The Western United States is facing another severe fire season. More than 12 million acres have burned so far in 2026, already surpassing the total cumulative area burnt by wildfires in all of 2024. According to the National Interagency Fire Center’s incident reports, the number of acres burned is up 231% compared to the previous 10-year average for the first three months of the year, with activity largely concentrated in the Southeast and Great Plains. In addition to area burned, the number of distinct wildfires is also above average, indicating increased ignition frequency.

Climatic conditions and a build up of hazardous fuels—combustible vegetation such as dry grass, dense brush, and fallen branches—are primary drivers of this year’s worrying start. But, Trump may be fanning the flames. The administration’s sweeping reorganization of U.S. land management agencies is making it harder to proactively prevent wildfires and jeopardizing better forest policy currently before Congress, together worsening future fire seasons.

Warmer winter temperatures and low snowpack across many Western basins are expected to intensify fire behavior later this spring and summer. This will exacerbate the consequences of decades of overly aggressive fire suppression that has contributed to fuel accumulation across U.S. forests, increasing the likelihood of severe fires under enabling weather conditions.

A growing body of evidence shows that proactive hazardous fuel reduction—including practices like mechanical thinning and prescribed fire (i.e. controlled burns)—can meaningfully reduce fire intensity, restore ecosystem resilience, and generate large net economic benefits. A 2024 meta-analysis of Western U.S. forests found that fuel treatment reduces wildfire severity by roughly 62–72% compared to untreated areas, with mechanical thinning combined with prescribed fire as the most effective strategy for preventing wildfires that destroy the majority of overstory trees. A 2025 study found that prescribed fire reduced the burn severity of wildfires by an average of 16% and lowered net smoke emissions by 14% during California’s 2020 fire season.

As the case for scaling fuel treatment becomes increasingly well established, the policy landscape is shifting. The Fix Our Forests Act (FOFA) is a sweeping legislative response to the nation’s escalating wildfire crisis. The bill aims to expedite active forest management by streamlining environmental review, limiting litigation delays, and accelerating hazardous fuel treatments on federal lands. FOFA passed the House with bipartisan support and advanced through the Senate Agriculture Committee in 2025. Trump’s reshuffling of the US Forest Service (USFS) and Department of Interior (DOI) threatens the passage of FOFA and would make implementation significantly harder.

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A Diminished and Declining Workforce

The USFS manages 193 million acres of national forests and grasslands. DOI manages wildfire response and fuel treatments across more than 500 million acres of public and tribal lands. In the first year of Trump’s second term, the USFS lost almost 6,000 employees through deferred resignations, early retirements, and buyouts amounting to a 16% reduction.

These workforce losses are already affecting the agencies’ ability to plan, permit, and execute fuel treatments at scale. In 2025, USFS saw a 38% reduction in wildfire risk reduction, including hazardous fuel treatments, compared to the four previous year average.

Even before the staffing changes in 2025, federal agencies have struggled to scale fuel treatments. In recent years, total treatment has averaged 5-7 million acres per year, far short of the 117 million acres identified as having high or very high wildfire risk potential. A 2024 Breakthrough Institute analysis found that California alone may require 3.9 million acres of treatment per year to most effectively reduce risk.

Additional workforce reductions are expected in 2026 that could further constrain capacity. Despite echoing some of the key goals articulated in FOFA around scaling up risk reduction, the White House’s recent budget proposal for FY2027 emphasizes organizational restructuring over permitting reform or workforce expansion. The central proposal is the transfer of fire-related employees from USFS to a new U.S. Wildland Fire Service within DOI. This is the biggest structural change proposed in the budget that could impact fuels management work on National Forest System lands.

Trump’s executive order on wildfire prevention and response in 2025 directed the consolidation of wildland fire programs across USDA and DOI. While the USFS move to DOI has not yet been initiated, DOI established a new U.S. Wildland Fire Service (USWFS) in January 2026. The new entity consolidates fire management operations of six preexisting DOI agencies including the National Park Service, Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the Bureau of Land Management. But it is unclear how the USWFS will balance suppression with mitigation work. The newly appointed Director of the U.S. Wildland Fire Service, Brian Fennessy emphasized that fire suppression is the service’s “primary mission,” igniting concerns that fuel reduction will not receive sufficient attention.

Critically, the administration has not spelled out how consolidating the nation’s wildfire efforts under one agency will increase the scale and pace of fuel treatments nationwide. The FY2027 USWFS budget proposes an increase in funding and staffing levels over FY2026 levels to support conducting fuels management activities but estimates the funding would support fuels management on 4.7 million acres. This is far less than the combined 6.6 million acres treated by USFS and DOI in FY2024, the most recent year for which complete data is available.

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Reorganization Risks Compounding Capacity Loss

Alongside internal changes at DOI, USDA initiated a sweeping reorganization of its own earlier this year. In March, the Forest Service announced it would be relocating its headquarters to Salt Lake City, Utah, closing regional offices, and restructuring to a state based leadership model. These changes risk further exacerbating operational challenges that Trump’s Forest Chief Tom Schultz himself said impacted the agency’s ability to meet annual goals for prescribed fire.

It’s too soon to know how relocation assignments for Forest Service employees will impact overall staffing levels. But, historical precedent suggests such relocations can significantly reduce staffing capacity. The Bureau of Land Management’s 2019 move to Colorado led to substantial attrition and was reversed in 2021. Similarly, relocation of USDA research agencies to Kansas City resulted in approximately 75% staff attrition and a sharp decline in productivity.

These risks extend beyond operations to politics. After passing with bipartisan votes in the House and moving out of committee in the Senate in 2025, FOFA now awaits a Senate vote before going to the President’s desk. FOFA’s bipartisan coalition may weaken as concerns grow—particularly among Senate Democrats—about staffing shortages and inadequate transparency surrounding the DOI reorganization.

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FOFA Implementation Challenges Loom

If Congress does manage to pass FOFA this year, a diminishing federal workforce also jeopardizes its implementation.

Expanding hazardous fuel treatments requires more than regulatory reform. Skilled staff are needed to execute environmental reviews, manage contractor relationships, conduct environmental consultations, and oversee treatment projects. The reorganizations at USDA and DOI will reshape implementation capacity precisely when states facing a severe wildfire season need it most.

FOFA could accelerate project approvals through a range of proposals, including expanded categorical exclusions and limits on injunctions. A Breakthrough Institute analysis found that litigation delays can add over two years to project timelines, and that forest management projects face more litigation than other federal project types.

Relief is needed on this front, but litigation is only one component of delay. By some estimates, NEPA compliance accounts for roughly one-fifth of the time required to implement forest management projects, with the remaining delays arising from contracting, funding, and project execution constraints.

Agency capacity remains crucial for meeting the Forest Service’s current regional targets, much less treatment levels supporters hope FOFA will usher in and, eventually, the goals set by the Forest Service’s 10-year Wildfire Crisis Strategy to treat an additional 50 million acres. These goals will be increasingly difficult to achieve with workforce and budget constraints.

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A Perfect Storm

A convergence of political and institutional challenges now threatens to limit our ability to mitigate the scale, intensity, and economic burden of future wildfires.

The sweeping reorganizations at USFS and DOI threaten to further diminish forest management capacity, complicate Democratic support for FOFA in the Senate, and jeopardize FOFA’s successful implementation if passed.

At the same time, other budget pressures are looming. Forest restoration and fire mitigation funding from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (also known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law) is appropriated only through 2026. Further, the Wildfire Suppression Operations Reserve Fund, which has served as a backstop since 2020 ensuring surging emergency fire suppression costs don’t crowd out mitigation spending, is set to expire in 2027.

Carryover balances and IRA funding available through 2031 will moderate near-term impact but, absent new appropriations, federal wildfire mitigation funding could face a meaningful decline later this decade. These dynamics create a perfect storm where rising wildfire risk coincides with declining institutional capacity and uncertain policy support.

Lawmakers should not allow these converging risks to delay action. Passing FOFA remains an important step toward scaling proactive forest management. Congress must ensure FOFA is duly followed by sustained investments in workforce capacity, contracting systems, and project delivery infrastructure. Without these commensurate investments, FOFA’s expanded authorities will be underutilized, leaving communities, ecosystems, and public budgets increasingly exposed to catastrophic wildfire.

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A few years ago, I wrote about a particular class of clean energy advocates who I described as “not anti-nuclear but.” The true face of the anti-nuclear movement, I argued, is not “hair-shirt wearing opponents of progress” but rather “a highly credentialed progressive policy wonk, a lawyer, or, academic, or journalist, who often claims not to be opposed to nuclear energy at all.”

Five years later, that cohort of barely disguised opponents has largely been defeated. Even NRDC now supports reopening shuttered nuclear reactors.

Instead, the biggest challenge the nuclear sector faces today, in my view, comes from within. The “pro-nuclear but” camp is genuinely pro-nuclear but typically argues for policy and technology that represent little change from the status quo that has been responsible for a generation of decline and stagnation—reactors that no one has been willing to build and regulations that have stifled innovation.

In the sections that follow, I run through five common “pro-nuclear but” claims: that advanced reactors are too exotic and unproven; that economies of scale mean that small modular reactors will never be cheaper than large reactors; that serious regulatory reform isn’t important and undermines safety and public confidence; that enriched fuels significantly increase proliferation risk; and, that doubling down on public engagement proceduralism is the key to assuring social license to build new reactors.

I’ve written about some of these claims in the past. They often overlap and there is a grain of truth in each of them. But each claim in one way or another mistakes highly contingent technological, economic, and political developments from the last century as intrinsic to nuclear energy and its future. Taken together, they reflect not a hard headed pragmatism about the technology but a self-fulfilling prophecy, one that risks dooming the sector to stagnation and obsolescence at a moment of unprecedented opportunity.

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Myth #1: The Paper Reactor Problem

If you’ve followed nuclear energy over the last 15 years or so, you have almost certainly come across Admiral Rickover’s famous observation about paper reactors:

An academic reactor or reactor plant almost always has the following basic characteristics:1) It is simple. 2) It is small. 3) It is cheap. 4) It is light. 5) It can be built very quickly. 6) It is very flexible in purpose (“omnibus reactor”) 7) Very little development is required. 8) It will use mostly “off-the-shelf” components. 9) The reactor is in the study phase. It is not being built now.

On the other hand, a practical reactor plant can be distinguished by the following characteristics: 1) It is being built now. 2) It is behind schedule. 3) It is requiring an immense amount of development on apparently trivial items. 4) Corrosion, in particular, is a problem. 5) It is very expensive. 6) It takes a long time to build because of the engineering development problems. 7) It is large. 8) It is heavy. 9) It is complicated.

These days, the quotation is almost always used to raise skepticism about small, advanced reactors in contrast to proven technology, namely large light water reactors. But the characteristics that Rickover described don’t cleave nearly as neatly as people who invoke the quote imagine. The only reactors currently being built now in the United States are, in fact, small advanced reactors, two Kairos Hermes reactors in Tennessee and the TerraPower Natrium reactor in Wyoming, along with a half dozen or so demonstration reactors as part of the Department of Energy’s Reactor Pilot Program at Idaho National Laboratory. Several are behind schedule. All, as first-of-a-kind reactors, will be expensive.

First-of-a-kind small advanced reactors will surely face many of the problems that Rickover described above. Non-light water reactors had exactly these sorts of issues in the 60’s and 70’s when they were demonstrated by government laboratories and very occasionally commercialized. Sodium coolants leaked and caught fire. Steel alloys and other materials became embrittled by high neutron flux fast reactors. Corrosion, in particular, was a problem. First-of-a-kind commercial reactors were expensive to build and operate and were frequently down for repairs and maintenance. This history has been the foundation for much contemporary skepticism toward advanced reactors.

But these problems are, ironically, the characteristics in Rickover’s telling of practical reactors, not academic reactors. Back in the 60s and 70s, the US was building lots of conventional nuclear plants at competitive cost that featured proven technology and well developed supply chains, so there was little reason to push through the first of kind and supply chain challenges necessary to get non-light water reactors to market. But that is not the case today. A range of institutional and economic changes have made it far more difficult to build large light-water reactors at competitive costs in advanced developed economies. And there is ample reason to believe that fifty years of progress in materials science, computation, and design will help advanced reactor developers solve many of the problems that plagued early advanced reactor designs in the post-war era.

For at least the last five years, meanwhile, breathless reports that the next AP1000 build was imminent have come to naught, despite a Trump executive order calling for 10 new reactors under construction by 2030. Unable to convince domestic parties to take on the risk, the administration appears to be considering switching horses, dropping the AP1000 and acquiescing to using Korean or Japanese technologies and firms to get large reactor projects underway in the US.

So while it is true that the AP1000, thanks to the completion of two reactors in Georgia in 2024, are proven technology, there is very little reason to think, despite many proponents’ claims, that the next one will be built quickly or cheaply. Rather, it appears unlikely that any site, other than the unfinished AP1000 build that was abandoned in South Carolina in 2017, will begin construction before 2030.

Many boosters have also claimed that the next build might be as much as 30% cheaper than the Georgia plants. But recent estimates by both Duke Energy and TVA project that the next AP1000 build will cost more than the first two plants in Georgia. TVA projects that an AP1000 will cost the same as the first of four planned GE BWRX300 units, with subsequent builds seeing substantial further cost declines. Cheapest of all, in TVA’s analysis, is the Terrapower Natrium reactor which it projects will cost about two-thirds as much as an AP1000.

Besides the two plants at Vogtle, the only AP1000s ever completed are in China, which did so at costs that the West is unlikely to replicate and has since significantly changed the design for future builds. The much hyped Fermi project, which planned to build four AP1000s to power its President Donald J. Trump Advanced Energy and Intelligence Campus, is, as Robert Bryce wrote last week, imploding. With every day that passes since the completion of the Vogtle reactors in 2024, the AP1000 looks more like a paper reactor and less like a practical one.

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Myth #2: Economies of Scale Are the Coin of the Nuclear Realm

Back in the 60s and 70s, the size of light-water reactors increased from demonstration reactors that clocked in around 600MW, to 800MW commercial reactors, and then upwards of 1GW. Size, it turned out, really mattered for light-water reactors. As reactors got larger, the cost per MW to build and operate them declined, at least until the mid-70s, when rising commodity and labor costs, high interest rates, and overregulation saw nuclear costs escalate significantly. That’s because a 600MW reactor requires much the same infrastructure, security, and operating staff as a 1200MW reactor.

This basic dynamic should mostly apply to small light-water designs as well. For somewhat different reasons, both NuScale’s VOYGR reactor and GE’s BWRX300 reactor require substantially more concrete and steel per MW of capacity than an AP1000. Small light-water reactors also still require a significant exclusion zone, a well-staffed control room, and much the same infrastructure as a large light-water reactor.

But that assumption does not necessarily apply to many other reactor types. Given the larger safety margins and lower likelihood and consequences of worst case accidents, many small advanced designs can be much more lightly staffed or remotely operated. The exclusion zone is often the plant wall or the fence line. Security needs are less extensive and fewer moving parts and redundant safety systems mean much reduced maintenance, infrastructure, and staffing.

We won’t really know what these reactors will cost until some of these first-of-a-kind non-light water reactors are built. In contrast to light water reactor costs, which have a well established cost structure and significant data to base estimates of future costs upon, non-light water reactor costs, in both structure and particulars, are far less certain. A comprehensive literature review and engineering analysis led by Idaho National Laboratory concluded recently that while cost estimates for non-light water reactors were highly uncertain, the best estimates provide little basis for the claim that non-light water SMRs will cost more than conventional large light-water reactors.

And while it is true that all else equal, a larger reactor will generally cost less per MW to build and operate than a small reactor, all else is almost never equal. Whether light water or something else, large reactors have proven virtually impossible to build in liberalized electricity markets, which dominate in the US and most other developed economies. As Adam Stein and I noted in the fall of 2024, site availability, in the short and medium term, significantly limits opportunities to build large reactors in large enough numbers that we might get good at doing it again. Meanwhile, smaller reactors, simpler builds, and much reduced unit costs mean that economies of multiples, process innovation, manufacturing, and simplified supply chains have much greater potential to drive costs down for small, non-light water technologies.

I don’t write any of this to suggest that we should give up on the AP1000 or that economies of scale never matter. The AP1000 is a wondrous technology. It would be great if we could figure out how to get some more of them built in the US. But the logic of the small, advanced reactor appears, at the moment at least, to be winning the day in the real world. Billions of dollars in private investment have flowed into dozens of next generation startups, orders from hyperscalers, big tech, and industrial users are growing, and real “practical” reactors are actually under construction, suggesting that legacy light-water technology and large reactors may not, in fact, turn out to be the future of nuclear.

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Myth #3: Far Reaching Regulatory Reform Is Unnecessary, Compromises Safety, and Risks Public Confidence in Nuclear Energy.

If you’d been a fly on the wall as Congress was debating passage of the ADVANCE Act back in 2024, you would have heard a lot of erstwhile nuclear advocates insisting that a key provision directing the NRC to modernize its mission statement to account for the benefits of nuclear energy was at best a distraction and at worst would compromise nuclear safety.

Some said it publicly. Others privately. Yet, today, you will be hard pressed to find any nuclear advocate still skeptical of that change. Some have publicly reversed course. Others simply took credit for it after the fact.

That’s because barely a year after the NRC revised its mission statement, the impact of the reset is already clear. Congressionally mandated action to modernize NRC licensing for a new generation of reactors had dragged along without resolution for over five years prior to the agency’s mission statement revision. In the year since, the NRC has both finalized the Part 53 licensing framework mandated by Congress in 2019 and revised its entire regulatory code pursuant to Executive Order 14300. The NRC approved TerraPower’s construction permit, NuScale’s uprated license amendment, and Kairos Hermes 2 license ahead of schedule.

The new mission statement, alone, can’t take credit for this. President Trump replaced and then removed the former chair of the commission, issued Executive Order 14300, and used DOGE and other sources of executive power to force the NRC to move much faster on reform. The mission statement was part of a much broader culture shift that has ramified throughout the agency and far beyond.

But the dramatic change in the pace of rulemaking and license approvals is good evidence of just how conservative, arbitrary, and lacking in urgency much of the agency’s regulatory practices actually were. The memory-holing of all the arguments made against the mission statement requirements in the ADVANCE Act prior to its passage, meanwhile, suggest that there was never much basis to them in the first place.

And yet, many of the same parties are now making almost exactly the same arguments in opposition to current proposals to eliminate ALARA, abolish or significantly limit the use and misuse of LNT, raise maximum public radiation dose limits, and license demonstration reactors through DOE. As with mission modernization, these “pro-nuclear but” advocates claim that they are unnecessary because both conventional and advanced reactors are already able to meet the old standards. They say that raising regulatory thresholds increases the risk of accidents and that even if new rules and standards don’t materially increase public health risk, they will undermine public confidence in nuclear regulation.

I have written recently about these claims and won’t go into too much detail here. Suffice to say that as with the claims that were made about mission modernization, there is little by way of an actual mechanism that critics will stipulate for how these changes would lead to negative consequences. Raising the public radiological dose limit, for instance, from 100 millirem to 500 millirem, might seem to portend significant public health consequences until you realize that both doses are well over an order of magnitude below exposures at which an increase in cancer incidence could conceivably be observed.

The argument that changing these standards won’t matter because current and proposed reactors already meet more stringent standards, meanwhile, asserts, with little basis, that design decisions that have been informed by the current standards and regulatory norms would be the same under a different regulatory regime. As with claims about the technical issues and economics of scale that challenge small, advanced reactors, this argument is strongly anchored in the current regulatory and technological status quo, which tells us nothing about what future developers might do under different policies.

Finally, the chestnut that these changes risk undermining public confidence both misunderstands the nature of public opinion and is fundamentally incompatible with any sort of risk informed regulation. If public fear of radiation exposure is both highly irrational and irrationally high, after all, then all risk informing of regulation definitionally undermines public confidence. To the contrary, what has become clear over the last year, as regulatory reform has shifted from talking point to reality, is that it is possible to license and regulate nuclear energy far more flexibly and expeditiously without compromising safety or provoking a public outcry.

Myth #4: Advanced Reactors and Enriched Fuels Increase Proliferation Risk

If you are not deeply enmeshed in nuclear policy and technology, you might think that the distinction between low enriched uranium (LEU) and high assay low enriched uranium (HALEU) is arcane. With regard to the importance of these different fuel types to different sorts of reactors, the distinction is anything but. Most advanced reactor technologies require the latter, which is typically enriched to just below 20% U235 content, versus LEU which is typically enriched to 4-6% and is sufficient to power conventional reactors.

But when it comes to proliferation risk, the distinction is indeed arcane and largely irrelevant. Neither 4% enriched uranium nor 20% enriched uranium is remotely sufficient to make a fissionable weapon. The case against HALEU is that it takes a lot less additional enrichment to turn 20% enriched uranium into weapons grade uranium with over 90% U235 content than it does to turn LEU into weapons grade material. But the key thing that determines whether you can make weapons grade material is not whether you start with LEU or HALEU but whether you have the enrichment capacity to make LEU in the first place. The process and technology for enriching a decent grade of uranium ore from 0.6% U235 to 4 or 6% is exactly the same as what is required to enrich LEU from 6% to 18 or 20% which is the same that is necessary to enrich HALEU from 20% to weapons grade at 90%. It’s just centrifuges, lots of them, spinning up the U235 concentration in the fuel.

Once you have sufficient enrichment capacity to increase the concentration of U235 from .06% in uranium ore to 6% in LEU, you already have all the enrichment capacity and technical capability you need to make weapons grade fuel. HALEU is just a step along that path, and not a particularly significant one. Time to breakout is somewhat shorter if you start with HALEU rather than LEU. But any actor that has stockpiled significant LEU has ample enrichment capacity to get from there to weapons grade material in short order.

What makes producing weapons grade uranium difficult is not procuring uranium ore or centrifuges but hiding the effort from prying international eyes. Sanctions, technology restrictions, and other disincentives to weapons proliferation make nuclear weapons development an unattractive enterprise for all but the most determined state actors. States that are determined to do so will generally, sooner or later, succeed. But the existence of civilian nuclear energy and enrichment capabilities is not correlated significantly with weapons development.

