🌈 How to build a future of clean energy abundance

5 (More) Quick Questions for ... the Breakthrough Institute's Alex Trembath

Climate worries often go hand-in-hand with a Down Wing scarcity mindset. But we can be concerned about our warming planet without resorting to the kind of alarmism that eschews pro-growth solutions in favor of economic degrowth or solar-powered, socialist eco-topia fantasies. Our climate problem is a clean energy problem, and one that’s solved not by cutting back but by pushing forward.

As such, we need technological progress and regulatory reform that supports cleaner, more abundant energy. What does that look like? In this edition of 5 Quick Questions, Alex Trembath discusses regulatory reform, R&D in the energy sector, and what’s going on with next-gen geothermal and fusion. And, of course, I had to ask him about a carbon tax, too.

Alex is deputy director at the Breakthrough Institute, a think tank dedicated to promoting technological solutions to environmental and human development challenges — a sentiment that should feel familiar to regular Faster, Please! readers.

In part one of my Q&A with Alex, I asked about ecomodernism, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the recent renaissance in nuclear power. It’s definitely worth checking out if you haven’t already!

1/ What are the key environmental and energy regulatory reforms you would like to see to create a future of clean energy abundance?

If the federal government is spending money subsidizing or funding demonstration for a technology, then they should probably get a categorical exclusion from the National Environmental Policy Act, which some technologies benefit from today. It strikes me as just really bad policy to, with the Inflation Reduction Act on the one hand, pump hundreds of billions of dollars into solar and wind and nuclear and transmission; and then, with the National Environmental Policy Act on the other, say, “Hang on. We don't want you to actually build any of this stuff unless you do years and years of really expensive environmental review and litigation and overcoming vetoes by any number of stakeholders.” I think NEPA absolutely plays into the future for nuclear and for all these technologies and deserves serious reform from Congress.

And it's going to have to come from Congress. Both Congress and various administrations of both parties have been sort of tinkering around the edges of NEPA for a while. I think it needs significant reform. And then you need reform to more public lands regulation and state-level policy. States are often the ones who are making these decisions. I live in California where we have NEPA's mutated stepson, the California Environmental Quality Act, which took all the worst parts of NEPA and turbocharged them. I think the state legislature in California is actually starting to get the message about that one. And that's true in a bunch of states. And then I think you have to look at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which is responsible for electricity transmission infrastructure.

All of which is to say that there's quite a bit of environmental regulatory reform and deregulation that needs to happen across our bureaucracy in order to actually deploy the technologies that we just spent $400 billion subsidizing. It’s true at [the Nuclear Regulatory Commission]. It's true at [the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission]. It's true at [the Environmental Protection Agency]. It's true at the Council of Environmental Quality. It's true for NEPA. It's true for the Endangered Species Act. I don't think we need to gut our entire environmental regulatory regime. But I do think that we need to make it sensible. I think we need to align it with how our peer countries do it. Our peer countries do not have these kinds of delays and high cost to litigation and extensive environmental review like we have. I think that's a really, really big project for the next Congress, and likely beyond that. I think it needs to be taken really seriously.