There are moments when events conspire to clarify that a page has been turned, something fundamental has changed and events and people are no longer likely to flow in the same direction. Sens. John Barrasso, Wyoming Republican, and Joe Manchin III, West Virginia independent, this week offered up proposed legislation ostensibly to improve federal permitting, but in reality, is a mishmash of provisions that would give the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission more power over the nation’s transmission system.
The proposed legislation is grounded in the idea that soon, the United States is going to build thousands of miles of large interstate transmission lines in an effort to address climate change or whatever. That’s certainly possible and perhaps even likely, but the immediate history isn’t encouraging. For the last few years, we have built a few hundred miles of high-capacity transmission lines each year, rather than the thousands of miles that people have projected we need to meet President Biden’s goal of reducing net greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050.
The legislation’s remedy — more federal involvement in the process — seems unlikely to make much of a dent. If you want to speed something along, the right answer is probably not more bureaucracy, more process and more lawyers. Around the same time, and much more importantly, Google published a report about its progress toward its corporate goal of reducing its net greenhouse emissions to zero.
It will not.