Nonetheless, it has been an article of faith within the non-proliferation community for decades that HALEU production ought to be discouraged, a posture that continues to this day. And while few proliferation experts today outright oppose HALEU reactors and fuel, the basic heuristic is that more enrichment capacity and more enriched fuels are bad even though, in many contexts, lower enriched fuels and technology can be faster and easier pathways to weapons grade material. LEU used in light water reactors, for instance, produces spent fuel with higher plutonium levels than HALEU in most advanced reactors. A CANDU reactor produces similar levels of plutonium from natural uranium with no enrichment at all.

Nonetheless, general preference within the non-proliferation community has been for large light-water reactors using LEU with a once-through fuel cycle that forgoes reprocessing. Once all the caveats and safeguards for HALEU fuel production and reactors that many non-proliferation experts insist upon are accounted for, there is little likelihood that HALEU-based technologies will prove scalable.

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Myth #5: Consent-Based Siting Holds the Key to Community Acceptance of Nuclear Facilities

For much of the last generation, the shadow of the failed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository has loomed over nuclear politics and policy. Nevada Senator Harry Reid’s long tenure as leader of Senate Democrats resulted in the issue dominating Democratic policy priorities at both the NRC and DOE. Opposition to Yucca, along with sustained fights to prevent the completion of the Shoreham plants in New York and Seabrook in New Hampshire, were taken as evidence that local NIMBY resistance was at the core of failed efforts to site and build nuclear facilities around the country.

In response to this diagnosis, the notion of consent-based siting has gained support among many nuclear advocates. If the problem is that nuclear plants and waste facilities are being forced upon communities that don’t want them, then the answer is to find communities that want them. Better yet, do even more community and public engagement before choosing sites, and offer lots of special, legally binding, community benefits, so more communities will want those facilities.

But while there is nothing wrong with consent based siting in theory, most proposed nuclear facilities actually have significant community consent. As Breakthrough’s Adam Stein recently wrote, in the case of proposed waste facilities, the communities where they have been proposed have strongly supported these facilities. Even Yucca Mountain had significant local support.

The opposition to these facilities, rather, typically comes from further afield. State officials, the city of Las Vegas (150 miles away), and national environmental groups were the main opponents of Yucca Mountain. Opposition to temporary waste storage facilities in Texas and New Mexico has been similarly composed.

The problem has not been local NIMBYs who don’t want these facilities in their communities but state officials whose incentives are more often to pander to larger constituencies in population centers that see no direct benefit from these facilities finding common cause with ideological opponents who often have little connection to the communities in question whatsoever. Recent proposals in this vein, such as the proposed Office of Public Engagement at the NRC, would almost assuredly make the situation worse, basically paying environmental justice and similar activist groups with little actual presence in local communities to show up and obstruct nuclear projects and demand community benefits that no one locally is asking for.

In reality, many communities are competing for new nuclear facilities. Four towns in Wyoming all campaigned to be the site of the first TerraPower reactor. As Stein notes, the Department of Energy’s proposed Innovation Hub approach, which packages long-term waste storage with reprocessing, advanced reactor demonstration, and other opportunities that position these hubs as centers for innovation around cutting edge energy technologies has potentially flipped the script. Twenty-eight states have indicated interest in hosting hubs. Combining local and state incentives, and supporting local communities that want them, has far greater potential to build broad stakeholder support for nuclear facilities than pouring more public engagement resources into communities that have not been the source of resistance to those facilities and typically have wanted them.

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Nuclear for the 21st Century

As I noted at the beginning of this post, none of these claims are necessarily wrong. It is possible that non-light water reactor technology will prove as difficult to tame as it was fifty years ago. If that proves to be the case, large reactors may well continue to be the nuclear technology of choice, regulatory reform to allow for different technological pathways and innovation will be less essential, there will be little need for HALEU fuels, and the number and diversity of siting contexts and use cases for new nuclear infrastructure will be greatly simplified. But the applicability of each of these erstwhile conditions and constraints to the future of nuclear energy is every bit as contingent as the histories from which they are drawn.

And while I don’t doubt the sincerity of many who make these claims, there are other reasons why so much of the nuclear advocacy community continues to fight the last century’s wars. For a lot of nuclear insiders, the nuclear they know is the basis of their expertise and status within the community. For many generalists without deep knowledge of either the technology or its history, the “pro-nuclear but” posture is a way to signal that they are serious people, not wild-eyed “nuclear bros”. And for a lot of left-of-center nuclear advocates, “pro-nuclear but” helps resolve the cognitive dissonance between their (not unreasonable) conviction that “the Orange Man is bad” and the reality that the Trump administration has proven far more effective at accelerating nuclear innovation, regulatory reform, and commercialization than Biden-era Democrats.

At a moment when power demand, AI economics, global energy supply shocks, climate concerns, and a huge shift in public opinion about nuclear have created possibilities for the technology that have not existed since the dawn of the nuclear era, the effort to downselect nuclear’s future to a post-industrial simulacrum of its 20th century past has real policy consequences.

In order to convince utilities and state regulators to sign up for new large reactors, for instance, legislation is now proposed to establish federal cost-overrun insurance, which seems as likely to incentivize cost overruns as spark a renaissance in large light water reactors. The NRC’s regulatory reform efforts, to take another example, have stopped short of establishing a clear and consistent numerical standard for reactor safety in the face of criticism from various “pro-nuclear but” quarters.

Much of the nuclear advocacy community, meanwhile, has failed to substantively engage the NRC as it has embarked upon a soup to nuts revision of its entire regulatory code. Licensing barriers and ambivalence at the Department of Energy has delayed congressionally mandated establishment of a HALEU fuel bank. And while climate and clean tech philanthropy has underwritten much of the academic discussion around consent-based siting, there has been little support for state based nuclear advocates, the kind of people who might actually show up at a local meeting to support a proposed nuclear project.

To be clear, there is much to be said for leaning into strategies that have worked in the past. But that heuristic doesn’t offer much guidance for nuclear energy. The assumptions, norms, institutions, practices, and technologies that characterized the sector over the last fifty years bear significant responsibility for its decline. That’s why the civil society pro-nuclear movement that has so transformed the political and policy landscape around nuclear energy over the last fifteen years had to be launched by outsiders who were willing to question those assumptions and norms. As that effort gained momentum, it was too often captured by the old nuclear priesthood and its many conventional wisdoms. A better future for nuclear energy will almost certainly require something different.

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This was originally published by The Dispatch on April 16, 2026.

Since the start of my career in energy more than 15 years ago, I’ve been hearing about—and, indeed, actively championing—the declining cost of renewable energy technologies. Between 2010 and 2023, the price of wind turbines fell by about 70 percent and the price of solar panels fell by 90 percent. Lithium-ion batteries, which can store electricity for short durations when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing, have also shown impressive gains in both performance and price, dropping about 90 percent in cost through 2023.

Given these advancements, renewables are now competitive on a per-kilowatt-hour basis with incumbents like coal, nuclear, and natural gas. So why are electricity prices rising?

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A Renewables Referendum

The explanation is threefold. First, the intermittency of wind and solar means that even very affordable renewable energy relies on enabling technology and infrastructure, like natural gas plants and extensive networks of power lines, with the consumer price set by the overall system. Second, though wind turbines and solar panels are cheap, they are increasingly running up against geographic limitations. The sunniest and windiest places are not always close to cities and industrial sites, or to transmission infrastructure that can connect generation to demand.

These two factors are exacerbated by a third, which is perhaps the defining energy phenomenon of our era: U.S. electricity demand is rising for the first time in a generation. The electrification of vehicles and HVAC systems, artificial intelligence and other emerging industries, and growing use of air conditioning are combining to increase electricity demand faster than new sources of power generation are coming online. That lag time pushes prices up, and it’s just the beginning.

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Intermittency.

While many renewables advocates have come to believe it’s a form of trolling to point out that the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow, it is, in fact, true. And because they’re both intermittent and have no fuel costs, wind farms and solar plants largely act as fuel-savers for the nation’s natural gas and coal plants (which are “dispatchable,” meaning they can be turned on and off by their operators instead of relying on the weather like renewables do). This capability has real economic advantages, especially given renewables’ current level of penetration in the U.S. grid system. But over the long term, grids that include more and more wind and solar will inherently require substantial overbuilding of redundant capacity to smooth out lulls in sunlight or wind.

Battery storage also helps fill the gaps caused by fluctuating supply and demand, but today’s battery systems store electricity for only a few hours at a time. They cannot cover unexpected days- or weeks-long droughts in wind generation, nor store excess summertime energy for use when the solar panels are covered in snow in the winter.

Meeting current, let alone growing, year-round demand with increasing shares of wind and solar will simply require far more electric power capacity than is installed today. That helps explain why the capital costs of the U.S. electric power system are expected to grow faster if more renewables are added to the grid.

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Geography.

One reason my fellow Dispatch Energy columnist Lynne Kiesling has written frequently about long-distance transmission is because large power lines make it easier to connect sunny and windy deserts and plains to demand centers. Provided they have access to the right infrastructure, renewables have some of the shortest lead times of any electricity sources available today, so utilities and independent power producers are trying to connect them to the grid as quickly as possible. But as with the nation’s bridges, tunnels, and rail lines, the U.S. has struggled to build significant high-voltage transmission for decades.

This wait time imposes something of a hard constraint on many renewable projects, hundreds of which are languishing in the “interconnection queue.” Transmission lines have become one of the most difficult types of infrastructure to build in the United States, often taking a decade or more to clear overlapping local, state, and federal siting and permitting regulations. As one prominent analysis of the Biden administration’s energy policy found, the growth of wind and solar through 2030 could be cut by as much as half if new electric power lines are not built in a timely manner.

But it’s not just transmission. Communities across America have increasingly turned against renewable energy projects. In a prelude to the ongoing local opposition to data centers, hundreds of counties around the country have enacted siting limits on wind and solar projects. Building more clean energy may be a national priority, but it runs up against local preferences against new construction and infrastructure in people’s backyards.

And even in areas that allow renewable energy development, other geographic features may get in the way. For example, the Northeastern United States has both high population density and dark, snowy winters—not exactly a welcoming combination for land-intensive and weather-dependent renewable energy projects. Many Eastern states had hoped offshore wind projects would overcome these limitations, but due to both economic and political factors, the U.S. offshore wind industry has failed to scale.

There is still plenty of untapped solar and wind potential in the United States. But these geographic constraints are real, and we can already see evidence of them in the data on annual wind deployment, which, despite falling costs, has fluctuated substantially over the last decade. Solar, which is a much more modular technology that can be deployed at either the rooftop or megaproject scale, has grown more consistently.

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When demand outpaces supply.

The dynamics that defined the expansion of U.S. wind and solar power over the past two decades have been completely upended by more recent technological developments. A steady migration toward air conditioning-reliant states like Arizona, Florida, and Texas, together with the growing adoption of electric heat pumps and vehicles, is helping drive electricity consumption up for the first time in a generation. But the big story, of course, is AI data centers, whose power consumption could triple (or more) within a decade.

So it’s telling that, while wind and especially solar continue to grow steadily in the United States, data centers are relying overwhelmingly on natural gas to meet their immediate power needs—at least for now.

AI is also infamously driving renewed interest in nuclear power, especially smaller advanced reactors that can be installed on-site and generate reliable power. The so-called tech hyperscalers like Google and Microsoft have also invested in next-generation geothermal and natural gas with carbon capture to meet the skyrocketing electricity needs of their data centers.

In other words, while wind turbines and solar panels have become cheap, mature electric power commodities, they alone do not appear capable of meeting rising electricity demand. In renewables’ defense, no other single technology is better-positioned either. Advanced nuclear, geothermal, and carbon capture technologies remain somewhat speculative, and there’s even a shortage of natural gas turbines.

But as many energy analysts have been warning for years, even impressively declining solar and wind costs will not enable renewables to meet all or even most of the electricity demand facing modern power grids.

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By Adam Stein (& ChatGPT, Gemini, NotebookLM)

An office worker pastes a contract clause into an AI assistant and asks whether it is enforceable. The system produces a confident explanation, complete with citations to legal precedent. A small notice warns that the tool can make mistakes and should be verified with a professional. The worker skims the answer and sends an email based on it anyway.

Interactions like this are becoming routine.

Artificial intelligence is often criticized for producing errors: fabricated citations, broken code, or confidently wrong explanations. But the more important risk may be what it does to the people using it. The growing catalog of what people now call “AI slop” has become a familiar complaint in classrooms, workplaces, and online forums. The usual conclusion follows naturally: large language models are unreliable. That conclusion is understandable, but it does not reflect the actual problem.

The real risk is not that AI systems sometimes generate incorrect answers, it is that the humans using those systems are not checking their work. For decades, researchers studying safety‑critical industries have documented a behavioral pattern known as automation bias. When people work with automated systems that perform reliably most of the time, they gradually reduce their own vigilance. They verify less. They question less. And when the system eventually fails, they become less likely to detect the mistake.

Until recently, automation bias was most visible in expert environments using specialized tools. In some clinical studies, physicians have even changed correct diagnoses to incorrect ones after consulting automated decision-support systems—a well-documented example of automation bias in clinical decision-making. Pilots have followed incorrect cockpit alerts despite contradictory instrument readings, a pattern documented in studies of automation bias in aviation decision support systems. Military operators have accepted automated threat classifications even when other evidence suggested the system was wrong. In each case the system usually worked until the moment it didn’t, and the human operator had already stopped questioning it. Automation improved performance on average, but introduced a predictable category of error: humans trusting the machine too much.

Versions of this behavior have appeared in everyday technology before. Early consumer GPS systems occasionally sent drivers down the wrong road, or in a few well-publicized cases into lakes or dead-end roads, because digital maps were incomplete. The problem was not that the navigation system occasionally made mistakes; no map is perfect. The problem was that some drivers assumed the system must be right, even when the route clearly did not make sense to a human paying attention. Artificial intelligence changes the scale of that dynamic, bringing this pattern into everyday decision‑making.

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In effect, AI has democratized automation bias, extending what was once a problem in expert systems into domains where users cannot tell when the system is wrong. Artificial intelligence has effectively placed a cognitive assistant into millions of hands. Ordinary people are asking for investment advice, writing essays, or building software they can’t understand—what developers have taken to calling “vibe coding”. In each case, people are operating in domains where they may have little underlying expertise, or where the volume of work has outpaced their capacity for careful review.

Consider a hiring manager reviewing hundreds of job applications. Instead of reading each one carefully, they ask an AI system to summarize the candidates and rank them. The summaries are plausible, and the rankings feel systematic. But over time, the manager reads fewer applications themselves and becomes less certain what a strong candidate actually looks like. If the system misinterprets a resume, overlooks an unusual career path, or invents a detail that was never there, the manager may not recognize the mistake. The automation has not simply accelerated the task; it has quietly replaced the manager’s independent judgment.

When automation is used under conditions where the user lacks verification capacity, two distinct failure modes appear. The first is that the user does not know what a good output should look like. If an AI system produces legal language, technical analysis, or complex code, the user may not have the background knowledge required to judge whether the result makes sense. The second is more subtle: even when something goes wrong, the user may not know how to recognize that a failure has occurred, or how to diagnose it.

The first failure is straightforward but easy to underestimate. If a person lacks a mental model of what a sound answer looks like, they cannot meaningfully judge whether the output is strong, weak, or subtly flawed. A polished response can therefore create the illusion of competence. The user sees fluency, structure and confidence, but has no independent basis for deciding whether those qualities reflect genuine correctness.

The second failure is different and in some ways more consequential. Here the user is not merely unable to rank the quality of the output; they may not even know that a mistake has been made. The error leaves no obvious trace. Nothing feels wrong, so nothing triggers review. In that situation, automation does not just influence judgment. It suppresses the very signal that would tell a person their judgment should be activated.

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In expert settings, automation bias is dangerous but somewhat bounded because experts retain the underlying skills needed to detect errors. A physician can usually recognize when a recommendation is clinically implausible. A pilot can cross-check instruments and procedures. Experts also have internal standards against which they judge automated outputs. For many everyday AI users, that safeguard does not exist.

When people operate in domains where they lack expertise, they often substitute surface signals for real evaluation. A fluent summary feels reliable because it reads well. A ranking generated by software feels objective because it was produced by an algorithm. These cues resemble evidence of quality, but they are only proxies. Without an independent standard for judging correctness, those proxies quietly replace genuine verification. The same mechanism that causes a hiring manager to trust a flawed ranking causes a writer to accept a first AI draft as though revision were unnecessary. Anyone who has written a paper understands that a rough draft is followed by editing and iteration. That feedback loop is often missing when people use AI tools, sometimes because users do not realize it should exist at all.

A student using AI to summarize research papers may not recognize fabricated citations. A small business owner automating spreadsheets may not fully understand the logic embedded in formulas the model produced. Someone relying on AI-generated code or analysis may not know how to verify whether the results are correct. When verification capacity disappears, automation bias changes form: instead of experts trusting machines too much, non‑experts begin outsourcing cognition entirely. The workflow becomes simple: ask the model, receive an answer that appears plausible, move on.

Systems that are correct most of the time can still degrade decision quality by training users to trust them too much. Research on automation bias shows that systems performing correctly most of the time can still degrade decision quality. Reliable automation gradually trains users to treat outputs as authoritative rather than provisional. The remaining errors slip through precisely because people have stopped checking. What AI adds is scale. It lowers the barrier to attempting complex tasks while producing outputs that are fluent enough to anchor judgement even when they are wrong.

Paradoxically, improvements in system reliability can make the effect worse. Consistent success encourages what researchers sometimes call learned carelessness: users reduce scrutiny because past experience suggests scrutiny is unnecessary. Artificial intelligence amplifies this dynamic in two ways at once—it dramatically lowers the barrier to attempting complex tasks, and it produces outputs fluent and plausible enough to anchor human judgment even when they are wrong. The result is a category of failure that looks like a technology problem but is fundamentally a human one.

Public debate about AI risks tends to focus on the models themselves: hallucinations, training data limitations, or alignment failures. Those concerns are real. But focusing exclusively on model errors overlooks the human side of the equation. The more consequential question is what happens to human cognition when automated reasoning tools become ubiquitous. History suggests a clear answer: people adapt. They adapt by delegating parts of their reasoning process to machines, or by trusting outputs that appear credible. And over time, they adapt by investing less effort in verifying results that are usually correct.

Return to the example of early GPS navigation. Over time, both the technology and its users improved. Maps became more accurate, and people learned when to trust directions and when to question them. But the underlying tendency did not disappear. It adapted. This behavior is not irrational—in many contexts, it is an efficient response to cognitive cost, since verifying every AI output can easily take longer than generating it in the first place. But efficiency and reliability are not the same thing.

As AI systems move deeper into education, workplaces, and professional practice, and increasingly into research, engineering, and policy analysis, the central challenge will not simply be improving model accuracy. It will be preserving the human capacity, and the institutional expectation, of independent verification. Safety‑critical industries learned this lesson long ago. Automation not only changes what machines can do; it changes how humans think and how carefully they check their own decisions.

What AI has done is extend that familiar human tendency into domains where many users lack the expertise to verify the results. The real risk of AI is not that machines will make mistakes. It is that, as we grow accustomed to relying on them, we may become less likely to notice when they do.

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Thanks to supply chain disruptions stemming from the war with Iran, California drivers, long accustomed to the nation’s highest pump prices, are now paying even more exorbitant sums for gas than usual—up to $8 a gallon in some locations. Part of this eye-watering price tag is due to the state’s strained refining capacity and other market quirks unique to California. But part of it is due to a program called the Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS). As of January 2026, the program adds 17 cents to every gallon of gas.

The LCFS requires fuel suppliers in California to reduce emissions from transportation by either using low-carbon fuels in their supply chain—and thus receiving a LCFS credit—or by purchasing low-carbon fuel credits from producers elsewhere. The system works, in theory, by incentivizing the substitution of fossil fuels with supposedly less emissions-intensive products like biofuels and electricity.

The program could reduce emissions, in theory, but, in reality, California’s LCFS sends billions of dollars to biofuels linked to deforestation that, by some estimates, release more carbon over their lifecycle than the fossil fuels they replace. In short, California is charging drivers a premium to make emissions worse.

But there is a further irony to the LCFS program. The California credits are, in large part, for biofuels that would have been produced and sold anyway thanks to the Renewable Fuel Standard, a federal mandate. So, not only does LCFS fail to actually reduce emissions, it is overcharging Californians for a biofuel incentive program that does not incentivize new biofuels.

This is, paradoxically, better, emissions-wise, than the alternative. When the program fails to drive new production, it merely forces drivers to pay extra for biofuels that have already done their damage. When it succeeds, it forces drivers to pay to make emissions worse.

With more states looking to follow in California’s footsteps and launch their own versions of LCFS, it is critical for California legislators to reform the program. A good first step will be to make sure that drivers are not forced to pay extra for fuels that are already receiving federal credits through an additionality requirement. Still, actually reducing emissions from California’s transportation sector will require far larger policy changes.

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The Renewable Fuel Standard already drives most U.S. biofuel use

The federal Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) is the main policy shaping the U.S. market for ethanol and bio-based diesel (including biodiesel and renewable diesel). The program requires oil refiners and fuel importers to blend specific amounts of renewable fuel into the nation’s gasoline and diesel supply each year.

Instead of requiring each refinery to physically produce or blend those fuels itself, the RFS works through a credit system. When a company produces a gallon of renewable fuel, it generates a tradable credit called a Renewable Identification Number, or RIN. Refiners and fuel importers must acquire enough RINs each year to meet the federal mandate, either by blending in renewable fuel themselves or by buying RINS from others.

The EPA sets several renewable fuel mandates for each year. These include an overarching mandate covering all renewable fuels as well as mandates for specific categories of fuels: advanced biofuel, bio-based diesel, and cellulosic biofuel.

