The problem of public input vetoing low-carbon energy projects (including transmission) is really a symptom or side effect of the fact that we don’t have cohere

The problem of public input vetoing low-carbon energy projects (including transmission) is really a symptom or side effect of the fact that we don’t have coherent global to national to regional to local energy policy. There is no responsibility for regions or localities to reduce carbon emissions, so these communities are not forced to make tradeoffs when commenting on local impacts of projects. What we need instead is to have carbon emissions reduction goals at all levels. Then a suite of efficiency and generation/transmission projects can be identified in each region that can contribute to those goals. Then, when those projects are being designed and approved (via an integrated process), the approval process can involve explicit tradeoffs. If the community, for example, has an exceptional wind energy resource, but doesn’t want to develop it for environmental or aesthetic reasons, then their regional climate action plan can be updated to use other mixes of efficiency and generation/transmission that would meet or exceed their goals. The community may then find that they would rather have the wind turbines than the alternatives. The “problem” with this approach is that it requires a level of urgency and coordination that we have only been able to muster in the past using wartime central planning. Not sure how to get around this, and this is a major problem given ideological biases against central planning in the US. The other problem is that in practice it will likely not be possible for both global and local climate goals to be satisfied while also minimizing local displeasure with the tradeoffs required. However, no system is perfect, and perhaps this system could at least provide a framework for identifying who is getting the short end of the stick and therefore to whom some sort of reparations can be made for “taking one for the team”.