaos. For all the tools at our disposal, we’re struggling to mobilize in our own defense.
If, as some believe, conservative denialism is the primary barrier to action, it might be sufficient to continue raising alarms. To throw paint at precious artwork. To post pleas on social media. To publish more reports and studies delineating what will happen if temperatures continue to surge. But if, as recent history appears to demonstrate, the essence of the problem stems from something else—if, no matter how panicked we are, government is too hamstrung to steer humanity toward a solution—then banging the drum louder isn’t really sufficient. Put another way: if all progressives needed to do was convince the others that the planet was in peril, it might be worthwhile to spread more panic. But as we’ve seen, that’s not the core problem. Even absent denialism, government today would thwart the progress the planet demands.
Progressives should honor those who have invested their careers in building coalitions to set the ambitious goals required to reduce carbon emissions. But beyond establishing aspirations, progressivism needs to work on building governing structures capable of making the hard, expensive, painful, inconvenient, and often politically unpalatable choices required to steer humanity in a new direction. We can build all the solar, wind, and hydro facilities we want, but if we can’t get that power to the places where people are currently utilizing coal, oil, and gas, we’re no better off. The coal industry is so keenly aware that a more integrated transmission grid threatens their business model that the Trump administration angrily stifled a government study making that point.99 And yet the regulatory regime born from progressivism’s cultural aversion to power worked just as effectively to thwart progress on Clean Line when a Democrat sat inside the White House.
The good news is that, if given the license to act, we have at hand the tools required to address the challenge. Technological innovation is bringing to scale humanity’s ability to turn sunlight, wind, and water currents into electricity at scale. Battery technology is evolving to make it possible for us to store power for use even when the sun is hidden and the wind is still. Even better, other forms of energy may soon be on the way—fusion, for example, could end up creating vast quantities of power without imposing severe environmental impacts.100 But that’s also what’s so frustrating: without a modernized transmission system, all of these advances in electricity generation may prove to be something of a useless bounty. Absent public authority’s ability to clear ways for newly tapped sources of clean power to travel, it’s of almost no value at all.
As of late 2022, the United States boasted roughly 400,000 miles of transmission wire. According to the National Academies, to get to net zero emissions, the US will have to build 120,000 more miles of high-voltage line. In 2021, a mere 386 were added to the grid. In 2022, the lack of transmission capacity kept the delay for new projects requesting connection to roughly four years long, a duration twice as long as in 2005.101 And a recent study by researchers at Princeton estimated that, absent a vast acceleration of grid development, four-fifths of electrification’s environmental benefit—our growing ability to replace polluting technologies with clean alternatives—will be squandered.102 The problem here isn’t a lack of awareness. Nor is it that the movement’s leaders aren’t motivated to get things moving. The issue is procedural.103 Progressives, fearful of centralized power, have inserted so many checks that building the grid is an exercise in futility.
The South Fork Wind project was, for example, designed to construct wind turbines in ocean waters near New York, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts, subject to sign-off from nine separate federal agencies. Those bureaucracies are, in the main, chartered to protect the natural environment, to preserve fisheries, navigability, bird migratory patterns, and more. Many of the bureaucrats working inside those agencies may want to reduce carbon emissions, but they are hired to pursue separate concerns.104 They frequently worked in partnership with state and local agencies, and maintain collaborative relationships with various interest groups. Their studies had to meet certain standards of rigor or else they were almost sure to be subject to lawsuits that they might well lose (see Chapter 7).
These reviews are not, in and of themselves, beyond the pale; they were all created for good reason. But together, they create gauntlets that are simply too difficult to clear expeditiously, if at all. The reviews have the effect of creating redlines, rather than informing deliberative and discretionary decision-making processes. As Michael Skelly complained after his decade of work on Clean Line collapsed: “You could have Robert Moses come back from the dead and he wouldn’t be able to do shit.”105 And that’s the problem. For those determined to thwart climate change, the central challenge isn’t simply to castigate the climate deniers who aren’t inclined to move on climate solutions. It’s to restore the government’s ability to ratify trade-offs—to accept that saving the planet requires sacrifices that impose real costs.