The RFS explicitly required about 3.4 billion gallons of bio-based diesel in 2025. But because the program’s mandates are nested, it actually incentivized more. Biodiesel and renewable diesel generate RINs that can count not only toward the bio-based diesel requirement but also the advanced and total renewable fuel mandates. In fact, these fuels are often the lowest-cost way for refiners to meet the larger advanced biofuel requirement and to fill any remaining gap in the overall renewable fuel mandate.

The programs’ influence on biofuel use can hardly be overstated. It sets a very high floor for biofuel use. Nearly all corn ethanol and 80% of all bio-based diesel use nationally was tied to RFS compliance in recent years, from 2022–2024. Put another way, the program effectively requires about 15 billion gallons of ethanol and 4 billion gallons of bio-based diesel. EPA’s new renewable fuel targets for 2026 and 2027 will require even more, nearly 5.5 billion gallons of bio-based diesel.

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Why the LCFS credits are often redundant

The LCFS works by requiring fuel suppliers to reduce the average carbon intensity of the fuels they sell. Fuels below the benchmark generate credits; fuels above the benchmark generate deficits. Those credits are tradable, creating a market that rewards low-carbon alternatives. California fuel sellers have historically passed on about 100% of the costs of compliance to consumers; right now the LCFS adds about 17 cents to a gallon a gas, and is expected to rise to 25 to 40 cents a gallon by 2030 as the benchmarks become more stringent.

Because the RFS already requires vast quantities of bio-based diesel and ethanol to be sold, the majority of LCFS compliance dollars paid by California drivers—nearly two billion dollars just in the last year—is likely going to biofuels that would have been produced anyway. As of 2024, 75% of LCFS credits were going to either bio-based diesel, ethanol, or biomethane—all fuels covered by the RFS.

By just comparing nationwide fuel sales to the volumes credited under the RFS, we can see that at most 60% of bio-based diesel credited under California’s LCFS in 2024 was produced because of the program or, in other words, was additional. As the figure below shows, the vast majority of national bio-based diesel use was required by the RFS: only the remainder, about 1.6 billion gallons, could have plausibly been spurred by the LCFS. Yet the program still allowed companies to earn credit revenue for over 2.5 billion gallons. It’s possible that even more of the diesel would have been produced anyway since the RFS also increases its market price, making it more profitable to produce even without any government incentives.

Ethanol is even worse—virtually none of it is additional. This is because there is an effective ceiling on how much ethanol can be blended into the gasoline supply—only flex-fuel vehicles can use blends above E15, and they make up a small fraction of the fleet. Therefore, there is no reason that the quantity of ethanol consumed in the US should be above the quantity mandated by the RFS, even if there were very lavish additional subsidies. This is borne out by the data, as shown below.

In other words, California drivers are not buying cleaner fuel—they are buying the same fuel, at a higher price, that would have been sold in another state. The LCFS subsidy does not reduce emissions so much as it moves them.

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Policymakers should add an additionality requirement

As California goes, so do many other states. Legislatures and agencies in Oregon, Washington, and New Mexico have modeled their clean fuel programs after California’s. Other states, from Minnesota to Massachusetts, are considering their own programs too. California’s LCFS, however, has set a poor precedent by subsidizing biofuels that would already have been produced.

The state agency in charge of the program, CARB, is unlikely to consider any changes having just passed a series of controversial reforms in 2025. Likewise, Governor Newsom is unlikely to roll back a major environmental program while preparing a campaign for president as well as throwing his support behind ethanol, practically a prerequisite for any presidential contender. The legislature and the next governor, then, must push for reforms.

The most straightforward reform is to add an additionality requirement. California should not award LCFS credits to biofuels already needed to satisfy the federal RFS. The state could take a range of different approaches. It could credit only biofuel producers who couldn’t sell the RINs generated from their fuel. Or it could require financial data indicating that a fuel would not be profitable to produce without an LCFS credit. Or it could simply cap the amount of LCFS credits for fuels eligible for RFS compliance, especially corn ethanol and conventional biomass-based diesel.

This need not be revolutionary. Some of the projects that the LCFS supports are already highly additional and would not be pursued without the program’s support. Nearly 30% of credits are now awarded to a wide range of electrification activities. Hundreds of millions of dollars in LCFS revenue have been used to offer electric vehicle rebates. While many high-earners receiving the rebates would have bought an EV regardless, thousands of low-income households received larger rebates that likely enabled them to buy an EV. LCFS credits also help cover the high capital costs of installing fast chargers, including for trucks. While these costs have constrained widespread deployment, the LCFS now supports over 5,000 fast chargers.

Making the LCFS more additional would provide more support for electrification. Governor Newsom has already proposed a $200 million EV rebate program, but California is estimated to need far more: roughly $16.5 billion in EV charging and related electrification investment by 2030. Reforming the LCFS would not close that gap on its own, but it could further shift support toward fast chargers, charging at multi-unit dwellings, and other infrastructure needed to make EV ownership practical.

California should still pursue lower-carbon transportation. But it should stop making California drivers pay more for performative decarbonization, cutting emissions on paper while real-world fuel use hardly changes. In fact, reforming the LCFS would accelerate the state’s climate goals and pave the road for others to follow.

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The recent film adaptation of Andy Weir’s novel Project Hail Mary opens with an astronaut coming to consciousness, alone on a spaceship, almost 12 light-years from Earth. What follows is a saga where that man, Dr. Ryland Grace (played by Ryan Gosling), seeks to engineer a solution to a crisis on his planet, inspired by the exploration of a distant solar system with the help of an alien friend.

But despite the plot’s distance from our own planetary reality, its statement on humanity and nature is profound. Mankind has dominion over Creation. And exercising technological power to bring out the potential of nature, with humility and love, is foundational to human and natural flourishing.

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A mission for stewardship

The movie’s story is premised on a global cooling crisis in the near future. Scientists observe extraterrestrial microbes that metabolize solar radiation—called “Astrophage”—forming a film around the Sun. If the trend persists, a catastrophic ice age will arrive in a few decades, leading to famine and ecological collapse. Astronomers also find that this phenomenon is occurring on other stars too, with the lone exception of Tau Ceti.

Dr. Ryland Grace, a disgraced scientist turned schoolteacher whose heterodox astrobiology proves useful for the Astrophage crisis, is sent on a mission—the titular “Project Hail Mary”—with two other astronauts to investigate what makes Tau Ceti immune. Due to the distance and fuel constraints, the spacecraft can’t return. The astronauts are expected to send their findings back with remote probes and sacrifice themselves to save Earth and humanity.

After waking up from an induced coma, Dr. Grace finds that he’s the only surviving astronaut on the spacecraft. The pilot and engineer died mysteriously sometime before his coma lifted. But, Grace is not alone. Soon arriving to the Tau Ceti system, he finds that another spacecraft, manned by a benevolent alien we come to know as “Rocky,” is on a similar mission for his planet, Eridia.

Working together, Grace and Rocky investigate the Tau Ceti system, finding that a microbial predator—“Taumoeba”—is keeping Astrophage in check. With this knowledge, they develop Taumoeba for deployment on their own homes, and after feats of science, Grace and Rocky successfully send the engineered Taumoeba back home to save their planets.

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Technology, humility, and love

Project Hail Mary not only suggests that technology is key to addressing our problems—it also shows how to approach active, technological management. The dominion ecology of the movie is centered on three elements of stewardship: the use of technology for cultivation, the humility of the good scientist and nature manager, and the love of home.

Clearly, the power of technology is a central theme of Project Hail Mary. The characters see the real threat that Astrophage pose—limiting Earth’s human carrying capacity in the near future—not as an immovable biophysical reality but as a technological challenge. Grace’s mission develops a technological solution that uses a natural predator-prey control mechanism, breaking the prior limit.

This story has overlap with the real world. As ecomodernists have long shown, the Malthusians and neo-Malthusians who model and discuss hard biophysical limits of human prosperity have been proven wrong again and again by technological progress.

Thomas Malthus’s insistence that England’s population growth would outpace food production was rebutted by early agricultural advancements in Britain. President Jimmy Carter’s concerns about peak oil were reprimanded by the technological advancement of fracking led by the likes of George Mitchell and Harold Hamm. And the infamous, late Paul Ehrlich’s disastrously wrong predictions about human population growth were roundly disproven by leaders of the Green Revolution like Norman Borlaug, who developed high-yield wheat through experiments in Mexico that likely saved hundreds of millions of lives. Project Hail Mary tells a similar story. Through the discovery and engineering of Taumoeba, Grace seeks to understand and work with nature to then shape it for the common good.

Grace’s particularly humble approach to technology and nature is notable. His dominion over nature isn’t one of a rationalist, top-down tyrant inflicting his will. Rather, Grace’s approach is one of respect—he recognizes that Tau Ceti can teach him something. Through careful investigation and trial and error, he and Rocky find an ecology in the solar system that they then use to engineer and iterate planet-saving technology. Grace is confident and takes risks, but his approach is bound by a respect for the limits of his knowledge. The Jurassic Park story and the disastrous real-world release of cane toads in Australia are the negative corollaries to Grace’s technological humility. The introduction of moose to Colorado and the construction of Dutch sea walls are positive corollaries—bold acts of natural dominion that elevate nature with a respect and love for it.

And it is love of home, for people and nature, that animates Grace and Rocky in the final analysis. Both characters have a love for the natural world manifested in their joy at knowing it through science. But their mission to save their planets with engineering is guided by a deeper love for their particular homes and communities.

In flashbacks, the audience learns that Grace was extremely resistant to the “Project Hail Mary” mission. Indeed, the duty was forced on him by a technocratic autocrat tasked with saving the world. As Kody W. Cooper observed, an abstract love of humanity didn’t initially compel Grace for the mission. But by loving his neighbor, Rocky, Grace awakens his love and duty toward his planet and his people.

Over the course of their developing friendship, Grace and Rocky discuss their relationships with their people and their homes. Rocky clearly has deep bonds with his romantic interest on Eridia, but absent an old girlfriend, Grace doesn’t have a corollary. We do see early glimpses of Grace’s longing for home in flashbacks to scenes with his students and as he often returns to a simulator that shows landscapes on Earth. But Grace’s innate love of people and home is developed by the sacrificial love Rocky shows him. When Rocky falls into a temporary unconsciousness after he saves Grace from spacecraft troubles, Grace works alone to engineer Taumoeba to save Earth and Eridia. After developing a particular relationship with Rocky over the course of their mission, Grace is prepared to take radical action to save the planet he’s always loved.

In doing so, Grace distinguishes his first duty to save Earth from his friendship with Rocky, while taking heroic actions to save him. As Grace embarks back to Earth after Rocky generously gives him extra fuel, he comes to a technological problem in his ship that he realizes would doom Rocky’s spacecraft too. But before backtracking to save his friend and abandoning hope of returning home, Grace is sure to send his Taumoeba samples back to Earth, ready to be used. The Taumoeba are deployed on Earth, and Grace ends up on Rocky’s planet of Eridia, with a terraformed landscape built for him, and the Eridians working to build a ship so he can return. In the end, it’s love and duty toward his people and his home, awakened by Rocky, that motivates and guides Grace.

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Applied dominion

Despite the catastrophism of the climate alarmists, Earth doesn’t face the same degree of ecological challenge as represented in Project Hail Mary. We won’t see temperature averages change 10-15°C within thirty years that would require interplanetary alien microbe deployment, thank goodness.

What we do have are serious natural challenges and opportunities that require the daring of ambitious technologists exercising a humble and loving dominion. Recent history is replete with successes against these challenges, from the aforementioned Green Revolution and fracking boom to the rapid COVID vaccine development in Operation Warp Speed. But these projects aren’t inevitable—they require resolve and, often, public policy. With deliberate attempts to aim high and reject the hard biophysical limits of degrowthers, innovators can call out the potential of nature for the good of itself and everyday people. We need more of our own “Hail Mary” projects.

Facing the challenge of climate change will require ambitious ventures of natural stewardship. It’s true that a lot of the adaptation and mitigation work climate change requires can be accomplished with existing technology and approaches—active forest management, building energy infrastructure, and agricultural modernization. But now that global temperature averages are higher than any period in the last 100,000 years, climate change will require the humble, confident, and careful innovation of novel mitigation and adaptation technologies to be deployed where localities want. Marine cloud brightening can cool ecosystems and save coral reefs, as Australia is experimenting with right now. Glacial stabilization technology could slow the sea level rise that would drive mass migration and immense human suffering. Carbon dioxide removal through ocean enrichment could improve fisheries while mitigating climate change.

A similar opportunity exists for energy and industry. Massive public investment in research and commercialization made natural gas and solar the cheapest energy available. These projects have advanced both emission reductions and energy abundance. National projects to replicate this success to drive down the cost of even denser and cleaner energy resources like nuclear and geothermal could lead to three simultaneous outcomes. American industry would expand with new sources of cheap industrial heat and electricity. American families and families throughout the world would have lower energy costs. And by displacing higher-emission and higher-land-use resources, emissions and ecosystem loss would be mitigated. As the Breakthrough Institute’s Ted Nordhaus has pointed out, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright’s DOE has taken admirable steps to do just this, especially in nuclear development.

Directly addressing climate and energy challenges is only the beginning. There are many more projects of natural dominion, including active projects to support Great Salt Lake restoration with precipitation enhancement, to functionally de-extinct woolly mammoths for reintroduction to the Arctic, and to use gene drives to control mosquitoes and invasive species.

On each of these fronts, nature managers have chances to both reactively address challenges and proactively take opportunities to actively steward the Earth. But amassing the political will behind these projects will require a new consensus on the human person, technology, and our relationship to nature. As popular culture like Project Hail Mary shows, that consensus is already emerging.

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A pro-human ecology

As other reviewers have identified, there are strong Christian themes throughout Project Hail Mary. A man named Grace embarks on a sacrificial, likely fatal mission to save the world. He’s even delivered by a spaceship called “Mary.” The story’s ecological message is built on the same ground.

The Christian story says that the same characteristic that gives every human being inherent and equal dignity—the image of God—gives humanity the right and responsibility to tend the Garden. Grace exercises this office in the story by investigating Tau Ceti, engineering Taumoeba, and sending it back home to renew nature and support people. As leaders on the Right and the Left are embracing public Christianity, this conception of the human person offers a pro-human, techno-optimist ecology that transcends partisan affiliations. I’ve called it “an environmentalism of dominion.”

Dominion ecology offers a positive alternative to the misanthropic environmentalism of Paul Ehrlich. As the Breakthrough Institute’s Alex Trembath recently wrote, Ehrlich’s anti-humanism manifested in deep cruelty directed toward the poor, families, and mothers. His legacy is one of forced sterilization and abortions, and an anti-humanism that unfortunately still pervades parts of the environmental movement. All of this arose from Ehrlich’s deeply warped view of the human person. As we rethink ecology for this century, leaders on the Right and the Left should embrace the human person’s dignity and responsibility to tend the Garden. In doing so, each must overcome elements in their coalitions inclined toward dehumanization, lest we repeat the evils of misanthropic environmentalism.

Our environmental politics should reject Ehrlich’s lies. The human person is good. Our home is good. And technological ingenuity, inspired by nature, can elevate people and ecosystems by realizing the good of each.

Because of technological ambition, the present already has mRNA vaccines, abundant food, and cheap natural gas and solar. With a common good techno-ecology, the future could have woolly mammoths, dense clean energy in abundance, and a more stable climate, governed and enjoyed by thick human communities. Let’s advance more projects of dominion in the pattern of Dr. Ryland Grace and Norman Borlaug. The future of people, and nature, depend on them.

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Isaiah Menning is the External Affairs Director at the American Conservation Coalition, a nonprofit organization building the conservative environmental movement. Follow him on X @IsaiahMenning.

As suicide drones wing through the skies of the Middle East, bringing a sizable share of global oil and gas shipments to a grinding halt, the strategic significance of electrified technologies looms indisputably large. The proof is now in the pudding that solar panels are helping countries reduce exposure to natural gas scarcity and resultant price spikes, that electric vehicles are valuable for de-risking oil import dependence, and that mass-produced fleets of armed drones are disruptively changing how militaries fight wars.

Tremors in energy prices, suspension of industrial facilities such as aluminum smelters and fertilizer plants, and munitions shortages facing the combatant countries raise larger questions around resilient and competitive industrial production in an era of uncertain geopolitics and rapid technological change. The crisis has revealed the energy vulnerability of North American to European to Middle Eastern economies, compounding preexisting insecurities over the changing global landscape of industrial mass production.

In contrast, China’s position today inspires envy. Early large-scale bets in solar and EV deployment but also in drone production and managed, diversified gas sourcing have made China the manufacturer of record across a wide spectrum of highly-coveted to markedly mundane supply chains. China now generally defines how global political elites think of industrial might.

A growing number of technological and clean energy futurists now see China’s successful pursuit of batteries, solar power, computer chips, and electric motors as synonymous with its manufacturing mastery. Such arguments seek to shift the framing of this “electro-industrial stack” from a mere set of climate-friendly gadgets to the very essence of 21st century geopolitical and military power. Expertise and innovation sparked by iterative improvements and networking of electric vehicles, drones, and robots, they argue, catalyze vertical integration and competence across a whole ecosystem of other manufacturing industries.

But the purveyors of this thesis mistakenly assume that upstream inputs—critical minerals, key metal inputs, and chemicals—fall obediently into place in response to demand pull from value-added, feature-rich consumer products. In reality, metals and chemicals production require muscular industrial policy of their own to succeed, yet carry the potential to either constrain or catalyze downstream innovation. Whereas batteries, solar cells, semiconductor chips, and rare earth magnets are modular and democratized commodities with rapidly-improving performance, their supply chains are a series of bespoke, energy-intensive, large-scale metallurgical and chemical industries often heavily concentrated in China and viewed as uneconomic or uninvestible almost everywhere else.

If solar panels, batteries, and rare earth motors are the future key to national power, why is it only possible to manufacture them competitively in a single country? Part of the answer is that key tests of industrial mastery lie upstream in the ability to commercialize hard tech—including difficult chemical and metallurgical industrial processes—at vast economies of scale. Other countries seeking to rebuild such process knowledge must explicitly define their alternative to China’s model in these sectors. If governments and political elites hope vague prioritization of the “electrotech” technologies themselves can deliver industrial competitiveness, their misdiagnosis may well lead to profound disappointment.

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Metals all the way down

For all the teeth-gnashing that visionary Chinese industrial strategy has lapped the West in electric vehicles and drones, relatively few analysts have sought to dissect how China’s market share of unglamorous bulk raw material inputs and intermediates across its minerals, metallurgy, and chemicals sectors actually directly enables their market share in these finished, shiny consumer products.

Critical minerals get their nod, to be sure. In his widely-read essay “The Electro-Industrial Stack Will Move the World,” venture capital manager Ryan McEntush acknowledges “mineral sourcing and refining” as among the core areas of expertise that companies like BYD have built and calls for “software-native mineral and metal companies that operate at machine speed” to compete accordingly. Similarly, in an essay from September 2025, blogger Noah Smith devotes a line to the importance of these upstream supply chains: “If you want to be able to defend your country, you simply have no choice but to secure the Electric Tech Stack. And this includes securing the minerals that are necessary to create the Stack.” But such inputs are too important to address with a terse handwave—all the more so because these key commodities do not benefit from the kinds of software and consumer technology playbooks that commentators like McEntush and Smith laud the electrotech stack products for.

A hundred kilos of bagged 99.9999999% (9N) pure polysilicon chunks or a pallet of 99.7% aluminum foundry ingots are not “tested in simulation, updated over the air, and improved continuously as telemetry feeds back into design.” Nor does a kilogram of gallium or neodymium-iron-boron alloy powder benefit from the same cost learning curves as the semiconductor chips or wind turbine rotor drives that they go into. It is hard to imagine how AI will be particularly useful for mastering rare earth separation from mined ores in the face of arcane process knowledge, protected IP, and Chinese restrictions on technical secrets.

These ingredients of “electrotech” technologies are not themselves small-format, modular, robot-assembled, feature-rich, and digitally-connected but rather products of scaled industrial processing and refining. Strong demand pulls and industrial policies supporting manufacturing of the final technologies are not sufficient to establish dominance in their upstream supply chains and secure their end-to-end manufacture from mined ore to the microchip—a lesson that the U.S. is now learning in the wake of the CHIPS Act and one that Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan have grappled with in solar and battery manufacturing.

In fact, the critical industrial capability allowing China to eventually scale its solar, battery, rare earth permanent magnet, and computer chip industries was, arguably, a co-benefit of China’s achievement of producing 15 million metric tons per year of domestic primary aluminum (Figure 1). China passed this threshold in 2010, notching quadruple the aluminum output of global production runner-up Russia and more than quintuple that of Canada, in third place.

Considering aluminum as the foundation of the electrotech stack is more likely than not a little absurd, but it helps illustrate that pinpointing the electrotech stack as the essence of national industrial strength is overly narrow.

Today, the automobile manufacturing sector—a competitive industry where automakers have traditionally used hedging instruments to guard against swings in steel and aluminum prices—accounts for around one quarter of Chinese domestic aluminum consumption.

Meanwhile, China’s ability to produce 15 million tons of primary aluminum a year requires around 6 to 7 million tons of carbon anodes for the aluminum smelting process. The production route for these carbon anodes shares many commonalities with the industrial processes for synthetic battery graphite anode material—which makes up around 80% of the global battery anode market. China’s vast aluminum industry indeed catalyzed a network of standalone carbon anode plants whose capabilities and technical experience translated to battery applications. Every lithium-ion EV battery pack also directly uses around 30 to 50 kg of aluminum in cathode current collectors (and 50 to 80 kg of graphite), depending on battery size.

Provincial grid planners and engineering firms accustomed to cumulatively building one to two million tons of new aluminum smelter capacity yearly from 2007-2011 likewise gained experience in power plant construction and large industrial grid interconnections that supported a wave of comparably electricity-intensive solar and semiconductor-grade polysilicon refineries. Every kilometer of high-voltage power lines in turn requires around 12.9 tons of aluminum conductor cables.

