One Place where Bipartisan Climate Action May a Bit Easier.
Getting permits has become as big a barrier to building climate mitigation projects as getting funding. This is a great place to start bipartisan climate work.
Getting faster and more sensible permitting is a Republican friendly initiative – it's getting the government off our backs. It can appeal to Democrats because it does little good for the government or others to fund climate mitigation if building it gets stopped or long delayed in the permitting process.
The sweet spot here is not lowering standards, but rather in changing from slow moving legal processes to getting the parties together to understand each other’s viewpoints, science, and attitudes in a rapid back and forth dialogue. This leads to better understanding, better decisions, much lower costs, and less time to get to the point of either killing bad projects or permitting good ones.
If the dialogue process fails, one can always go back to a drawn out legal process, but in many cases the parties can come to agreement without all that if they have the opportunity to talk directly rather than through legal filings. We need both nonprofits and businesses to be more open to collaborative solutions rather than winning the fight.
The 2nd obstacle you highlight is problematic to say the least. At some point I hope the Republican Party rebounds from its descent into disinformation and its movement away from facts and evidence. While the world remains addicted to, and dependent on, fossil fuels, highlighting the difficult timing of a fulsome green transition, the fossil fuel companies are complicit in the pernicious deny and delay cycle we've been subject to since the late 70s. They're in a similar position legally to the tobacco companies, Purdue Pharma, and the NRA/gun lobby, i.e., pursuit of immoral profits over the health of society.
I wonder what would happen politically if the fossil fuel giants were offered a deal: immunity from future prosecution for facilitating intentionally harmful climate change in exchange for admission that they have known for decades about the cause and effect between fossil fuel emissions and climate change, plus $X billions/year to help fund a green transition.
One Place where Bipartisan Climate Action May a Bit Easier.
Getting permits has become as big a barrier to building climate mitigation projects as getting funding. This is a great place to start bipartisan climate work.
Getting faster and more sensible permitting is a Republican friendly initiative – it's getting the government off our backs. It can appeal to Democrats because it does little good for the government or others to fund climate mitigation if building it gets stopped or long delayed in the permitting process.
The sweet spot here is not lowering standards, but rather in changing from slow moving legal processes to getting the parties together to understand each other’s viewpoints, science, and attitudes in a rapid back and forth dialogue. This leads to better understanding, better decisions, much lower costs, and less time to get to the point of either killing bad projects or permitting good ones.
If the dialogue process fails, one can always go back to a drawn out legal process, but in many cases the parties can come to agreement without all that if they have the opportunity to talk directly rather than through legal filings. We need both nonprofits and businesses to be more open to collaborative solutions rather than winning the fight.
The 2nd obstacle you highlight is problematic to say the least. At some point I hope the Republican Party rebounds from its descent into disinformation and its movement away from facts and evidence. While the world remains addicted to, and dependent on, fossil fuels, highlighting the difficult timing of a fulsome green transition, the fossil fuel companies are complicit in the pernicious deny and delay cycle we've been subject to since the late 70s. They're in a similar position legally to the tobacco companies, Purdue Pharma, and the NRA/gun lobby, i.e., pursuit of immoral profits over the health of society.
I wonder what would happen politically if the fossil fuel giants were offered a deal: immunity from future prosecution for facilitating intentionally harmful climate change in exchange for admission that they have known for decades about the cause and effect between fossil fuel emissions and climate change, plus $X billions/year to help fund a green transition.