Cognizant of this broader challenge, reformers through the Obama years made sustained, but limited, progress speeding the construction of transmission lines. The backstop siting authority created in 2005 may have been undermined by results of subsequent litigation, but the White House pressed on several fronts, including $4.5 billion for smart grid development as a part of the Recovery Act, and creating an Interagency Rapid Response Team for Transmission to help coordinate efforts and quickly respond to challenges between federal agencies.106 FERC adopted a general framework, Order 1000, that encouraged utilities to share the costs of transmission lines.107 In 2015, as part of a highway reauthorization, Democrats created a Federal Permitting Improvement Council to help site transmission lines across federally owned property.108
But the underlying frictions remain because so many players who, in theory, want to help on climate are conflicted not only because of disagreements within the federal government, but also by power wielded outside it. Utilities decline to pursue projects that threaten to eat into their profit margins. State regulators refuse to issue certificates of public convenience and necessity to controversial transmission lines.109 Localities reject requests to site electrical infrastructure because they will have deleterious impacts on nearly all property values. These barriers are born less of denialism than intersecting priorities. The executives running energy companies have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders. State regulators have a legal obligation to protect ratepayers. Town councils have a political mandate to represent those who vote them into office. It’s a tragedy of the commons in reverse. Everyone is boxed into pursuing their own interests even as the proverbial asteroid speeds toward Earth.110
It’s worth remembering that the federal government has, in fact, dispatched this sort of problem before. The Natural Gas Act of 1938, passed just three years after the Federal Power Act of 1935, gave the bureaucracy that has since morphed into FERC the explicit authority to site pipelines, with Washington bigfooting states out of the regulatory frame almost by default. Today, if a company wants to build a new natural gas pipeline, planners simply need to provide evidence that there’s someone willing to burn the gas at the tail end, and federal siting authority can be used to override local concerns.111 Put another way, the interests that maintain veto leverage over transmission lines—property concerns, existing utilities, state objections—have much less bearing. And for that reason, the permitting time for gas pipelines is less than half what it is for transmission lines, though that too has become more difficult.112
As many progressive advocates will argue, the power granted to the federal government under the Natural Gas Act is too comprehensive. Often, FERC simply transfers its power of eminent domain to the private company looking to build a pipeline, and work begins on sections so quickly that the worst damage is done before landowners can mobilize a defense. The expeditious siting of new pipelines explains, in no small part, why the United States was able to take such quick advantage of the shale gas boom: companies quickly constructed new means of getting fracked gas to power plants around the country. Had these pipelines been subject to the same rigmarole as a new high-voltage transmission line, many fewer would have been constructed.
Recognizing this disparity, members of Congress more recently worked in concert with the Biden administration to level the playing field. Included, for example, in the bipartisan infrastructure bill passed in 2021 was a provision that ensures that the federal government’s backstop siting authority can be used if a state rejects a transmission project—not just when the relevant bureaucracy fails to come to a decision. The Inflation Reduction Act established a new regime of federal financing for transmission lines: money developers could claim up front and pay back at reduced interest.113 Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) had introduced the SITE Act, which would give FERC primary siting authority over interstate transmission lines.114 And the Biden administration pushed for expedited NEPA reviews of certain climate-friendly projects both as part of the Inflation Reduction Act and in subsequent rulemaking.115
Many of these proposed reforms would be welcome—some are almost inarguably crucial. But if some often appear like mere tweaks to the system, each solution actually addresses just a corner of a much broader challenge. At root, America’s inability to steer clear of the asteroid centers on government’s inability to make expeditious decisions. Perhaps policymakers should maintain some redlines—some “rights” considered inviolable no matter the benefits to humanity as a whole. But the globe can no longer abide a system in which any potential objection can delay every potential project. We need to empower figures to take all relevant factors into consideration, weigh them against one another, and green-light the best options. We need, in short, to give government the leash required to permit public authority to prove itself competent.