For high-performance semiconductor chips and power electronics, China recovers the critical element gallium as a byproduct from its immense fleet of alumina (aluminum oxide) processing plants, which perform 62% of the world’s refining of aluminum-bearing bauxite ores into alumina. By regulation, Chinese alumina plants are required to extract gallium during the alumina refining process. Circa 2012 the world’s largest producer of gallium was the Aluminum Corporation of China (Chalco).

Finally, the electrolysis of rare earth oxides into rare earth metals borrows significantly from aluminum process knowledge, with Chinese researchers having regularly tested and adapted approaches from the latter for the former. An experienced chemical engineer transferring from Chalco to China Northern Rare Earth Group would adapt to rare earth metal refining relatively quickly. Indeed, Chalco’s Rare Earth and Metals division was one of three state-owned rare earth producers merged into the new China Rare Earth Group in 2021.

Rare earth refining, along with metallurgical-grade silicon (MGS) smelting and electric arc furnaces for steelmaking, again makes substantial use of graphite electrodes. Because metallurgical silicon is widely used in aluminum-silicon alloys, some MGS smelters in China are even co-located with aluminum smelters. With all this laid out, aluminum’s place in the electrotech industrial network appears increasingly coherent.

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The shared ingredients behind electrotech

The advantages of heavy industrial process knowledge for competitiveness in electrotech stack and other technologies extend well beyond aluminum, of course.

While many observers have focused on chronicling the Chinese success in manufacturing iPhones and electric vehicles, the upstream supply chains feeding into batteries, solar cells, chips, and magnets are themselves crucial. The raw materials at the center of these technologies importantly determine the performance or form factor of the final product—the size or thinness of the silicon wafer, the capacity and longevity of the battery, and the strength of a permanent magnet motor.

Across graphite, battery active material synthesis, aluminum, metallurgical silicon, solar-grade polysilicon, solar wafers, gallium, rare earth oxides, and rare earth magnets, China manufactures around nine to ten times the volume as the next-largest global producer. This amounts to an extraordinarily powerful industrial ecosystem, built upon technical expertise but also vast old-school industrial plants and an abundance of baseload electricity generation.

For instance, in the solar, chip, and rare earth magnet supply chains, certain steps are almost obligatorily co-located. Neodymium-iron-boron alloy powders can react with both air and water and spontaneously combust, restricting transportation to short distances and forcing magnet production facilities to be located near rare earth metal refineries. Competitiveness in rare earth permanent magnet production thus depends heavily upon competitiveness in rare earth metal refining, a technically-challenging metallurgical step with miniscule to nonexistent profit margins.

Similarly, China’s share of solar manufacturing is most formidable precisely at the “ingot/wafer” step—the growth of monocrystalline high-purity silicon ingots, followed by the slicing of those ingots into solar wafers. Ingots are so sensitive to damage and contamination that solar and semiconductor wafer manufacturers typically perform wafering at the same facility, such that most industry publications refer to “ingot/wafer” capacity as a single step. Co-location of wafer production and solar cell manufacturing also possesses additional synergies, incentivizing vertically-integrated solar manufacturing.

Many of these relevant upstream commodities that Chinese firms have mastered are also highly electricity-intensive—enough to be classified as “congealed electricity,” a term traditionally used to describe the energy-intensity of aluminum production (Figure 2). Synthetic graphite battery anode material requires a little more electricity per ton to produce than aluminum, with electricity accounting for one-third of the cost of the graphitization step. Metallurgical silicon and rare earth metals are likewise “congealed electricity” due to the electricity requirements of their smelting and refining, respectively. Nickel metal for stainless steel production, a global market that Chinese-Indonesian mining and refining joint ventures have turned on its head in the last ten years, is more than three times as electricity-intensive as aluminum. Meanwhile, the Siemens process for polysilicon refining, which Chinese producers first adopted when taking the solar-grade polysilicon market by storm, is more than five times as electricity-intensive as aluminum smelting, with electricity accounting for 40% of the process cost.

Figure 2: Electricity consumption of major current and proposed industrial processes, in kilowatt-hours per ton of metal or material produced. Emergent proposed processes include hydrogen electrolysis and green steel production via the green hydrogen direct reduced iron electric arc furnace (DRI-EAF) and molten oxide electrolysis routes.

China sourced the energy to feed these growing industries mainly from coal and hydropower. In many cases, China had already achieved dominance in these electricity-intensive commodities by 2015 if not 2010, well before the country began adding noticeable margins of wind and solar electricity onto its grid. While reporters and analysts are now uncritically lavishing attention on recent and future announced shifts of new marginal industrial capacity towards hydropower, wind, and solar, few seem interested in considering how Chinese industry climbed to its current level of production in the first place. After all, it is far easier for Chinese policymakers to experiment and tighten clean energy standards when already sitting atop the commanding heights of the supply mountain.

The unvarnished truth is that Chinese industrialists used the country’s last great wave of coal-fired and environmentally-unabated heavy industry buildout to master process knowledge across a whole host of strategically valuable capabilities. As Ember energy strategist Kingsmill Bond and energy systems professor Jesse Jenkins put it during one recent conversation, China invested its coal power wisely as an “endowment” to take the lead in important emerging industries.

Runaway Chinese success in charismatic and futuristic sectors like electric vehicles and drones must be understood as part of a larger story spanning flat glass, PVC materials, magnesium, and silicones, where survival on thin profit margins hinges upon fairly traditional pillars of scaled heavy industry: vertical integration, cheap energy, and cheap feedstocks.

Amusingly, batteries, solar and semiconductor polysilicon, rare earth permanent magnets, and aluminum all use petroleum coke as an input—for battery graphite, metallurgical silicon, and carbon anodes, respectively. While some might scoff at petroleum coke’s significance relative to the more important industrial factors listed above, all of the electrotech stack products would be much more expensive if their production had to make use of non-fossil alternatives.

What all of this conveys is that competitiveness in these industries is built upon sprawling process plants of furnace halls and distillation columns just as much if not more so than they are upon manicured, automated “dark factories” and clean rooms. The ability to build a new greenfield metallurgical plant or chemical plant is as critical as the ability to build a shiny, vast, robot-equipped auto manufacturing complex. It should be worrying, then, for the European and North American commentators ruminating over industrial power, that their countries struggle much more with the former than the latter.

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The hard industrial choices ahead

The important if obvious realization from a closer look at earlier supply chain steps is that batteries, solar cells, chips, and magnets are not in fact very useful for reproducing themselves. “If you want to be able to defend your country,” as Smith puts it, it is clear that it must be able to mass-manufacture drones. However, mastery of electrotech, industrial dominance, and the capacity to produce a million drones monthly fundamentally depend on regaining some ability to scale upstream components and materials that global investors now casually speak of as oversupplied and uninvestible outside of China. The temptation with electrotech thinking is to focus overly on deployment, software, AI, product iteration, and final assembly and continue letting someone else figure out the difficult unglamorous steps of polysilicon or lithium refining.

It is not yet clear that the mass-manufacturing of drone swarms needs to be particularly solar-powered or even clean. In fact, the expectation that the electrotech discourse sets up is the same old wine in new bottles as the climate movement presuming that any new heavy industrial capacity developed upstream should be maximally electrified and decarbonized. The similar consensus among many climate-minded policymakers in Europe or North America ten to fifteen years ago that fully low-carbon industries were the optimal and preferred way forward may bear some partial responsibility for the current industrial disparity that political elites are now worrying about today.

Cheap industrial electricity is indeed critical, making solar and batteries useful but far from sufficient. Hurdles like super greenhouse gas emissions from aluminum and rare earth metal smelting, the use of coal as a reducing agent for metallurgical silicon and nickel production, and the basic difficulty of accommodating large flat heavy industrial electricity consumption with entirely variable renewable sources remain imposing. The challenges of competing with low-cost Chinese industrial market power in these commodities only entrench such decarbonization obstacles further.

If everyone were to follow the actual Chinese industrial dominance recipe of investing their own fossil endowments into rebuilding process knowledge—as observably practiced through the 2010s—the world can likely kiss carbon budgets goodbye (perhaps building a lot of hydropower as some silver lining). Indeed, if elite thinkers remain insistent that the only path to competitive national industry is a pure green path, they must understand this remains a yet untraveled path that China itself is only just starting to experiment with.

In one interview, Kingsmill Bond dismissed harder-to-decarbonize industrial sectors while emphasizing the enormous progress on emissions and electrification that governments could capitalize on immediately: “People often focus on hard to solve sectors and that’s great and I salute [those folks] but actually we shouldn’t forget that we can already get solar and wind to around 70 or 80% of electricity demand and we can already electrify around 75% of our economy.”

What planners and commentators must keep in mind is that many of the electrotech stack’s supply chains happen to reside heavily in the hardest 30%. Even assuming fully green electricity is indeed cheap, green metals, by all accounts, will not be. If policymakers remain determined to simultaneously pursue environmental performance alongside strategic security and competitiveness, then fostering such alternative ex-China production will neither be cheap, nor emerge naturally from free market outcomes.

Selectively framing the future of industrial mastery around the most photogenic technologies risks ending up with an incomplete recipe—one can’t just pick a few favorites, trace their supply chains back to their roots, prioritize those inputs too, and call it a day. Recall that technologies like Siemens process polysilicon refining, lithium-iron-phosphate batteries, and even early techniques for rare earth metal refining were originally innovated in countries like Germany and the United States with considerable public sector support. A failure to scale manufacturing outside China owes a great deal to broader industrial conditions—higher-cost energy, higher-cost feedstocks, higher plant capital costs, atrophied engineering and technical expertise, halfhearted investor interest in hard tech, and a policy and regulatory environment non-conducive to dynamism or economies of scale.

As goods like aluminum and graphite electrodes illustrate, strategic industries are interconnected and linked to “non-strategic” industries in surprising and unpredictable ways. The broader aim of industrial policy is to cultivate an energy-industrial ecosystem that can effectively procure upstream capabilities on its own to adapt to the evolving technological cutting edge. The operative test of such an ecosystem may well be whether it can build and commission a new metallurgical or chemical plant as necessary. The challenge for Japan, India, the United States, or the European Union will be developing a non-Chinese formula for bringing that plant into operation.

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In 1968, a little-known ecologist named Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, which aimed to bring attention to the perceived dangers of rapid population expansion. Almost three million copies were sold worldwide, marking a turning point in the global discourse on population control. Much of the book’s popularity was driven by Ehrlich’s portrayal of India as an example of the catastrophic consequences of unchecked population growth.

Ehrlich’s views were formed during a family trip to India in the 1960s. He famously described the experience of arriving in New Delhi as overwhelming and alarming. In The Population Bomb, he wrote:“People eating, people washing, people sleeping… people, people, people, people.”

India symbolized the limits of human carrying capacity. According to Ehrlich, India would be among the first to suffer catastrophic food shortages because agricultural production could not keep pace with population growth. Its rapid population increase was unsustainable and would result in famine and societal collapse. Ehrlich predicted imminent mass starvation:“The battle to feed all of humanity is over.” He added “hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death” and “nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.”

Ehrlich’s book, reprinted twenty times by the early 1970s, succeeded in creating a climate of fear around the size of India’s population. Appearing several times on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, he gained a huge following with his predictions of a world with too many people, running out of food. Policymakers and philanthropists jumped on board with sterilization programs and incentives for smaller families. Doug Ensminger, the Ford Foundation’s representative in India, designed and financed large-scale family planning programs, including experimental programs that tested new methods of contraception on Indians. Ensminger’s goal was to embed population control within the machinery of the Indian state.

It worked.

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On June 25, 1975, Indira Gandhi, who served as prime minister from 1966 to 1977 and, again, from1980 to 1984, declared a state of Emergency. The decision followed mounting political unrest, economic challenges, and a court ruling that invalidated her 1971 election victory on grounds of electoral malpractice. Invoking Article 352 of the Indian Constitution, her government cited threats to national security and stability, but the move was primarily aimed at preserving political power. During this period, the Indian state curtailed democratic processes, arrested opposition leaders, and imposed strict censorship on the press.

The suspension of democracy during the Emergency enabled a coercive campaign that led to the sterilization of millions of men. Indira Gandhi’s son Sanjay, the driving force behind the campaign, believed that reducing birth rates quickly would ease pressure on land, jobs, housing, and public services, and help India move faster toward industrialization. Local officials were given quotas, and in many areas coercive tactics were used. Men were rounded up, detained, denied access to food rations and housing permits, and threatened with job loss, all unless they agreed to be sterilized. Local authorities and police conducted mass sterilization camps, often under unsafe and unhygienic conditions. Millions of men suffered health complications. Some men were forced to undergo serious procedures, and the many who did “consent” did so under duress.

The program expanded rapidly, disproportionately targeting poorer and marginalized communities. Over 6 million sterilizations (mostly male vasectomies) were carried out in 1976 alone. Precise figures on deaths are harder to establish, but contemporary reports and later analyses indicate that hundreds, and possibly thousands, of men died due to botched procedures, infections, or poor conditions in overcrowded camps. The lack of medical oversight and the pressure to meet quotas contributed to outcomes that left a lasting stigma around family planning programs.

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Despite these brutal efforts, India’s population growth did not slow down. Between 1971 and 1981, India’s population grew by roughly 24% from 548 million to 683 million people. And, yet, India never ran out of food.

Instead, India benefited from the Green Revolution, which introduced high-yielding varieties of rice and wheat to poor countries. Advances in high-yielding varieties of rice and wheat, along with the use of irrigation and fertilizer, allowed India to become self-sufficient in food. Even as Ehrlich was making the rounds on American TV, Indian farmers had figured out how to grow three times the amount of wheat and twice the amount of rice on the same amount of land.

The Green Revolution freed up rural labor that moved into more productive sectors, contributing to the structural transformation of India’s economy. Lower food prices helped urban workers reduce their cost of living, which in turn supported industrial growth. At the same time, public investments in education, healthcare, and infrastructure bore fruit. As child mortality declined and economic opportunities expanded, people chose to have fewer children. A 2021 study of the Green Revolution estimated that a 10 percent increase in the adoption of high-yielding varieties of rice and wheat increased GDP per capita by 15 percent.

But, Ehrlich simply refused to acknowledge this demographic transition, preferring to see India’s population as an endless driver of poverty and instability.

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Ehrlich’s vivid description of crowds vastly oversimplified the complex reality of India. India was not a nation overwhelmed by its circumstances, unable to take effective action. Rather, it pursued a deliberate strategy to build food security through state-led investment and institutional innovation. Beginning in the 1950s and accelerating in the 1960s, the government expanded agricultural research through bodies such as the Indian Council of Agricultural Research and agricultural universities, which helped develop and disseminate high-yielding varieties of wheat and rice. At the same time, policymakers provided incentives to increase production: minimum support prices, input subsidies for fertilizers and irrigation, and credit programs aimed at farmers. These measures were complemented by the establishment of procurement and distribution institutions like the Food Corporation of India and the Public Distribution System, which enabled the state to purchase grain, maintain buffer stocks, and deliver subsidized food to vulnerable populations. Together, these policies formed the backbone of the Green Revolution, particularly in regions such as Punjab and Haryana.

The results were transformative. India moved from a position of chronic food shortages and dependence on imports in the early 1960s to near self-sufficiency in staple grains within a decade. Large-scale famines—once a recurring feature—were effectively eliminated. The gains were uneven: regions with better access to water and infrastructure benefited most, while rain-fed and poorer areas lagged behind. The intensive use of fertilizers and groundwater introduced long-term environmental stresses. Even so, the overall trajectory was clear—India emerged as one of the world’s leading agricultural producers, with the capacity to feed its population and maintain significant public grain reserves, reshaping its rural economy and reducing the risk of mass starvation. Today, it uses advanced digital techniques to predict the onset of monsoons. India’s development story could not be more different from Ehrlich’s rigid and pessimistic views.

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Paul Ehrlich turned a vacation to India into a thinly-researched book that brought him fame and fortune. His stereotype of a densely-populated land, unable to sustain itself, remains influential to this day, as doomsayers (now with a climate twist) compete to take his place. The historian Naomi Oreskes asserts that eight billion people represent a crisis, not an achievement. People living in poor countries, she says, lack opportunity. Despite a mountain of evidence on technological advances and smart policies that have resulted in fewer poor people, rapid economic growth, and more food being grown on less land, there is no dearth of people regurgitating Ehrlich’s failed arguments. An obituary in the New York Times states that his findings were “premature” and brands his critics as “conservatives and academic rivals.”

The apocalyptic scenario Paul Ehrlich predicted for India never came to pass. New seeds, fertilizer, irrigation, and human ingenuity provide more than enough food for the 1.4 billion people who live there. In the end, Ehrlich will be remembered not for rigorous scholarship but for preying on the anxieties of people in wealthy nations for his own gain.

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As the last major effort for bipartisan permitting reform fizzled out at the end of the last Congress, both protagonists and observers settled upon two dueling explanations for the political failure of the Energy Permitting and Reform Act (EPRA). The first was that the green groups did the deed, opposing judicial reform and other key changes to the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) that spiked a deal with Republicans. The second was that the utility industry was responsible, opposing reforms that would have made it easier for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to override state opposition to new interstate transmission lines because they feared that new transmission would increase competition from out of state generators.

The first of these explanations is undoubtedly true. Green groups made no bones about their opposition to the package pushed by then West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin and Wyoming’s John Barrasso. Despite a lot of handwaving in some green quarters about the need to build, not a single major green group came out publicly in support of EPRA.

But the role that utilities played is more complicated. Not every major utility opposed EPRA and some publicly supported it. Rural electricity co-ops and publicly owned utilities opposed the transmission reform provisions in EPRA as did a subset of investor-owned, vertically integrated monopoly utilities in states that have not liberalized their electricity markets.

The dispute, ostensibly, was about whether states should be forced to pay for transmission capacity that they don’t want or need. But it was also about an attempt to use transmission reform as a trojan horse to force states where utilities continue to be traditionally structured and regulated to allow competition from merchant power generators.

As Democrats and Republicans gear up for one more go at a permitting reform deal, there are lessons from the failed effort to pass EPRA in the dying days of the last Congress that might help avert a similar fate in this Congress. Transmission reform needs to work not only for utilities and states that have liberalized their electricity markets but also for those that have not. For decades, advocates for electricity market liberalization have argued that competition would lower rates and accelerate decarbonization. But the real world evidence for these benefits is mixed at best. Simultaneously, the ability of traditionally regulated utilities and regulators to plan for new generation, transmission, and distribution has real strengths that advocates for market competition have underestimated. Using transmission reform to force competition on states that have not signed up for liberalization is bad politics and bad policy.

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Electricity Market Liberalization Has Been a Mixed Bag

Both renewable energy advocates and proponents of electricity market competition have long directed fire at traditional cost-of-service utilities, both believing that supply-side competition will drive down electricity prices by opening up the grid to alternative energy sources. Vertically integrated utilities, in this view, restrict the free market’s ability to lower prices and bring new energy technology to market. There is some truth to this argument. Data collected since restructuring in the 1990s shows that competition in deregulated markets does indeed improve dispatch and decrease production costs.

But the relationship between wholesale electricity market competition and lower observed electricity rates is tenuous. Lower production costs don’t necessarily lower consumer prices because electricity markets remain deeply imperfect. Generators can exert market power, markets are influenced by state policies, and public goods like reliability and grid inertia aren’t properly valued, even by capacity and ancillary markets. Multiple analyses of deregulated regions suggest that dispatch of cheaper generation doesn’t even translate into lower wholesale price, much less retail prices.

Production costs, moreover, are just a fraction of the prices seen by end users. In an analysis of utility spending reports to FERC, EIA found that, while production costs nationwide decreased 24% from 2003 to 2023, spending on transmission tripled and spending on distribution grew 160%. EIA goes so far as to explicitly state that “capital spending on the distribution system, responsible for delivering electricity to end users, was the main driver of electricity spending increases over the last two decades.”

In practice, the choice between competitive markets and cost-of-service regulation has real tradeoffs. For instance, deregulated markets tend to beget volatility. Prices subject to real-time swings in supply and demand expose consumers to the volatility of fuel prices and supply-demand imbalances. The cost-of-service model doesn’t eliminate these impacts entirely, but helps smooth them out over a longer time horizon, protecting ratepayers from feeling price spikes as acutely.

If one regulatory model were objectively better than the other, it would demonstrate so on the grounds of a utility’s core mandate: to provide reliable electricity at the least cost possible to consumers. Yet deregulation has not emerged as a clear winner.

Consider resource adequacy. Deregulated regions internalize resource adequacy with market structures like ancillary and capacity markets that offer profits to private developers willing to build generation needed for long-term resource adequacy. But resource adequacy, and reliability more broadly, are public goods that can’t be bought and sold in any organic market. Because of this, electricity markets struggle with proper valuation. Markets are also influenced by inconsistent risk tolerances between regions and states, distortionary political interventions (e.g., renewable portfolio standards and state tax credits), and regulations that cap energy prices during periods of extreme scarcity (e.g., Texas electricity prices hitting the state’s $9/kWh cap during Winter Storm Uri). On net, merchant developers in competitive markets typically wait to start new construction until they see strong enough price signals. This often leaves deregulated regions with thinner margins of excess capacity to act as a buffer against, say, an unanticipated explosion of demand from data centers.

Regulated utilities can tackle resource adequacy with the advantages of centralized decision making, stable financing, and predictable revenue. As both the system planner and the system builder, they don’t experience a coordination gap between the identification of a need and that need getting fulfilled. This lets regulated utilities construct larger projects that serve long-term resource adequacy forecasts rather than limiting new construction to what near-term market signals justify.

As a result, vertically integrated utilities are structurally better equipped to accommodate large loads like data centers and industrial facilities and to build energy megaprojects like nuclear, hydropower, and even offshore wind. Market liberalization has proven deadly for both firm, low carbon generation and large loads. Since restructuring began, liberalized markets have contributed to the closure of 6.5 GW of nuclear generation. The replacement of long-term industrial price agreements has contributed to the closure of 85% of U.S. aluminum smelting capacity since 1980. No liberalized market in the US or abroad has succeeded in deploying a new reactor or smelter. Ever.

