... I thought this opinion piece did a good job detailing an aspect of climate policy that maybe does not get as much attention as flashier proposals. Once you get money allocated for a problem,...
It hurts to get hammered by your friends. And that’s what’s happening to Newsom. More than 100 environmental groups — including the Sierra Club of California and The Environmental Defense Center — are joining to fight a package Newsom designed to make it easier to build infrastructure in California.
For Newsom, it’s a wounding break. “I licked envelopes for these nonprofits as a kid. My father was on the board of the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund for more than a decade,” he said. “This was my life. But this rigidity and ideological purity is really going to hurt progress. I did the climate bills last year, and these same groups were celebrating that. But that means nothing unless we can deliver. That was the what; this is the how.”
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The Biden administration is pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into decarbonization. And it wants to make sure it gets a return on that money. So it’s making states compete for federal grants, and one way it’s judging them is on whether the state has made it easy to build. That has become an issue for California.
“We’re agnostic as to where these investments go,” Jennifer Granholm, the secretary of energy, told the Silicon Valley Leadership Group. But California is competing against states that have done permitting reform, and they’re making that case. Her advice was blunt: “Whatever you can do to help bring the costs down to make yourselves competitive and to speed things up I think would go a long way to making more manufacturing come to this area.”
I thought this opinion piece did a good job detailing an aspect of climate policy that maybe does not get as much attention as flashier proposals. Once you get money allocated for a problem, you have to actually use it to build things. How that happens can often be as consequential as the initial allocation. Climate policy is a multi-step affair, and it seems like California is suffering from a case of "dog catches car" here with internal arguments over how what building climate-focused infrastructure should look like.
EDIT: Link should be non-paywalled so I encourage others to read.
If the link does get paywalled at some point, consider checking with your local library. Many have free access to some national newspapers as part of having a library card. LA Public, for example,...
If the link does get paywalled at some point, consider checking with your local library. Many have free access to some national newspapers as part of having a library card. LA Public, for example, has NYT, Washington Post and WSJ.
...
I thought this opinion piece did a good job detailing an aspect of climate policy that maybe does not get as much attention as flashier proposals. Once you get money allocated for a problem, you have to actually use it to build things. How that happens can often be as consequential as the initial allocation. Climate policy is a multi-step affair, and it seems like California is suffering from a case of "dog catches car" here with internal arguments over how what building climate-focused infrastructure should look like.
EDIT: Link should be non-paywalled so I encourage others to read.
If the link does get paywalled at some point, consider checking with your local library. Many have free access to some national newspapers as part of having a library card. LA Public, for example, has NYT, Washington Post and WSJ.