Today I received and began reading George Hoberg’s new book: The Resistance Dilemma: Place-Based Movements and the Climate Crisis.
The usefulness is threefold. It speaks directly to my concern about how the environmentalist focus on resistance isn’t a great match with building a global energy system that will control climate change. It references much of the same literature as my dissertation, so it provides a useful opportunity to check that I haven’t missed anything major. Finally, it’s an example of a complete, recent, and successful piece of Canadian academic writing on the environment and thus a model for the thesis. It’s even about 300 pages, though a lot more fits on a published book page than a 1.5-spaced Microsoft Word page in the U of T dissertation template.
As Demand for Green Energy Grows, Solar Farms Face Local Resistance
https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/21/11/06/0340217/as-demand-for-green-energy-grows-solar-farms-face-local-resistance
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As Demand for Green Energy Grows, Solar Farms Face Local Resistance
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/02/business/solar-farms-resistance.html
The permitting process has become the favoured vehicle by which people can try to block projects they don’t like. Legal challenges to proposed developments often revolve around threats to endangered species. In Wyoming, for example, environmentalists worry that wind farms and transmission lines will harm sage-grouse habitat. Native American tribes sue to stop officials from approving energy projects on land sacred to them. A recent study by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (mit) identified 53 big wind, solar and geothermal projects that were delayed or blocked between 2008 and 2021. A third of them faced permitting difficulties. nepa challenges make up the largest proportion of federal climate-change litigation in America, according to a database kept by Columbia University.
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2023/01/29/america-needs-a-new-environmentalism
President Joe Biden wants to combat climate change by taking carbon dioxide out of the air and burying it underground. But some environmental activists on the left are working to stop him.
The activists say a focus on carbon capture would give industry political cover to keep polluting instead of reducing emissions, and their argument is gaining traction in communities across the country. They convinced the New Orleans City Council to pass a resolution opposing underground carbon storage last year. Elsewhere in Louisiana, they’re trying to delay the permitting of a pipeline that would carry carbon to storage facilities.
The growing opposition is threatening to delay the full rollout of billions of dollars in new federal spending on carbon capture — and it’s showing the difficulties the Biden administration faces in trying to prioritize both industrial carbon removal and disadvantaged communities.
“The developers of carbon injection projects are not going to get environmental justice advocates on board,” said Jane Patton, campaign manager for plastics and petrochemicals at the Center for International Environmental Law. “There is no environmental justice to be found in the injection of carbon under the ground.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/05/09/carbon-capture-biden-agenda-00095869