Critics will point out that guaranteed rates of return on billion dollar megaprojects incentivizes utilities to overrun costs. Again, this argument is not wrong, but it is incomplete. Yes, the cost-of-service model puts the risk of overbuild onto ratepayers. But liberalized markets burden ratepayers with risk too; they only shift it to the opposite scenario by imposing steep scarcity prices if past market signals caused underbuilding.

Is it better to bill ratepayers for larger safety margins, knowing that utility gold-plating makes up at least some of those costs, or to use markets to ensure, on average, leaner spending on generation but increase household electricity prices at the times when that conservatism falls short? The case for the latter is by no means clear enough to justify fixating on competition and deregulation, a stance that only works to the country’s collective detriment at a time when bulk system reliability demands collaboration and coordination over homogeneity.

Figure 1: Conceptual table of societal risk burdens under cost-of-service versus competitive electricity market structures

At any rate, using transmission reform to increase competition in regulated markets in the name of affordability, reliability, and decarbonization fails to reckon with how deregulated markets have yet to deliver on their promises.

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Decoupling Transmission Reform from Stealth Deregulation

Unfortunately, proposed federal transmission reforms of the past few years have indeed erred towards the deregulatory thesis—directly and circumspectly proposing increases in federal authorities to promulgate competition.

The Energy Bills Relief Act introduced by Reps. Levin and Casten in March 2026, for example, would mandate minimum electrical transfer capacity between regions, give FERC ultimate authority to allocate the costs for a broad and vague classification of transmission lines of “national significance,” and require that demand response be “eligible to participate in all wholesale energy markets regardless of the State in which they are located.” Physical ties to neighboring deregulated regions exposes regulated utilities to the argument that lower cost imports should displace new local investment. While this would not definitively lead to deregulation, it allows ratepayer advocates to make the case to state commissions that utilities should trade with external generators and integrate with competitive markets in lieu of investing in local generation and infrastructure. Integration and interconnection may make sense in some cases, but those determinations need to be made in the context of comprehensive, long-term planning. Moreover, statutes like these in the Energy Bills Relief Act make no attempt to integrate with regional processes or the limits placed on FERC jurisdiction by the Federal Power Act, nor do they ensure ratepayers on one side of a line won’t pay for benefits received only on the other.

The press release announcing the Energy Bills Relief Act—and the bill title itself—frame these policies around lowering electricity prices. But it wasn’t too long ago that policymakers openly pushed for similar reforms to advance the interests of competitive electricity markets and renewables into cost-of-service regions. The CHARGE Act of 2022 mandated competitive procurement and eliminated right of first refusal laws for new generation built outside of an RTO or ISO, with sections titled “Promoting Competition for Generation” and “Due Regard for Fair Competition.” The 2023 SITE Act proposed allowing FERC to pre-empt state legislatures for interstate transmission lines that “enable the use of renewable energy,” while the 2025 Reinforcing the Grid Against Extreme Weather Act called on FERC to consider “improved access to electricity generating facilities with no direct emissions of greenhouse gases” and “increased competition and market liquidity in electricity markets” as transmission benefits to determine minimum mandatory interregional transfer capacities.

EPRA, to its credit, steers clear of many of these excesses, shedding the unambiguous use of deregulatory and renewables-biased language seen in its predecessor bills. But traces of that approach still exist. EPRA, for instance, would allow FERC to issue siting permits for interstate transmission at or above 100 kV. This change makes much needed improvements to the existing federal siting pathway that bureaucratic redundancies and legal challenges have made nearly impossible to use. And while the 100 kV provision does constrain FERC’s siting authority compared to the status quo (the existing authority has no such voltage floor), the very act of making the siting pathway usable nets an increase in federal powers well above the floor at which they would likely be particularly efficient or practical. Half of the country’s transmission lines are at or over 100 kV [Figure 1]. 100 kV transmission is significantly more expensive per unit capacity than higher voltage lines [Figure 2]. Raising the voltage floor to, say, 230 kV, would reserve federal authority for projects that clearly exploit transmission’s high economies of scale and promote more efficient utility spending. Democrats genuinely interested in interregional transmission should be prepared to concede points like a 100 kV limiter for the greater good of the permitting package, which almost certainly provides more benefit for transmission than extending federal siting authority to thousands of lines at the lowest possible voltages to be considered part of the bulk power system.

Figure 2: Number of transmission lines in the United States by voltage class. Approximately 52% (44,665) of lines with documented voltage levels are rated between 100 and 161 kV.

Figure 3: Cost per MW-mile (rated capacity) for a new AC, single-circuit transmission line at different voltage levels. Assumes a 100 mile line, addition of two breaker-and-a-half positions (one each terminal), power factor of 0.95, and conductor specs provided in MISO’s 2024 transmission cost estimation guide. Calculated data may not be accurate outside of the MISO footprint.

Bottom line, rather than assuming that interregional lines maximize social welfare, federal policies should instead facilitate interregional planning processes that use local cost-benefit analyses to evaluate projects on their merits. States, utilities, and other stakeholders are far more likely to support federal transmission policies that let them participate in planning from the outset and that align with existing FERC rules. Even if interregional planning is federally required, it retains local autonomy, making it significantly more palatable than top-down, prescriptive transmission mandates.

It is also crucial that interregional transmission planning operate in parallel with both region’s internal transmission plans, and that these joint transmission plans use objective criteria that regions agree upon a priori to calculate a project’s benefits. This builds upon interregional planning provisions in EPRA that require consideration of existing regional transmission plans but don’t ensure that interregional lines are directly evaluated as alternatives to multiple regional projects. Such criteria should consider both the least and most cost-efficient solutions across the shared geographic area that improve bulk system performance defined using quantifiable metrics already employed by the power sector. Importantly, such criteria should exclude more politically-laden criteria like promotion of clean energy, regional carbon emissions, and other vague benefits. After all, one state should not have to pay higher rates to help another state meet its clean energy policy targets. If climate advocates believe so firmly in the growing economic power of clean energy sources, they should take appropriate confidence that such characteristics will manifest empirically in cost-optimized reliability planning.

If interregional planning selects an interregional line as a worthy project, it stands to reason that the affected states and entities should cooperate to build and pay for them. To prevent intractable disagreements over the exact share of costs that each involved state’s ratepayers should bear, federal policy should also require in advance that states formalize agreements on a default cost allocation formula to pay for a project in the event that it meets cost-benefit criteria. Here again, the early involvement of key decisionmakers improves this transmission reform framework’s political viability by letting them craft the agreements that will hold them accountable moving forward.

FERC siting authority should only apply in cases where states refuse to issue siting permits as a veto to block transmission projects that regional planning or rigorous independent analysis has already singled out as desirable for the areas they would connect. In such instances, FERC is only intervening to enforce agreements that the relevant stakeholders have already consented to—to advance a public interest that project-specific modeling has already empirically identified. Notably absent from this framework is any ideological attempt to impose competition upon vertically-integrated utility territories for its own sake.

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Market Neutral National Transmission Policy Is Good

In the end energy system evolution and decarbonization will have to move forward in numerous vertically-integrated, regulated jurisdictions as well as in deregulated electricity markets, federal organizations like the Tennessee Valley Authority or Bonneville Power Administration, and not-for-profit, community-owned utilities. Of these options, many states will choose to retain regulated monopolies in the electricity sector and have every right to do so.

Regions with competitive electricity markets are not going anywhere either. It is difficult to imagine putting Humpty-Dumpty back together, nationalizing all generation and transmission assets, and re-bundling everything under one roof again in places like New England, California, and Texas.

The United States, being a large and diverse country with strong regional and state-based identities, contains a myriad of regulatory flavors and will likely continue to do so. In a federal system, Congress should be expected to craft transmission policy reforms that let a thousand flowers bloom, rather than implicitly dictating one electricity market structure over another. If Congress and energy policy commentators want to build lines connecting wind and solar in the Great Plains to coastal population hubs or to restructure utility regulation in states that currently operate under the traditional cost of service monopoly utility model, they should debate such ideas explicitly rather than using transmission to fight a proxy war over competition and renewable energy despite the lack of clear evidence that these objectives efficiently improve affordability and reliability or accelerate decarbonization.

Meaningful and politically-durable transmission reform, rather, need only ensure that transmission planning regions coordinate to identify—and build—projects that genuinely benefit both regions, and to codify agreements between states for sharing project costs. Such a framework rightly leaves decisions over preferred utility or market structures up to regions and states, retaining federal siting authorities but only for transmission lines that participatory interregional planning has already identified as beneficial to all parties involved.

Even if critics of traditional monopoly utilities are correct that such territories would continue to block interconnections that might introduce competing sources of electricity generation, a compromise would still facilitate interregional transmission between other areas of the country—a vast improvement from the currently intractable status quo. At the same time, the empirically-grounded regional planning processes mandated by this policy framework would focus greater political pressure upon bad-faith stakeholders if they were indeed seeking to prevent worthy projects from moving forward.

By the same token, if utilities operating under cost-of-service regulation are correct that their regional systems are cost-efficient, resilient, and in conformity with reliability requirements, then the regional planning process will vindicate their claims and deem additional interconnections unnecessary. If they are mistaken, then they possess an obligation to their regulators and their ratepayers to support new high-voltage lines identified as beneficial.

Just as grid operators and researchers rely on centrally-designed power system models to test scenarios and hypotheses, the solution to regionally contested transmission expansion is to evaluate results scientifically: 30 years of observations from the American Experiment with reconstruction fail to corroborate the hypothesis that competitive markets are more effective than cost-of-service regulation. Policymakers should adopt this narrow and more technically-informed mindset to decouple the transmission debate from fraught ideological goals around preferred market models and favored generation technologies, increasing the odds that Congress will enact politically durable and materially successful permitting and transmission reforms.

This article has been revised in order to clarify language and discussion points regarding several policies and regulations.

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This month, the Breakthrough Institute, with support from the law firm Van Ness Feldman, filed an amicus brief in Lighthiser v. Trump, a suit brought by the climate activist organization Our Children’s Trust (OCT) against the Trump administration’s executive orders on “unleashing fossil fuels.” In our brief, we argue the Ninth Circuit Court should not only affirm the suit’s previous dismissal by the Montana District Court but reject OCT’s claims on substantive as well as procedural grounds.

Breakthrough has long supported action to address climate change and to accelerate the deployment of clean energy technology. So why have we elected to file an amicus brief challenging a lawsuit brought by climate advocates that will almost certainly be rejected by the court anyway?

First, because the case tests a series of claims that the climate movement has persistently made that simply misrepresent the facts. The plaintiffs claim that the Trump administration’s EOs will appreciably increase US greenhouse gas emissions, that this increase in emissions will appreciably increase atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases and global temperatures, and that this increase in global temperatures will appreciably intensify weather extremes and other climate impacts that will cause additional harm to the the public. Every step in this logic chain is dubious.

The court room, as opposed to the court of public opinion, requires a much higher standard for both evidence and argument. Wise climate and energy policy, whether pursued through the judicial, legislative, or executive branches, requires some basic fidelity to both climate science and techno-economic reality. This is as true for the climate movement as it is for the Trump administration.

Second, because this suit reveals a strong anti-democratic strain of thought and action that is apparent in the broader strategy that OCT and other climate litigants are pursuing through the courts and is endemic to the climate movement more generally. OCT asks the courts to invent a new constitutional right from whole cloth—a right to a “stable climate” and “livable future”—to overturn policy undertaken by democratically elected policymakers based upon this newfangled constitutional principle, and to require a rapid transition away from fossil fuels by judicial fiat.

Neither concern about climate change nor antipathy toward the Trump administration’s energy dominance agenda and climate skepticism can justify these demands. Rightly or wrongly, there is no right to a livable climate in the Constitution. Climate change is a serious problem but there is no good evidence that climate change, now or in the foreseeable future, threatens a livable climate. Nor is there any well established science that can establish prospectively that Trump administration policies will significantly increase emissions or that an extremely marginal additional contribution to warming that these policies might cause would result in any measurable intensification of climate extremes or impacts.

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Energy Forecasts Are Hard, Even About the Near Future

As in prior cases such as Juliana v. United States, lower courts have often dismissed suits like Lighthiser on procedural grounds while largely accepting the plaintiffs’ scientific claims at face value. For this reason, a closer legal examination is overdue.

To establish its claim against the Trump administration, Lighthiser elevates factors that are, at best, minor contributors to the trajectory of emissions, warming, and climate impacts, presenting them instead as dominant drivers. This synecdoche is necessary to sustain the lawsuit’s central claim: that Trump administration policies will increase emissions, accelerate warming, and harm the plaintiffs.

To support this argument, the plaintiffs rely on modeling by Princeton energy systems scholar and our former colleague Jesse Jenkins, projecting that Trump’s executive actions will increase U.S. emissions. Jenkins is an accomplished researcher, but also a prominent climate advocate and architect of Biden-era climate policy. After passage of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), he published widely cited projections suggesting the law and related policies would reduce U.S. emissions by 37–41% by 2030 and 43–48% by 2035, with battery electric vehicles exceeding 80% of new light-duty vehicle sales and zero-carbon electricity reaching roughly 90% by 2035.

Soon after the law’s passage, however, Jenkins acknowledged that roughly 80% of those modeled emissions reductions depended on a massive expansion of high-voltage transmission infrastructure. Subsequent work from his laboratory found wind and solar deployment lagging earlier forecasts. In 2022, REPEAT modeling projected roughly 50 gigawatts of solar, 40 gigawatts of wind, and EVs reaching 20% of the new-vehicle market by 2025. Actual figures were closer to 43 gigawatts, 7 gigawatts, and 9%, respectively. Much of this divergence predates Trump’s re-election.

Jenkins has since produced new analyses estimating that Trump policies could add more than 500 million tons of CO2 by 2035. But as with his earlier projections, these analyses depend on highly uncertain assumptions about technology, markets, geopolitics, and policy effectiveness.

Like a lot of advocacy-oriented modeling, Jenkins’ models have been prone to overemphasize the impact of the policies they are aiming to shape.

While it is certainly plausible that U.S. emissions could be somewhat higher over the next decade under Trump than they would have been under a hypothetical Harris administration, the inverse is just as easily possible. The AI and data center boom would almost certainly have driven the deployment of significant new fossil generation under a Harris administration, just as they are under the Trump administration. Trump’s military adventure in Iran, meanwhile, is driving up energy prices to a degree that would have been unlikely under Harris, creating better market conditions for wind, solar, nuclear, and other non-fossil energy sources.

Even the explicit energy policy comparison is not so clearcut. Over the long term, the Trump administration’s conspicuously efficacious nuclear innovation agenda, and perhaps a bipartisan deal on permitting reform that eluded the Biden administration, may prove every bit as important, if not more so, than the Biden-era policies that the Trump administration and Republican Congress have revoked.

Jenkins at least grounds his analyses in a realistic understanding of energy technologies and their costs. Elsewhere, Lighthiser relies upon far more dubious energy researchers and analysis. In his own declaration submitted by the plaintiffs, Stanford’s Mark Jacobson writes that “the United States no longer needs fossil fuels for its energy purposes and has not for some time.” Jacobson’s discredited claims, along with a heavy reliance on the reductive and misleading levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) metric in Joseph Stiglitz’s and Geoffrey Heal’s respective briefs, are called upon to support the notion that the U.S. energy system could be immediately and easily transitioned to non-fossil technologies. This is far outside mainstream consensus in energy systems and technology analysis, and should be understood as such by the courts.

Forecasts, of course, are hard, especially about the future. As we and others have consistently noted over the last decade, there is little evidence that climate policy has had much impact on decarbonization rates over the long term. Emissions have often fallen faster under Republican administrations than Democratic ones, including during Trump’s first term. That’s because long-term decarbonization trends have historically been driven by macroeconomic forces and technological change, not climate policy. Both are influenced in various ways by policy. But mostly not the sorts of policy that the climate movement, Lighthiser, and Jenkins’ models seek to center in the climate discourse, policy debates, and litigation.

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Misrepresenting Climate Science In Service of Vexatious Litigation

Even accepting Jenkins’ estimates, it is hard to establish that Trump Administration policies will have much impact on global warming. Jenkins estimates that those policies will increase U.S. emissions by about 505 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent per year by 2035. That is roughly 10% of current U.S. emissions, less than 1% of current global emissions, and about 0.02% of total historic global emissions—the latter being the emissions factor that actually determines the amount of anthropogenic warming that the world experiences at any given point in time.

Lighthiser insists that “every ton of CO2 emitted contributes to global warming and climate change and increases the exposure of Plaintiffs to more harms now and additional harms in the future.” But the additional emissions that Jenkins estimates translate to an increase of between 0.0001°C and 0.0003°C in global temperatures. Even if that increase in annual U.S. emissions were to persist for a century, it would only translate to between 0.01 and 0.03 degrees of additional warming. This is the actual amount of additional warming, never explicitly stated, that the plaintiffs attribute to Trump Administration policy and claim is “unleashing dangers upon Plaintiffs” and is “a constitutional injury to Plaintiffs’ Fifth Amendment rights to life and liberty, their pursuit of happiness.”

Lighthiser alleges that a raft of harms identified by the plaintiffs—everything from direct injuries caused by natural disasters to asthma caused by wildfire smoke to a lack of skiing opportunities caused by melting snow—are directly attributable to executive branch policies. But even harms that can in some part be attributed to climate change, such as public health impacts caused by excessive heat, cannot be credibly traced to any one policy, corporation, industry, government, or nation. As we write in the brief, “Appellants’ causation theory fails to account for the inherently multifactorial nature of climate risk and collapses complex causal chains into untenable simplifications.”

In the clearest cases, such as heat waves and extreme precipitation events, anthropogenic warming can be confidently said to have modestly intensified climate hazards that would have been extreme anyway. Natural variability remains the primary driver of all extreme climatic activity. For many extreme climatic phenomena, there is no clear anthropogenic warming signal at all.

Yet the youth plaintiffs in Lighthiser cite extreme heat, flooding, drought, wildfire-induced smoke, and precipitation as the source of their injuries, such as the claim that plaintiffs will “face increasing extreme weather events, including hurricanes and tropical cyclones due to increased fossil fuel pollution.” Plaintiffs frequently link their injuries to specific extreme weather events and natural disasters, such as Hurricane Helene and the 2023 wildfires in Maui.

In Lighthiser, as in Juliana and dozens of other climate lawsuits at the federal, state, and local level, the plaintiffs ask the courts to find that tortious harm results from policies or actions responsible for a small fraction of annual global emissions, which in turn is responsible for a small share of total anthropogenic warming, which in turn can account for an at most marginal intensification of some extreme climatic phenomena, which in turn are not the main driver of social costs associated with climatic phenomena.

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An Anti-Democratic End Run

While Lighthiser can be easily dismissed as an absurdist parody of an actionable legal theory, it is also a microcosm of sorts of the fundamental strategy pursued by the climate movement. The climate movement is, at bottom, minoritarian. Having failed to mobilize either sufficient public demand or a crosscutting political coalition for sweeping climate action, the movement has sought to leverage its factional position within the Democratic Party, executive action, and the courts to achieve its desired ends instead.

Public concern about climate change is real and durable. All else equal, and as long as it doesn’t cost them any money, significant majorities of the public support climate action. But therein lies the rub. There is little public appetite to pay more for energy or other goods in order to cut emissions. Making polluters pay for the social cost of climate change sounds great until people realize that they are the polluters. The continual insistence that public resistance to the movement’s agenda is due to fossil fuel disinformation, the renewable energy boosterism, and claims that rapid reductions in emissions will save money are all forms of self-justifying cope downstream from this reality.

Unsurprisingly, then, the climate movement has attempted to end-run democratic governance, and instead pursue its unpopular and implausible agenda through executive action and the courts. Lest anyone doubt that this effort extends far beyond the Trump administration’s own assaults upon climate science, common sense, and practical energy policy, it is important to remember that OCT brought a similar suit against the Biden administration, seeking to invalidate all American energy policy, on the grounds that such policies have failed to keep atmospheric carbon emissions under 350 ppm. OCT has brought similar suits in all 50 states, and other climate advocates and attorneys general have brought over 1000 climate liability suits against corporate emitters and state and local governments.

That this effort is almost certain to fail is really beside the point. A movement underwritten by well-heeled environmental philanthropies, and no less dependent upon billionaires than its opposition, endeavors to substitute rule by ideologically motivated experts for deliberative, democratic policy-making. In so doing, OCT and its climate movement clients reveal themselves, perverting both science and democracy in pursuit of the movement’s millenarian agenda. The effort does not defend the Constitution but is, rather, antithetical to America’s founding principles.

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The Breakthrough Institute’s amicus brief in Lighthiser v. Trump, authored in collaboration with and filed by Charlene Koski of the law firm Van Ness Feldman, is available below.

Read the Brief Here

Rest in piss, Paul Ehrlich.

That was the gist of so many tweets on Abundance and Progress Twitter this week, marking the death of the famed environmentalist and Population Bomb author. “Paul Ehrlich was one of the most pernicious public figures of the last 50 years,” said Institute for Progress’ co-founder Alec Stapp. “Paul Ehrlich made a lot of money and got a lot of awards (including a MacArthur ‘genius’ award),” noted science writer Matt Ridley, “out of making doomsday predictions that were wrong, and did real harm.” My impressionistic tally counted hundreds of tweets of this nature this week.

Even on the occasion of his death, Ehrlich-bashing is so universal, I think, because of how spectacularly wrong his high-stakes predictions proved, and because of the cruelty with which he spoke about babies, mothers, families, and the poor.

I come not to add nuance, but to pile on. Ehrlich’s empirics and metaphysics were badly mistaken. He advocated monstrous policies, such as tax penalties for large families, coercive sterilization campaigns, and withholding foreign aid to lower-income nations which fail to control population growth. And throughout it all, he maintained a callous attitude towards the weakest among us. “Sure I’ve made some mistakes, but no basic ones,” he said in 2023, decades after inspiring China’s one-child policy, which is estimated to have resulted in 20 million “missing girls,” largely due to coerced sex-selective abortion and infanticide.

For those who think that Ehrlich’s errors are only obvious in hindsight, I would simply observe that Ehrlich himself never changed his tune as real-world events falsified his hypotheses. The same week as his death, a paper that he co-authored was published that argued the Earth can only sustain 2.5 billion people.

Ehrlich’s intellectual project was not merely proven wrong in retrospect. It was wrong throughout his life, and was always more the product of ideology than science, invulnerable to falsification. He was a proud champion of Malthusianism, which by the time of his own research had been thoroughly discredited by the likes of the Marquis de Condorcet, Karl Marx, and Ester Boserup. “I was pleased to find an article in a history journal that credited us ‘neo-Malthusians’ with stimulating ‘thinking of the planet as a whole and anticipating its future,’” he wrote in his memoir, even though the 20th century famines he predicted would kill hundreds of millions never came to pass.

All of which is to say that while his impact on society was significant, Ehrlich was merely one in a long lineage of eco-doomers, a tradition that carries on to this day. As my colleague Vijaya Ramachandran and I wrote for the Atlantic a few years ago, Ehrlich’s ideas can be easily found in the writings and positions of influential modern environmentalists. Naomi Oreskes, progenitor of the litigation campaign against oil and gas companies, and William Rees, one of the creators of the carbon footprint, to this day invoke population control and biophysical limits to growth.

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As Williams College’s Darel E. Paul eulogized this week for Compact:

Thirty years after The Population Bomb, environmentalist Bill McKibben published Maybe One: A Personal and Environmental Argument for Single Child Families. Reprising Ehrlich’s argument, Earth Policy Institute founder Lester R. Brown published Full Planet, Empty Plates in 2012. Broadcaster and natural historian David Attenborough has been a reliable Malthusian scold down to the present day, referring to human beings as a “plague” and giving his valuable long-time patronage to the organization Population Matters (formerly known as Optimum Population Trust).

It is with centuries of failed prophesies in mind that we should evaluate this generation of neo-Malthusians’ warnings about the latest looming eco-apocalypse.

What most, though not all, of Ehrlich’s intellectual descendants have abandoned is the abject cruelty of his conduct. The opening pages of The Population Bomb have become infamous for the way they describe a crowd of poor Indians (witnessed on an Ehrlich family vacation) as a horde of people “screaming,” “defecating,” and “urinating.” Ehrlich never publicly reckoned with, let alone atoned for, the tens of millions of forcibly terminated pregnancies and murdered babies he left in his wake. And throughout all his doomsaying about the poor and the planet, he was a charming, charismatic, seemingly carefree celebrity intellectual. He was the consummate pop scientist of his day, flaunting his anti-humanism while glad-handing with Johnny Carson, Ted Turner, and other paragons of the wealthy Western elite.

It’s important to note the ways in which environmentalism has moved beyond this blatant anti-humanist callousness. As Ramachandran and I noted in our Atlantic piece about the modern Malthusians, the major population control organizations have eschewed, at least officially, the use of coercive contraception and sterilization practices, instead emphasizing family planning resources and women’s education. The Sierra Club, to its credit, recently went further, closing the long-standing population program that had actually published Ehrlich’s book. “Contraception and family planning are not climate mitigation measures,” the Club wrote in 2022.

But modern environmentalism does still reward cruel anti-humanism. Consider the still-celebrated climate scientist Michael Mann, who earlier this year released an “enemies list” that ostensibly included all Republicans in America, and has referred to his critics as “cockroaches.” (Mann was one of Ehrlich’s few vocal defenders this week, because of course he was.)

And even if Ehrlich’s vile dehumanizing language and policy agenda have gone out of fashion, it’s still important to recognize the inherent cruelty in enforced Malthusian scarcity that persists in too much of environmental advocacy today. The Sierra Club notwithstanding, groups like Population Connect and the Overpopulation Project are still out there pitching population control as an environmental solution. Most major environmental groups oppose development finance for modern agriculture technologies and fossil fuel, hydroelectric, and nuclear energy infrastructure in poor countries. As Ramachandran put it a few years ago, these restrictions are little more than “green colonialism.”

There is also a certain cruelty in telling children that they may not make it to adulthood because of the ecological crisis. As Jake Anbinder wrote this week, “the small but growing number of young people who cite climate change as the reason they do not want children reflects a view that, in its way, is gloomier than anything Ehrlich wrote.”

And of course all this doomsaying is predicated on the same kind of pseudoscientific biophysical boundaries that Ehrlich insisted would doom hundreds of millions of humans to starvation and death. Limits to Growth, the Earth’s supposed human population carrying capacity, the two-degree temperature target, the Planetary Boundaries, and the Ecological Footprint are not fixed biophysical constraints on human population and development, but rather arbitrary limits, dressed up in the language of science, intended to enforce a Malthusian scarcity agenda.

Remember that next time you see one of these alleged boundaries out in the wild, even if it’s discussed in less cruel language than Ehrlich took to his grave.

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In recent years, public attention has been transfixed by fierce conflicts over charismatic oil and gas pipelines—think Keystone XL and Dakota Access. But the “Pipeline Wars” are old and have many battlefields. For decades, the protests, environmental review, and litigation over pipelines have played out in soybean fields, courtrooms, federal agencies, town council meetings, and construction sites. It hardly matters who fired first. But people would surely fight over that too.

These Wars aren’t purely partisan. Some Republican states have banned carbon capture pipelines, for instance. Democratic governors have made common cause with gas developers. But crude battle lines drawn at the federal level might pit environmentalists against industry and Democrats versus Republicans.

Now the Pipeline Wars are colliding with congressional negotiations over permitting reform. That collision could determine whether the United States finally builds the transmission lines and infrastructure needed for climate progress.

A partial detente seems possible. Reform to an obscure provision in the Clean Water Act—Section 401—has become a bargaining chip in current congressional negotiations. Republicans want limits on how states use Section 401 to block pipelines. Democrats want more transmission lines to decarbonize the electric grid. The trade could help get pipelines built while unlocking a path to a larger grid and lower emissions.

Democrats may be wary of trading away Section 401 reforms. But Democrats and Republicans should seize this moment for a potential win-win. The right reforms to Section 401 could give Republicans what they’re looking for while retaining protections for America’s waterways and creating a path to building the transmission lines necessary to scale renewables deployment.

As with the Pipeline Wars themselves, it’s complicated. Barriers to building transmission are legion. So there isn’t a mathematical formula linking Section 401 reform to either abundant electric power or lower emissions. Fortunately, reforms to transmission planning and the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) remain on the negotiating table, both of which would deliver on Democrats’ priorities. A well-designed legislative compromise on Section 401 reform could unlock further political negotiations on this broader permitting package, while protecting aspects of the Clean Water Act both parties continue to support.

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A Brief History of Section 401

Since the 1972 passage of the Clean Water Act, Section 401 has given states (and Tribes) the power to regulate federally permitted activities that may result in a “discharge” into navigable water bodies within state boundaries. Specifically, the state or Tribe certifies whether the activity will comply with applicable water quality requirements. The certifying authority must act on applications within one year, or the certification requirements are waived, effectively allowing the project to proceed as if certification had been granted, but without any state-imposed conditions.

The authors of the Clean Water Act wanted to ensure that the federal government and the states each had a role in preserving our waterways. Section 401 is regarded as a crucial design element of that state-federal vision. In turn, Section 401 was written with broad language that offered states flexibility. That broad language has been the subject of considerable disagreement over what states may or may not regulate about a project.

Like nearly everything in American politics, Section 401 has become a battlefield. In 2016, then-Governor Cuomo of New York denied Section 401 certification to the Constitution natural gas pipeline, which would have brought natural gas from Pennsylvania to New York to satisfy regional gas demand. In its denial, New York cited water quality impacts. But the context was also clear. Climate, environmental, and anti-fracking advocates had been pressing to deny fossil fuel infrastructure further entry into the Northeast. Correspondingly, they cheered at the pipeline stoppage. New York then denied certification to the Northeast Supply Enhancement (NESE) pipeline three separate times, in part citing inconsistency with state climate law. (Under Governor Hochul, New York approved NESE on November 7, 2025.) Other pipelines have met similar fates.

Although the Pipeline Wars encompass diverse disputes, Section 401 has taken on a totemic role in Republican permitting politics. Even though Section 401 allows states to veto projects based on “appropriate” state law, the argument goes, certifications should be assessments of water quality impacts, not climate change. Pipeline proponents cite the New York denials as evidence that individual states can block regionally significant projects by waging proxy fights via environmental laws that weren’t intended for this purpose. Section 401 doesn’t alone explain the pipeline stalemate. But it has become a shorthand for obstruction.

Defenders of Section 401 argue it’s a valuable tool for limiting the expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure and avoiding pipeline impacts on landowners, public health, communities and ecologies.

As with other areas of environmental law, Section 401 has been destabilized by cycles of de-regulation (2020), re-regulation (2023), and now re-de-regulation (in process). The Supreme Court has weighed in to affirm a broad interpretation of Section 401 that supports considering project impacts if they affect compliance with water-quality standards.

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Pyrrhic Wins in the Pipeline Wars

The pipeline blockages may feel like a win for the climate. The truth is more complex. The oil and gas transited by pipelines is ultimately combusted and generates greenhouse gas emissions. The pipeline system itself has leaks, contributing further to emissions. But under the right conditions, gas can help displace dirtier and more emissions-intensive energy production, leading to net pollution reductions.

The choice to restrict natural gas supply in the Northeast, for instance, has likely led to more near-term emissions. Gas supply constraints now periodically cause electricity generators in the New York region to burn vastly more fuel oil during winter, which yields more planet-warming emissions and has more public health impacts. Multiple analyses have found that fuel switching away from oil toward gas would produce meaningful co-benefits for both emissions and air quality. Blocking the pipelines has therefore prolonged and even exacerbated a suboptimal status quo, especially as electrification remains financially out of reach for many who heat their homes with fuel oil.

Stunningly, despite America’s immense domestic natural gas resources, New England often imports liquified natural gas (LNG) from abroad, which entails shipping emissions. The Everett facility in Massachusetts regularly receives imported LNG from Trinidad and Tobago. Back in 2018, when LNG from Trinidad and Tobago couldn’t cover the demand, Russian LNG came to the rescue. New England depends on imported LNG due to pipeline capacity constraints, market economics, and because the Jones Act effectively prevents LNG shipping from the Gulf states.

Then there’s the question of affordability. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, residential natural gas prices in New York rank among the highest in the United States, reaching $17.95 per thousand cubic feet in November 2025. After years of climate-driven and regulatory opposition to pipelines, Massachusetts faces a cascade of problems. Constrained gas supplies caused Massachusetts utilities to limit new gas hook-ups–for many, a feature of the policy, not a bug–which critics contend increased the cost of housing. Massachusetts has now introduced baroque subsidy arrangements to shield low-income residents from spiraling energy costs, in part a perverse outcome of pipeline obstruction.

As we’re witnessing in real time, these tradeoffs are not limited to New England. With LNG supplies choked off by events in the Persian Gulf, power grids in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East are expected to ramp up coal-fired generation in response.

Of course, achieving deep decarbonization while providing for energy needs ultimately requires a phase-down of natural gas. But the immediate tradeoff is not between gas supply and clean energy, but between gas supply and dirtier fuels. In the longer term, we will not want to legislate or regulate away our ability to build pipelines, which can carry carbon, synthetic fuels, ammonia, and other compounds necessary for deep decarbonization.

This said, pipelines do cause real environmental impacts. Fortunately, many of the impacts can be protected against, even with ambitious permitting reform.

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Reform, Don’t Gut, Section 401

States have deployed Section 401 to block other fossil fuel infrastructure. But Republicans and their stakeholders are mainly concerned about pipelines. Their reform proposals focus on the scope of review and on tightening the certification timeline.

The friction for Democrats, however, is emphatically not just about the pipelines. Proposals to reform Section 401 tend to sweep in other types of projects. GOP stakeholders often want to limit Section 401 certifications to the effects of specific, identifiable discharges from the activity rather than the broader environmental or policy consequences of a project. Under this interpretation, a state reviewing a pipeline crossing a stream could evaluate whether sediment from the crossing would violate water quality standards. But it could not use the certification process to resolve policy concerns with the proposed project or climate impacts not directly related to water quality. Accepting that framing might allow more pipelines to be built, which is precisely the goal of many Republican proposals. But it might also strip states of their ability to weigh in on the downstream effects of other non-pipeline construction projects, such as upstream dam flows.

The Supreme Court has interpreted Section 401 broadly. In PUD No. 1 v. Washington Department of Ecology, the Court held that states may impose conditions necessary to ensure compliance with water quality standards even when those conditions address broader ecological impacts. This means states could look at impacts beyond just a “point source.” But, crucially, the Court did not suggest states could consider the whole policy effect of the projects. Later, in S.D. Warren Co. v. Maine Board of Environmental Protection, the Court confirmed that dams altering water flows can constitute the relevant “discharge” to trigger Section 401 state review. In light of these decisions, Republican attempts to re-write Section 401 regulations have an uphill battle in court. Correspondingly, GOP proposals often seek to narrow the statute legislatively rather than relying on courts to reinterpret it.

Dam re-certifications illustrate the stakes. FERC hydroelectric dam licenses last 50 years. If states lose Section 401 review authority over dams, they could be locked out of protecting their waters for half a century. Take the Conowingo Dam on the Susquehanna River, which feeds the Chesapeake Bay. When heavy storms flush accumulated sediment downstream, it can carry large loads of nutrients and pollutants into the Bay, threatening the Bay’s ecology, its fisheries, and the local economies they support. Section 401 played a key role giving Maryland the leverage it needed to protect the people and industries that depend on the Bay.

A mutually agreeable outcome may not require the aggressive reform proposals in some House legislation. We could keep Section 401’s review authority largely intact, but specify what it is and is not allowed to consider when applied to pipelines. Negotiators could decide that Section 401 certifications may not consider climate change, noise, traffic, and other impacts that don’t connect directly to water quality. That would be mostly consistent with the Biden administration’s 2023 rule, which tried to focus review on water quality impacts. (The 2023 rule arguably left room for states to link climate impacts to water quality through attenuated causal chains. But that question wasn’t settled before EPA’s latest regulatory revisions.) Sedimentation, turbidity, and direct ecological disturbance to water bodies could be kept in scope.

Republican negotiators may worry that states could use water quality issues as a pretext to block projects. To try to solve that, statutory revisions could require states to identify the specific water-quality standard at issue. Lawmakers could also require state certification if mitigation measures are available to resolve the violation, or if a mitigation could provide comparable ecological protection.

To ensure dam certifications receive Section 401 review, Congress could clarify in statute that dam flows count as “discharges.” This would make explicit what the Supreme Court has already held. This way, narrowing pipeline review doesn’t inadvertently gut other key equities.

Other proposals would tighten the certification timeline or limit repeated application withdrawals. Yet, there are surprisingly thorny problems with timeline reforms. Under current law, it’s possible to get around the one-year time limit if a sponsor withdraws and re-submits their application. States and project sponsors, each for their own reasons, have used this procedural mechanism to extend the certification process. But this flexibility can be important to ensure a project sponsor provides a complete application, or if an iterative process for large infrastructure would work better.

Although some proposed timeline changes might be hard for Democrats to accept, there’s some cross-partisan agreement that the process shouldn’t extend indefinitely. The courts also agree. In Hoopa Valley Tribe v. FERC, the DC Circuit held that a coordinated, repeated withdrawal-and-resubmission scheme between a state and applicant could not be used to indefinitely avoid the statutory deadline. The trick may be finding mutually agreeable statutory language to enshrine meaningful limits.

The trade-off for Democrats shouldn’t be overstated. Federal methane regulations are likely to survive Trump-era deregulation. That will mitigate the climate impact of new pipelines, even if Section 401 is narrowed.

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Section 401 for Powerlines?

Balanced Section 401 reform will likely be an essential chess move toward climate progress in permitting negotiations. Republicans and some Democrats both want faster and more predictable NEPA reviews, making NEPA an area of cross-party alignment. But Republicans want limits on Section 401. And Democrats want faster approval of transmission lines, which Republicans and their stakeholders have tended to resist in recent years. That tradeoff has quietly made Section 401 one of the central bargaining chips in the current permitting debate.

Governor Hochul’s 2023 approval of the NESE pipeline offers a template, even if it’s an uncomfortable one for pipeline opponents. In the final decision, the many water quality concerns that New York’s environmental agency had cited in its earlier denials were either mitigated through project modifications or assessed to be compliant with applicable standards. Water quality received a review, and the pipeline survived it. Environmental groups are suing. But if it gets built, the pipeline could help give New York the “breathing room” it needs to pursue climate policy going forward.

In chess, pawn trades make sense if they open the board for something more important. Section 401 may represent that kind of trade in the politics of permitting reform. Limiting how states use the provision against pipelines would not end the Pipeline Wars. But it could remove one of the obstacles standing between Congress and a broader permitting package, including NEPA reforms and the transmission buildout the energy transition requires.

Otherwise Section 401 will remain a proxy battlefield in the Pipeline Wars while climate progress stalls.

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This was originally published by The Dispatch on March 12, 2026.

As of this morning, tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz remains at a virtual standstill. Since March 1, 25 commercial ships have come under fire from Iran, but the country’s Foreign Minister, Abbas Aragchi, announced today that the Strait “is open” to Iranian allies, “but closed” to its “enemies.”

The sudden and ongoing war in Iran is roiling global oil markets, raising the specter of an energy shock that recalls the oil crises of the 1970s. In that era, U.S. policymakers responded by radically restructuring American energy policy, creating the Department of Energy and making big investments in energy independence, innovation, and infrastructure. Congress should respond similarly today by pursuing bold policies that cut red tape, expand energy abundance, lower prices, and extend America’s technological frontier. But two shifts over the last five decades stand in the way. The first, ironically, is the success of the 1970s-era initiatives. The second is the deep partisan polarization that now defines energy politics in Washington.

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The house that OPEC built.

The oil crises of the 1970s exposed just how vulnerable the United States had become to global energy disruptions. The 1973 oil embargo by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), and later the Islamic Revolution in Iran, prompted severe and shocking spikes in oil prices. Gas lines stretched around city blocks. Policymakers suddenly confronted the reality that the country’s energy system—long built around cheap, abundant petroleum—was far less secure than previously assumed.

Congress responded with sweeping legislation.

The Energy Reorganization Act of 1974 and the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975 established the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards for automobiles, among other agencies and initiatives. Lawmakers also created the Department of Energy and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in 1977, consolidating a sprawling set of federal programs and launching a coordinated national effort to develop new energy technologies.

And the response wasn’t limited to fuel conservation or emergency management. The new Department of Energy and its growing number of National Laboratories also funded large research and development programs in solar and wind power, geothermal energy, advanced nuclear technologies, and new drilling techniques aimed at unlocking unconventional oil and gas resources. Many of these projects looked speculative, even fantastical, at the time. Wind turbines were expensive and inefficient. Solar panels cost orders of magnitude more than today. And unconventional oil and gas deposits trapped in dense shale formations were widely considered uneconomic.

But in retrospect, many of the bets made at DOE and its National Laboratories in the 1970s and 1980s paid off.

As our research has shown, the 2000s-era boom in shale oil and gas production was the product of more than three decades of public and private experimentation. Government-funded research helped develop key technologies—from massive hydraulic fracturing to advanced mapping and drilling techniques—that made shale extraction viable. Industry innovators eventually combined those technologies with new drilling practices and persistent trial-and-error experimentation. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, companies like Mitchell Energy demonstrated that shale formations could be developed commercially.

Domestic gas production skyrocketed starting around 2005. Oil production followed soon after as similar techniques were applied to shale oil deposits. By the late 2010s, the United States had become the world’s largest oil producer and a leading exporter of liquefied natural gas. The transformation was so dramatic that it upended long-standing assumptions about American energy scarcity. For decades, policymakers assumed that the country would remain permanently dependent on foreign oil. Instead, technological innovation dramatically expanded the domestic resource base.

And it wasn’t just oil and gas. Policymakers in the 1970s responded to the oil crises by crafting the original all-of-the-above energy agenda. Federal support for solar photovoltaic technology, wind turbine development, and advanced battery chemistry helped nurture industries that today are growing rapidly worldwide. Early research programs, tax incentives, and demonstration projects helped drive down costs and expand deployment over several decades.

Like shale gas, these technologies required long periods of incremental progress. But the results are now visible across the energy system. Solar panels and wind turbines are among the cheapest sources of new electricity generation in many regions, while battery technologies are rapidly expanding the possibilities for grid storage, electric vehicles, and many other applications. These revolutions, in unconventional hydrocarbons and renewables, emerged from sustained public investment, bipartisan policymaking, and a willingness to pursue multiple technological pathways simultaneously.

Ironically, the success of America’s all-of-the-above energy independence agenda may now make it harder to repeat.

The shale revolution turned the United States into an energy superpower, dramatically reducing OPEC’s leverage on global oil markets and providing a meaningful buffer between American consumers and geopolitical shocks. U.S. producers can increase oil output when global prices rise, and the country now exports large volumes of liquefied natural gas, reducing both the market and strategic power of Middle Eastern supplies.

The flipside of domestic energy independence, though, is that America is now deeply embedded in global oil markets and increasingly commoditized trade in natural gas. We can’t become a global petroleum superpower for a second time, and though America can and should produce more oil and gas, this will not have either the short-term or long-term benefits that policymakers were chasing in the 1970s. Indeed, U.S. drillers require higher prices to turn a profit than their main global competitors in Russia, South America, and the Middle East, so consumers’ desires for gasoline price relief are somewhat misaligned with the priorities of the oil and gas industry. While demand for natural gas is widely expected to grow for at least the next few decades, the world is likely on the cusp of a peak in demand for oil.

And America’s hydrocarbon resources are only as useful as we make them. In response to the oil supply shock, the International Energy Agency announced the largest-ever release of strategic oil reserves. But America’s own Strategic Petroleum Reserve was not even full when the United States and Israel launched the attacks on Iran. Likewise, our military still is not positioned to escort oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz. Even unprecedented hydrocarbon abundance still exhibits vulnerable choke points.

Likewise, while wind, solar, and batteries have plummeted in price thanks largely to U.S. policy investments made decades ago, we may be approaching a period of diminishing returns in the ongoing renewables revolution. Wind deployment has slowed substantially in recent years. Solar power continues to surge in the United States, but the cost of new solar generation has actually ticked up for the first time in decades in response to inflation, interest rates, and rising electricity demand.

Oil, gas, solar, and wind all have bright futures in the U.S. But responding to the looming global oil crisis will require expanding America’s energy technology and infrastructure frontiers in much the same way policymakers pursued in the 1970s.

Unfortunately, even with a proven energy policy playbook, modern energy politics may get in the way.

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The rise of energy polarization.

The posture that policymakers adopted toward U.S. federal energy policy in the 1970s endured for decades. Lawmakers from both parties collaborated on the Energy Policy and Conservation Act in 1975, the Energy Policy Act of 1992, and the Energy Policy Act of 2005. These bills combined support for fossil fuels, nuclear power, efficiency programs, and emerging renewable technologies.

But this political consensus collapsed during the era of the climate hawk.

For Democrats, climate change became the central organizing principle of energy policy. Decarbonization targets, emissions regulations, and large-scale clean energy deployment dominated the party’s agenda. Republicans, meanwhile, grew increasingly skeptical of the clean energy agenda. Once broadly supportive of technologies like wind and solar power, many conservatives have come to view them as a stalking horse for a radical climate agenda. What were once largely technical debates have transformed into a multifront culture war. Instead of broad legislative coalitions, Congress now struggles to pass even modest reforms.

Deepening political gridlock didn’t feel like an existential risk to the American economy for most of the first two decades of the 21^st century, when domestic energy supply was expanding while demand was stagnant. But if war in the Persian Gulf triggers a global oil shock on the backs of a mounting electricity affordability crisis, the U.S. will be forced to reckon with energy system vulnerabilities that have been worsened by years of neglect.

Fortunately, there is no shortage of opportunities for meaningful policy change. At the beginning of March, key lawmakers reopened congressional negotiations over elusive federal permitting reform legislation). There are many active bills designed to expand domestic critical minerals production and refining, geothermal exploration and drilling, high-voltage electric power transmission, and beyond. Securing the fuel supply for the next generation of advanced nuclear reactors, and financing their manufacture and construction, remains imperative. Policymakers are considering increasing the use of reserves and stockpiles of critical resources, including the dynamic use of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, to better protect American consumers from swings in global commodity markets.

America may be sitting on the launchpad of nuclear, geothermal, and battery renaissances, a massive expansion of the power grid, and the creation of whole new domestic commodity and advanced technology industries. Our oil and gas abundance should buffer American consumers against acute supply crises while enabling big investments in advanced energy innovation. These are exactly the kinds of policy and technology opportunities that once brought America’s two political parties together.

But hyperpartisan politics have bedeviled policy progress on all of these fronts for years. The question now is whether looming energy cost crises will force a meaningful shift in those politics.

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Glyphosate may just be the most polarizing chemical in modern agriculture, if not modern society. Since the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classified it in 2015 as a “probable human carcinogen,” glyphosate has become a fixture of courtroom battles, consumer anxiety, and political debate. Juries have awarded multi-billion-dollar verdicts against its manufacturer, Monsanto, acquired by Bayer in 2018. Several countries have banned its use, often to reverse the ban shortly after, as in Mexico, Germany, and Sri Lanka. And activists have successfully forced regulatory agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency, to revisit their assessments of the chemical’s safety.

Public opposition to glyphosate rests not only on concerns about its alleged health impacts, but also on a widespread narrative casting glyphosate as an ecological villain—accused of destroying healthy soils, harming pollinators, contaminating water, and degrading biodiversity.

But a closer look at how glyphosate is used, which herbicides it has replaced, and how it reshaped farming systems tells a more complicated story. For many of its most common agricultural uses, glyphosate has delivered net environmental benefits, largely by displacing more toxic herbicides and enabling farming practices that reduce soil erosion, water and air pollution, energy use, and crop losses.

That does not mean glyphosate is benign, or that current weed control practices are beyond reproach. Glyphosate resistance in weeds continues spreading. And glyphosate-based herbicides, though often better than the alternative, still negatively impact wildlife and ecosystems. But building more sustainable weed management alternatives requires understanding what works well today so environmental benefits are preserved and expanded moving forward.

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More spraying, less hazard

Glyphosate was first approved and marketed in the United States in 1974 as a broad-spectrum herbicide designed to kill most plants it contacts. Its rise coincided with the commercialization of genetically engineered glyphosate-tolerant (“Roundup Ready”) crops beginning in the mid-1990s. Today, glyphosate is primarily used on corn, soybean, and cotton operations, applied to roughly 80–90% of those crops’ acreages. These crops—which are overwhelmingly grown for animal feed, biofuel, and fiber rather than direct human consumption—account for the vast majority of all agricultural glyphosate usage, about 84%.

In these systems, glyphosate is used in three main ways: as a “burndown” before planting to clear fields without tillage; as weed control on glyphosate-tolerant crops while they are growing; and after harvest to suppress weeds before the next planting. These uses have made glyphosate the most widely used herbicide in U.S. history, with over 250 million pounds used annually.

But volume alone is a poor proxy for environmental harm. What matters is glyphosate’s toxicity, how it compares to the herbicides it replaces, and the farming practices it enables.

By almost any measure, glyphosate and glyphosate-based herbicides (which contain other substances such as surfactants) have a low toxicity even at the high volumes used. For example, a 2017 analysis by weed scientist Andrew Kniss found that in the most recent data available, glyphosate accounted for roughly 26% to 43% of herbicide applications in corn and soybeans, respectively, yet contributed only 0.1% and 0.3% of the chronic mammalian toxicity hazard in those crops, which reflects the risk of adverse effects to mammals from long-term exposure. We updated these estimates with USDA data released since then. As shown in the figure below, although glyphosate accounts for a large share of the herbicides applied to each major crop, it accounts for a much smaller share of the acute hazard to mammals and no more than 1% of the chronic hazard. For instance, in 2024, glyphosate accounted for 50% of herbicide applications to winter wheat, but only 0.7% of the chronic hazard to mammals.

To be sure, there are many different ways to measure the toxicity of herbicides. The hazard figures above are based only on estimates of toxicity to rats. While this is helpful in understanding potential impacts on mammals, it sheds little light on how an herbicide affects birds, insects, fish and other organisms. But by most measures, glyphosate also has little impact on these animals and is much more benign than the other herbicides farmers often use today instead of glyphosate such as when they’re dealing with glyphosate-resistant weeds. The table below compares several of these measures for the herbicides most widely used on corn, soybeans, and wheat. It shows that glyphosate, as well as glufosinate (a non-selective herbicide often used on glyphosate-resistant weeds), are among the least toxic options for most species studied.

The adoption of glyphosate and glyphosate-tolerant cropping systems also reduced reliance on a number of legacy herbicides that had disproportionately high toxicity levels. For example, glyphosate-based weed management enabled farmers to cut back on Alachlor, an herbicide that was widely used on corn and soy farms. After determining that it is a probable human carcinogen, EPA restricted its use and, with effective alternatives available to farmers, eventually revoked approval for all Alachlor products.

None of this means glyphosate is environmentally harmless. Ecological risk assessments from EPA and other regulatory agencies identify real concerns in some contexts. Chronic glyphosate exposure may slow growth of some birds. But one of the most concrete risks is not from glyphosate itself, but from surfactants that are mixed into some formulations to help it better penetrate plant leaves: EPA finds that drift from heavy aerial application of formulations with polyethoxylated tallow amine (POEA) carry a slight risk to some freshwater fish, amphibians, and aquatic invertebrates. Likewise, some formulations may increase the impact of acute exposure to birds, though the evidence on this is limited.

Glyphosate itself, as well as other broad-spectrum herbicides, also can have indirect effects on wildlife by killing the plants they rely on. For example, glyphosate is not considered acutely toxic to monarch butterflies or their larvae at the rates they’re exposed to it. But spraying and drift can kill milkweed, which the butterflies exclusively lay their eggs on. Milkweed populations substantially declined at the same time that herbicide-tolerant crops and glyphosate use rose. But increased use of any herbicide that affects milkweed would have had a similar effect. In fact, compared to glyphosate, many common herbicides—like Dicamba—affect milkweed at even lower doses and are more likely to drift from where they were applied and affect nearby vegetation.

Glyphosate, like any product designed to kill plants, carries some risk. The relevant question for judging its environmental impact is not whether it poses any risk, but whether it poses less risk than realistic alternatives. For most uses in farming, the answer is clear: glyphosate is the lesser evil.

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Herbicide-enabled no-till farming

One of glyphosate’s most important environmental benefits, however, is indirect.

By enabling effective weed control without plowing, glyphosate and glyphosate-tolerant crops made no- and reduced-tillage farming viable at scale. Beforehand, tillage was the primary way farmers suppressed weeds, repeatedly disturbing the soil to uproot plants and bury their seeds deep underground. Farmers could kill weeds before they planted their crop with other herbicides, but many herbicides weren’t effective in killing all species or persisted long enough in the soil that farmers had to wait too long to plant their seeds. Once the crop was growing, farmers also often had to till in between rows to control weeds. Glyphosate, combined with tolerant crops, allowed farmers to spray their fields before planting to effectively control weeds as well as to spray after their crop emerged.

Glyphosate-based weed management is not the only factor impacting a farmer’s decision to implement conservation tillage, a practice that dates back to the 1940s, but it has substantially increased use of reduced- and no-till farming. Surveys of farmers in the mid 2000s, as illustrated below, found a large jump in adoption after producers of cotton, soy, or corn adopted glyphosate-tolerant varieties. Since then, the development of glyphosate-resistant weeds has caused some farmers to plow more. Yet glyphosate use remains the strongest predictor of whether a farmer uses conservation tillage methods.

Less tillage leads to less soil erosion, one of agriculture’s most damaging externalities. Eroded soil carries sediment, nutrients, and pesticides into waterways, degrading aquatic habitat and water quality. Since 1982, U.S. cropland erosion rates have fallen by about one-third, with glyphosate-based weed management and conservation tillage playing a large role. By one estimate, adoption of glyphosate-tolerant soybean varieties increased the use of no-till among soy producers by 20%, cutting soil erosion by 27 million tons per year and generating over $100 million in water quality improvements.

Leaving crop residues on the field also improves soil structure, increases organic matter, and reduces nutrient runoff. No-till systems disturb earthworms and soil organisms less frequently and provide more continuous ground cover for wildlife. Studies often find higher abundance of birds and small mammals in reduced-till systems, in part because residues provide cover from predators, food, and avoid the destruction of ground-nesting birds during spring tillage.

Reduced tillage also saves energy and reduces greenhouse gas emissions. Plowing and cultivation require multiple tractor passes, consuming diesel. Continuous no-till farming can save over three gallons of fuel per acre per year, cutting CO₂ emissions. Glyphosate-enabled reductions in tillage save up to 60 million gallons of fuel in the US, avoiding up to half a million tons CO₂e per year. This is a relatively small amount—about 1% of annual emissions from fuel combustion for farming—but is nevertheless beneficial. No-till farming may also help store extra carbon in the soil, though often far less than typically assumed.

Though often overlooked, conservation tillage also reduces the amount of dirt and dust from farming, significantly improving air quality. Conventional tillage disturbs the soil, kicking some into the air where it often remains windborne and contributes to cardiovascular disease and chronic respiratory problems like COPD. Though it is not one of the primary sources of particulate matter or other air pollution, tillage-related pollution nevertheless causes about 1300 deaths annually. The rise in no-till and conservation tillage, often enabled by glyphosate, helps avoid several hundred deaths annually.

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Pre-harvest glyphosate use

Among the different uses of glyphosate, pre-harvest application—spraying glyphosate on fully grown wheat and other food crops—has attracted some of the greatest opposition. Representative Thomas Massie, MAHA activists, and RFK Jr. have all proposed banning this practice. Concern about spraying any herbicide on food crops near harvest time is understandable. However, this practice is uncommon, considered safe, and has several unique environmental benefits.

Pre-harvest spraying is most common on small grains and legumes such as wheat, oats, barley, and pulses, particularly in cool or wet climates. It primarily helps with harvest by killing weeds that may interfere with harvest equipment and crop quality, spurring more even maturation (especially of pulses), and reducing moisture content for some crops and enabling earlier harvest. However, it remains a rare practice, used on less than 3% of wheat acres. In these cases, farmers must wait until the crop is already mature and generally wait at least a week before harvesting. This reduces the amount of herbicide absorbed by the grain, effectively limiting glyphosate residues in the final food products. FDA and other agencies consistently find that tested foods have residues far below levels that would pose a concern to the health of consumers. Even in an implausibly extreme scenario where a child ate only wheat products made from grain that was sprayed pre-harvest and had the maximum legal glyphosate residues persist on it through processing, they would need to eat more than 1 ½ loaves of bread or 15 cups of pasta per day to reach EPA’s daily safety limit. That threshold is itself quite conservative, set 100 times below the highest dose that caused no harm in relevant animal studies.

Though sparingly used, pre-harvest application nevertheless has significant benefits not only for farmers but also the environment. For one, glyphosate can help farmers avoid wasting land, fertilizer and other resources growing crops that are then lost due to late-season weeds or spoilage. Pre-harvest spraying also reduces the weed burden for the subsequent crop, raising yields in some cases and thereby reducing the need to bring additional land into production. In addition, it can avoid energy- and emissions-intensive post-harvest drying. Grain dryers burn large amounts of propane or natural gas to reduce moisture levels. Finally, when compared to other chemical desiccants, glyphosate is often one of the lowest-impact options available. Common alternatives such as paraquat and diquat dry crops more quickly, but are generally more toxic to humans and wildlife and therefore pose greater risks in the event of misapplication or drift.

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Building on glyphosate’s legacy

Glyphosate is not an environmental panacea. Glyphosate-based herbicides can negatively impact some wildlife and habitats. But neither is it the ecological villain of popular imagination. Rather, glyphosate has enabled farmers to move away from other more toxic herbicides, till their fields less often, and manage wet conditions at harvest that otherwise could lead to crop losses.

The path forward is not to defend glyphosate indefinitely nor to ban it reflexively, but to retain the efficiencies and environmental benefits it enables while developing alternatives with even smaller tradeoffs.

That starts with a strong, science-based regulatory system capable of evaluating both existing products and new alternatives. Abrupt removal of glyphosate from the market without viable replacements would likely increase tillage and revive more hazardous chemistries, undermining decades of progress. As it stands, Bayer—the manufacturer of Roundup—has phased out glyphosate in its residential lawn & garden products, replacing some of it with diquat, which is generally considered more toxic.

Just as importantly, it requires sustained public support for research, development and farmer adoption of new technologies. Precision application technologies that use computer vision and machine learning to identify and spray individual weeds can reduce herbicide use by about 30–60%, and up to 90 percent in some cropping systems and studies. Autonomous robotic weeders are beginning to scale beyond specialty crops and into row-crop agriculture. Recent proposals in Congress to increase support for farmers to purchase precision agriculture equipment could go a long way to accelerating adoption. But development of new pesticides, both synthetic and biological, as well as herbicide-tolerant genetically engineered crops remains critical for farmers to better manage weeds, especially ones that are resistant to existing herbicides.

Building a more sustainable approach to weed management also requires improved transparency. USDA and FDA should expand routine monitoring for glyphosate and other herbicide residues and report results clearly. This is not because more evidence would necessarily identify new risks, but rather because public trust depends on visibility and accountability. While FDA added glyphosate to its annual pesticide residue monitoring program beginning in 2017–2018, its analyses are not nationally representative. The US Government Accountability Office has outlined several ways for the agency to make its monitoring more statistically robust. FDA’s release of a new data portal for summarizing pesticide and other dietary exposures is a good first step.

Glyphosate illustrates the environmental promise and tradeoffs of agricultural innovation. It helped enable meaningful reductions in tillage, fuel use, and herbicide toxicity. It also carries ecological risks that warrant continued research, scrutiny, and management. For policymakers, the key question is not whether glyphosate is flawless, but rather how to encourage its responsible use and develop alternatives that deliver better environmental outcomes. That requires rigorous oversight, transparent monitoring, and federal support for innovation instead of bans that replace one set of impacts with more damaging ones.

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On March 5th, after months of deadlock, Senate Democrats committed to re-opening permitting reform talks. Bipartisan support for reforming sclerotic federal permitting processes and the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) has recently grown as Democrats realize how onerous environmental reviews can impede their goals of deploying clean energy. Yet, the second Trump administration’s cancellation of wind and solar projects previously caused Democrats to pull back from permitting negotiations, demanding protections from arbitrary attacks by the executive branch.

The willingness from Democratic senators to restart permitting negotiations is welcome, but a grand reform deal remains elusive.

While permitting reform discussions mostly focus on energy projects such as transmission lines or renewables, and public attention remains firmly planted on energy prices, the mining sector also stands in need of the reforms debated by Congress. As debates drag on, permitting bottlenecks threaten to push mining investment abroad. Unlike energy producers, which uniquely serve U.S. markets, miners will pursue mineral deposits in other countries if they can develop them more quickly and reliably elsewhere.

Pressure from the increasingly globalized mining industry has already taken a toll on the U.S. business case, placing a premium on reforming U.S. permitting bottlenecks to regain competitiveness. The U.S. has ceded industry spending on mineral exploration as new markets emerge, falling from 20% of global investment in 1993 to only 11% in 2020. Meanwhile, the number of metal mines in the U.S. has decreased by over 70% since 1983.

The growing emphasis by governments across the world on securing critical mineral supply chains amplifies the competition. Major producers like Canada and Australia have outpaced the U.S. in speeding regulatory processes. Meanwhile, countries with immense critical mineral potential like Brazil have courted trade agreements abroad that threaten to further siphon industry interest from the U.S.

Mining is a hard enough business. Before developers even apply for permits, they must risk millions of dollars and years of effort to just find a viable mineral deposit. Miners have little reason to tolerate a broken permitting system that other countries have managed to fix.

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What from the National Permitting Reform Debates Is Valuable for the Mining Sector?

NEPA, among all permitting laws, remains the central shibboleth of American proceduralism and creates two particular sore spots for the U.S. mining sector that statutory reforms can alleviate: lengthy environmental reviews and frivolous lawsuits from environmental advocacy groups.

Mines must undergo extensive scrutiny during environmental reviews that take, on average, about four years. Developers must collect vast amounts of environmental data, like water quality, to establish baselines from which agencies can assess potential impacts. Meanwhile, agencies conduct their own assessments of endangered species, archaeological sites, and public resources. Throughout the entire process, developers iteratively revise their mine plans to minimize impact to the environment and ensure that reclamation restores public lands to a productive state.

Only with permits in hand can developers actually start constructing the mine itself, which alone can easily take over two years. Yet, when a third party sues a mine project, the lawsuit can delay construction and bloat project costs even if courts eventually dismiss the suit. On average, mining lawsuits take nearly three years to resolve, exceeding times experienced by the energy and infrastructure sectors. All the while, developers must bear the uncertainty that may disrupt their ability to continue to secure financing and purchase agreements.

Slow NEPA Reviews

When it comes to NEPA reviews, the mining sector is especially impacted. Mining projects are complex and require input from multiple agencies. If not well-coordinated, the intersection of water quality, air quality, ecological impacts, and archaeological resource considerations contributes to lengthy NEPA reviews that unnecessarily delay projects. Agency surveys have indicated that this can add months to years to review timelines.

This is often simply a data problem. When developers apply for mining permits, federal agencies like the Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Forest Service, and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, must collect all the necessary data to assess the relevant environmental impacts of the proposed project. Giving agencies modern digital tools to share relevant data, access data earlier in the process, and coordinate amongst themselves could meaningfully speed review times.

Canada has taken an early lead in addressing the multi-jurisdictional challenges of permitting mines by launching the One Project, One Process Framework in October of 2025. This program aims to cut project lead times by consolidating engagement with developers and Indigenous communities based on all the permits needed for an entire project, rather than iteratively for each individual permit that mines must obtain. The accompanying Mine Permit Navigator will create further efficiencies by clarifying for developers which jurisdictions apply and preparing them for the associated regulatory requirements.

In the U.S., the best congressional prospects for improving basic efficiency stand with the ePermit Act, originally proposed by Rep. Johnson and Sen. Curtis. The ePermit Act promotes efficiencies with standard data formatting; digital tools to assist regulators with reviews, like automating the compilation of public comments; and modernized digital platforms where developers can submit and track documents. All of these would greatly help mine reviews, which must collect immense amounts of data (often over multiple years to determine relevant environmental baselines) and which often receive tens of thousands of public comments. Fortunately, the ePermit Act faces little opposition and is perhaps the most likely piece of permitting reform legislation to pass in Congress.

Frivolous Litigation

While improved data processes can speed up environmental reviews, it cannot protect projects from the delays and uncertainty that lawsuits create. Here, NEPA places the U.S. at a disadvantage compared to competing countries because of the opportunities it creates for frivolous litigation from aggressive environmental NGOs. Compared to the procedural focus of NEPA, Australia’s environmental laws limit litigation by focusing on issues of national environmental significance.

In the U.S., mines must obtain a number of permits to ensure that operations will meet substantive standards, like water quality limits for any effluent discharge. If mine designs cannot meet standards, agencies withhold permits until developers sufficiently revise their design. Nevertheless, trigger-happy environmental organizations will sue projects based on purely procedural aspects of NEPA, such as failing to consider points of public input. In fact, 74% of court opinions regarding NEPA reviews affirm agency decisions, leaving lawsuits most often achieving nothing but delay and disruption to the project.

For smaller developers especially, the mere risk of litigation can disproportionately discourage the entrance to U.S. markets, as they cannot bear surprise costs as well as larger firms. These small upstarts may prove vital for tapping into more niche critical minerals like rare earth elements or graphite, compared to global majors which focus on staple commodities like copper or even non-issues like gold and coal.

The proposed SPEED Act attempts to discourage frivolous lawsuits by shortening the window in which plaintiffs can bring lawsuits from its current six-year limit to 150 days. The bill would also promote faster resolutions by mandating timelines for courts to issue judgements.

While these provisions remain valuable, the SPEED Act includes a number of other provisions that would collectively make NEPA unenforceable in court, such as raising the standard under which third parties can sue projects. This sweeping, heavy-handed approach makes the SPEED Act unlikely to move forward in Congress, placing a premium on retaining the valuable aspects in future proposals.

The Fix Our Forests Act proposes another solution: limiting the ability of courts to vacate permitting decisions to cases involving substantive and direct harms to the plaintiff from a failure to disclose adverse environmental effects, rather than cases involving purely procedural issues. The bill would only apply this provision to forest management activities, but its passage could set a promising baseline for future debates to expand the idea to all sectors.

Permit Certainty

Calls for protecting permits against arbitrary cancellation have grown in Congressional debates in response to Trump administration interference with renewables projects. In fact, provisions that provide permit certainty may prove a necessary provision for enough Democrats in Congress to move forward with proposals.

While permit certainty may seem tailored for the wind and solar sectors, the mining sector would also benefit, as the threat of arbitrary permit cancellation consistently lingers over mining projects. Arbitrary cancellations have already burned the proposed Twin Metals Minnesota copper mine twice, first under the Obama administration, which refused to renew the project’s leases, and then again when the Biden administration revoked the leases while they were still active.

The SPEED Act attempts to deliver certainty by restricting agencies from revoking completed environmental review documents or relevant authorizations like leases or right-of-ways. The introduction of other certainty-minded proposals like the FREEDOM Act, which would provide covered energy projects (including most mining activities) with court-administered compensation, bodes well for future discussions, should the SPEED Act stall in Congress.

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Mining Needs Permitting Reform in Statute, Not Executive Action

The lack of legislative progress to date has encouraged the Trump administration to attempt to unilaterally speed up permitting using regulatory change and executive action, such as calling for 28-day reviews for a range of energy sources and critical minerals. But, these methods alone cannot tackle core permitting challenges, such as protections against litigation, which must come from Congress.

Aggressive regulatory overhauls also risk decreasing investor confidence by introducing the possibility of policies that ping-pong unpredictably back-and-forth as administrations change, and by courting lawsuits that actually add time and uncertainty to NEPA reviews.

Environmental organizations recently sued the Bull Mountains coal mine and the Lisbon Valley copper mine, citing a lack of opportunity for public comment because the agencies did not complete a draft environmental impact statement before issuing its record of decision. Court proceedings will determine if the quicker review ultimately benefits the developers. Future projects may face greater potential setbacks if courts cite more than procedural concerns, such as failure to consider alternative designs with less environmental impact. Such cases may require significant mine design revisions not taken into account in developer budgets or construction planning.

Permitting agencies do need to shift culturally from applying excessive scrutiny during environmental reviews as a hedge against lawsuits, toward a more balanced, efficiency-minded approach. However, statutory proposals like the ePermit Act offer a more durable solution than ceremonial deadlines that agencies can’t realistically achieve.

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America Needs Mining, Mining Needs Permitting Reform

Despite the dearth of mining examples in the national permitting reform debate, the future of the U.S. mining sector depends on what Congress can agree on when it comes to NEPA reform, permitting certainty, and much more. NEPA stands as only one barrier to a more competitive mining industry alongside the sector-specific reforms that Congress must also pursue. Lawmakers may have little political bandwidth to address these issues until they reach a consensus on the broader permitting issues that touch all industries.

The proposed Mining Regulatory Clarity Act, for example, would revise an outdated provision of the General Mining Law originally aimed at preventing small-scale miners from dumping waste on each others’ claims. In 2019, courts halted the Rosemont copper project outside of Tucson, Arizona, over a technicality citing that provision. Meanwhile, the proposal has stalled in Congress since its introduction in 2023.

While permitting talks inch forward, the United States faces persistent supply shortages of key minerals. At the same time, countries abroad continue to refine their government oversight and discover new deposits ready for developers to take advantage of. Insufficient domestic supplies of commodities like iron can slow economic growth by raising the prices of commonly used building materials. Slow and unreliable development of new copper and nickel mines will compound challenges facing energy infrastructure deployment. Meanwhile, failure to attract industry interest in new projects can perpetuate dangerous import reliances for materials like antimony, which is used in munitions that are essential for national defense.

Failure to deliver meaningful permitting reform for the mining sector will cede the future of mining to the country with the most attractive combination of regulatory ease and mineral deposits, increasing the cost of American energy and putting the brakes on economic growth.

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For decades, America’s nuclear waste debate has followed a predictable script. The federal government advances a technically defensible solution. Local communities often signal cautious support. States object. Litigation follows. Progress stalls.

Yucca Mountain became the emblem of that cycle. More recently, Texas sued the Nuclear Regulatory Commission over interim storage licensing. In each case, the engineering questions were largely answerable. The political ones were not.

That is because nuclear waste is not a broken engineering problem. It is a wicked governance problem.

Wicked problems do not yield to definitive solutions. They are entangled with values, institutional authority, long-time horizons, and strategic behavior. Propose a solution and you reshape the coalition that must accept it. Shift the frame and you change who has leverage. The feasible set is not fixed; it moves in response to the proposal itself.

The Department of Energy’s new Nuclear Fuel Cycle Innovation Campus initiative appears to recognize that reality.

Rather than pursuing disposal or interim storage as standalone political fights, DOE has asked states to indicate interest in hosting integrated fuel-cycle hubs. These campuses could combine advanced fuel development, recycling research, workforce training, and consolidated storage of spent nuclear fuel. Just as importantly, DOE has begun describing spent fuel not solely as waste, but as material with potential economic and technological value.

On the surface, this looks like an industrial policy move tied to advanced reactors. In substance, it is an attempt to intervene at the binding constraint in a wicked problem.

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The Stakeholder That Actually Blocks Progress

Wicked problems share several defining features. There is no single agreed-upon definition of the problem itself. Stakeholders disagree not only about solutions but also about objectives and values. Proposed solutions change the political and institutional landscape, reshaping incentives and coalitions. And the consequences of decisions unfold over time horizons that exceed the durability of the institutions making them.

Nuclear waste fits this pattern closely. The engineering questions—radiation behavior, materials durability, and geologic isolation—are largely understood. The unresolved questions concern authority, trust, equity, and responsibility over generations. Each attempt at a “final” solution has tended to intensify conflict rather than settle it.

Under the traditional paradigm, spent fuel was framed as a liability to be removed from reactor sites and disposed of elsewhere. The Nuclear Waste Policy Act centralized authority in Washington and ultimately singled out a single permanent repository site. The technical case for deep geologic disposal was strong. But the institutional design embedded a structural misalignment.

Local communities near proposed facilities often showed willingness to host them, particularly when economic benefits were tangible. Counties in Nevada negotiated benefits packages. Communities in Texas and New Mexico expressed support for consolidated interim storage.

States, however, retained political leverage. Governors and legislatures could mobilize litigation, invoke sovereignty arguments, and transform what began as a local economic development question into a statewide referendum on federal overreach. Nevada resisted Yucca Mountain for decades. Texas and New Mexico challenged the NRC’s authority over interim storage. Governors have said plainly that they will not allow their states to become the nation’s nuclear‑waste dumping ground, a politically resonant framing even when the technical safety case is strong. The decisive veto point was not the county commission. It was the statehouse.

In wicked problems, the most important stakeholder is often the one with latent veto authority.

DOE’s new approach targets that stakeholder directly. Instead of asking a state to acquiesce to a federally selected waste site, the department is inviting states to compete; to opt in to becoming anchors of regional fuel cycle ecosystems.

That changes the starting position from defensive resistance to strategic choice.

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Changing the Narrative Changes the Coalition

The rhetorical shift from “burden” to “asset” is not cosmetic. In wicked problems, framing reshapes coalitions.

When spent fuel is presented exclusively as long‑lived waste, hosting it appears as an act of sacrifice, tolerable only with compensation. When it is embedded in a broader industrial strategy (advanced fuels, recycling R&D, high‑skill workforce development) storage becomes one component of a larger economic proposition.

This does not require recycling to be commercially proven today. It requires only that states see a credible upside in hosting infrastructure connected to next‑generation nuclear technology.

Under the old model, local consent was necessary but insufficient. A county could say yes, and a state could still say no. Under the hub model, the state is asked to say yes at the outset, aligning political authority with economic ambition. That does not eliminate downstream conflict, but it reduces the likelihood that projects unravel because the wrong actor was empowered to block them.

Wicked problems rarely dissolve. But altering who must agree can materially expand the feasible set of options.

It would be a mistake to treat this initiative, or any other suggested option, as a final solution in the traditional sense.

First, state interest is necessary but not sufficient. Tribal governments, local communities, neighboring states, and federal regulators retain independent authority. A governor’s support does not immunize a project from future political reversal.

Second, the economic proposition must be durable. If innovation campuses fail to generate sustained research activity, investment, and employment, the political coalition could erode. Reframing spent fuel as an asset works only if the associated institutions produce visible value.

Third, opposition will adapt. When waste is framed purely as a disposal issue, debate centers on safety and environmental risk. When it is tied to industrial strategy, criticism may shift toward subsidy allocation, regional favoritism, or long‑term liability. Wicked problems migrate rather than disappear.

But none of these caveats negate the central point: DOE is attempting to change the solution space rather than refine the technical case for the same strategy.

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From Deferral to Decision

One response to decades of stalemate has been to argue that spent fuel can simply remain where it is, in hardened dry casks at reactor sites. From a narrow safety perspective, that position has force. Dry cask storage is robust, monitored, and far safer than many industrial hazards society routinely accepts.

But leaving fuel in place indefinitely is not a strategy. It is a deferral.

In a wicked problem, refusing to decide does not freeze the system. It shifts burdens forward. Reactor sites were not designed for century‑scale stewardship absent operating revenue. Ownership structures change. Utilities restructure or dissolve. Communities that host plants under one economic rationale may not consent to becoming de facto permanent storage locations under another.

Choosing not to consolidate, not to realign authority, and not to clarify responsibility is itself a path‑dependent decision. It locks in dispersed storage by default, without an explicit governance framework matched to that outcome.

For years, some analysts—including at institutions that have otherwise contributed valuable perspective to the debate—argued that on‑site storage could persist safely for the foreseeable future and that the urgency of a permanent repository was overstated. The first claim remains largely correct on technical grounds. The second is incomplete on institutional ones.

There is a further complication. Anti‑nuclear advocacy groups have long opposed permanent repositories of any kind, not merely on technical grounds but as a strategy. So long as spent fuel remains at reactor sites, they can continue to argue that communities are being placed at risk, that the government has failed to act, and that nuclear energy remains uniquely irresponsible. Blocking consolidation preserves a durable rhetorical lever: “What about the waste?”

That dynamic is itself a symptom of a wicked problem. When every forward step reshapes the political battlefield, some actors rationally prefer stalemate. But paralysis is not neutral. It entrenches dispersed storage by default and converts the absence of decision into a long‑term outcome no one has formally chosen.

Technical adequacy is not the same as governance adequacy.

Two additional institutional developments could complicate the decision landscape further.

First, changes to the Department of Energy’s Standard Contract for spent fuel management could create divergent expectations between legacy reactors and future plants. If new reactors operate under amended terms governing federal acceptance, pricing, or timelines for waste removal, the result could be a bifurcated system. Over time, that fragmentation risks embedding different assumptions about federal responsibility and consolidation, making future alignment harder rather than easier.

Second, proposals to create a new federally chartered corporation to manage nuclear waste promise institutional focus and insulation from political turnover. But multiplying institutions does not necessarily align incentives. A new entity would still depend on congressional authorization and funding, regulatory oversight, state cooperation, and judicial review. Instead of resolving the wicked problem, it could simply create another arena in which opposition can organize and delay decisions.

If the United States expands nuclear generation to meet rising electricity demand and decarbonization goals, the inventory of spent fuel will grow. Treating continued dispersion as an acceptable steady state amounts to choosing a long‑term configuration without ever saying so.

The relevant question is therefore not whether dry casks are safe. It is whether dispersed, site‑by‑site stewardship aligns authority, responsibility, and economic incentives over decades. Absent a clear affirmative case, inertia becomes the default policy.

DOE’s hub model represents an attempt to move from deferral to decision. It does not mandate immediate permanence. It does, however, create a mechanism for voluntary consolidation tied to state‑level consent and economic strategy. That is qualitatively different from waiting for a comprehensive repository while fuel accumulates in place.

The standard of success should therefore shift. Not: did we finally close the waste issue? But: did we replace passive drift with structured, consent‑based consolidation that reduces risk while preserving optionality?

Three tests are relevant.

1. Does this approach align authority with responsibility at the state level?

2. Does it reduce the long‑term concentration of spent fuel at sites never intended for indefinite stewardship?

3. Does it preserve future options—recycling, deep disposal, continued monitored storage—rather than foreclose them?

If those conditions are met, progress has occurred—even without symbolic closure.

The deeper lesson is broader than nuclear waste. Wicked problems punish efforts at singular, final solutions. They respond better to incentive realignment, incremental consolidation, and governance structures that can adapt over time.

DOE’s initiative may not end the nuclear waste debate. But it reflects a more realistic premise: when a problem’s binding constraint is political and institutional, changing who has reason to say yes can matter more than improving the engineering.

On nuclear waste, movement will begin not with a perfect design, but with decisions that consolidate fuel, clarify responsibility, and make saying yes politically viable.

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“Kamala definitely needs to start getting involved.”

That’s what climate activist RL Miller told E&E News in August 2024, when congressional Democrats and Republicans were negotiating over major federal permitting reform legislation. “What Democrats should do is refuse to take [the permitting bill] up,” said Miller, “and wait until January to start passing more serious clean energy-only bills.”

Kamala, of course, never did get involved.

A year later, Bill McKibben made a similar argument about permitting reform on Jerusalem Demsas’s podcast. “I just don’t see that there’s a negotiation to be had now,” he told Demsas. “I think we should try to make it happen, but not with these guys.”

My concern, as 2026 began, was that this line of thinking—that permitting should be pursued, but only on a partisan basis—would prevail in the latest round of congressional permitting negotiations.

Late last year, after the House passed the SPEED Act, all eyes turned to the Senate for the Upper House’s companion legislation. Then, the Trump administration paused federal leases on five wind farms off the Eastern Seaboard. Key Senate Democrats announced they would, in turn, pause negotiations on permitting reform legislation. “The illegal attacks on fully permitted renewable energy projects must be reversed if there is to be any chance that permitting talks resume,” said Democratic Senators Martin Heinrich and Sheldon Whitehouse in a joint statement.

As I argued recently with my colleagues Marc Levitt and Elizabeth McCarthy, this was a substantive and strategic overreaction. One need not defend any portion of the Trump administration’s energy agenda to observe that walking out on permitting negotiations does as much or more damage to Democrats’ energy and climate priorities as it does to the administration’s agenda.

The Trump administration, though, has been far from a good-faith counterpart in the negotiations. While the Interior Department advanced its scorched-earth campaign against renewable energy projects, the White House has pursued a NEPA reform agenda predicated entirely on executive action. Not unlike their Democratic adversaries in Congress, the Trump administration has at times not seemed to care very much about permitting reform legislation.

Since December, courts have reversed the administration’s stop-work orders for all five of the affected wind farms, and the Trump Administration more recently quietly rebooted federal approval of solar projects on public lands. And, as of yesterday, Senators Whitehouse and Heinrich have announced their intentions to resume permitting negotiations.

This is encouraging. But we’re not out of the woods yet. Both political and policy disputes stand between resumed talks and final legislation. And those of us who have been pushing permitting reform for years remember well that partisanship has repeatedly stymied permitting legislation, from the handshake deal after the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022 to the Energy Permitting Reform Act (EPRA) in 2024.

It’s vitally important that Congress follows through this time. Abundance, artificial intelligence, stewardship of public lands, and other key national priorities are being held back by laws Congress passed half a century ago and that Congress now needs to fix. And the Trump administration’s lackluster attitude on the legislative front only goes to show what happens when one party gains the consolidated political control that Democrats like Miller and McKibben are clamoring for: temporary executive actions that worsen energy policy polarization.

Permitting reform should be one of the only remaining policy issues for which bipartisanship can prevail. If our legislature can’t do this, what can it do?

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The Permitting Proceduralist Arms Race

Meaningful permitting reform legislation has become a significant priority among certain congressional Democrats and Republicans in recent years. There are multiple bills in both houses of Congress, including major reforms to NEPA that passed the House on a bipartisan basis last fall, as well as several bills that advance the “permitting certainty” Democrats have prioritized. And the Trump administration’s anti-renewables agenda, if anything, strengthens the case for reforming NEPA and other laws that enable weaponized regulatory obstructionism, and strengthens the case for durable, bipartisan congressional action.

Democrats’ reticence on this issue is frustrating because, in one sense, they’re the party that started it. By canceling the Keystone XL pipeline permit, and attempting to cancel approved oil and gas drilling leases, the Biden White House opened the Pandora’s Box of weaponized permitting procedure. The Biden administration was also infamously meek in its support of permitting legislation.

Democrats’ general frustrations with the current administration are understandable. President Trump kicked his second term off with DOGE, and continued to pursue legally dubious RIFs, reversals, repeals, cancelations, and firings. The Departments of Energy and Interior have gone scorched-earth on many of Democrats’ signature climate and energy achievements, including specific renewable projects, but also clean energy innovation hubs and scientific funding. It has not always been immediately obvious that President Trump would sign permitting legislation that Democrats would support, nor that his agencies would implement any new laws in the ways Democrats would prefer.

But while President Trump may exert uniquely forceful executive preferences, it is not unusual for a minority party to be confounded by the executive’s agenda. And while Trump won’t be president in a few years time, the nation’s infrastructure woes will endure. Waiting for the perfect opportunity of consolidated political power would be worse than chasing a phantasm; it’s the very impulse that created the permitting proceduralism arms race in the first place.

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From Energy Policy Acts to Energy Policy Polarization

Energy politics and policy have polarized substantially over the last couple decades. The parties today not only diverge on the types of policies they favor—with Republicans generally preferring regulatory relief, and Democrats preferring new spending programs—but, more and more, on the types of technologies they’re willing to support.

Though the clean-versus-fossil dispute has long divided the parties, there was traditionally a middle ground. Republicans controlled both Houses when Congress passed, and George W. Bush signed the 30% investment tax credit for solar panels into law in 2005. Democrats voted across the aisle to end America’s oil exports embargo in 2015. The two parties regularly came together to write omnibus energy policy bills in 1975, 1978, 1992, 2005, 2007, and even in 2020, in the last piece of legislation signed during President Trump’s first term.

Then things changed in 2022, when a narrow Democratic majority took much of the policy errata established under these prior Acts and jammed reforms through the budget reconciliation process, to the tune of hundreds of billions in new federal outlays. In passing the Inflation Reduction Act, Democrats took bipartisan national energy policy and turned it into hyperpartisan climate policy. And of course the law was merely the signature piece of the Biden administration’s “whole of government” climate agenda which included a regulatory crackdown on fossil fuel production. Almost regardless of what the IRA would go on to accomplish, the Biden years represented an unequivocal escalation in the energy tribalism wars.

Republicans, at the first chance they got, responded in kind. In Our Big Beautiful Bill, Republicans went after the IRA, gutting incentives for solar, wind, and electric vehicles. And, like clockwork, Democrats have already drafted legislation to revive the IRA.

This is no way to manage national energy policy.

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Beyond Secret Congress

Again, it wasn’t always like this. Energy regulations and technology subsidies were historically passed via so-called “secret Congress” and more staid bipartisan negotiations. These vectors for legislative deliberation are still available, but the opportunities to utilize them for meaningful purposes are waning.

Consider the ADVANCE Act that passed in President Biden’s last year in office. ADVANCE was a package of nuclear regulatory reforms designed to streamline the commercialization and deployment of advanced reactor technologies in the United States. Though the legislation was introduced well into the era of energy policy hyperpartisanship, it secured overwhelming bipartisan support in both Houses. There was no great public fanfare or controversy, either from the public or from civil society. It was in this sense a classic success story for Secret Congress.

Even right now, Secret Congress is hard at work on quiet, abundance-oriented legislation. As of this writing, the Senate is considering the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, a bill that would streamline regulations on housing development, open up new financing for affordable housing projects, and even make narrow reforms to NEPA.

Not all bipartisanship can be accomplished in secret, though. And that brings us back to permitting reform.

Major, cross-sectoral reforms to NEPA and transmission planning are neither the kind of policies that generate tons of front-page headlines, nor the type of under-the-radar progress that can be expeditiously achieved by Secret Congress. Laws like NEPA benefit from large and well-funded special interest issue advocates on all sides, and the reforms themselves are often quite meaningful to businesses and the public alike. Reconciliation is not an option, as much as both parties have tried to shoehorn statutory reforms through budgetary gimmicks. And while US infrastructure policy may not be as politically perilous as immigration or welfare reform, it has become swept up in a variety of culture wars, making ambitious bipartisan legislation a difficult proposition.

But that’s the job.

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Permitting Reform or Die

The good news is that the coalitional dynamics behind environmental regulatory reform really have shifted in recent years. Streamlining NEPA and other environmental statutes makes sense whether one’s frame of reference is abundance, energy dominance, conservative populism, climate pragmatism, or national security.

The bad news is that permitting reform keeps falling short anyway. As much as members of both parties are working across the aisle to craft intelligent and practicable reform proposals, the parties at large still don’t feel the overwhelming imperative to get bipartisan legislation across the finish line. Public choice theory explains much of what’s going on here. The public doesn’t connect transmission cost allocation policy and NEPA to anything that readily improves their lives, and no President has utilized the bully pulpit to convincingly connect the dots for them. Permitting reform faces opposition from the large and well-endowed environmental movement, as well as a vocal cohort of ideologically anti-renewables influencers. The divergent electric power transmission planning priorities of liberalized versus vertically integrated utilities also complicates the negotiations. Optimizing for all operant stakeholder priorities is genuinely difficult.

But I’d argue it’s political culture, more than lobbying and logrolling, that most explains Congress’s failure to pass meaningful reform legislation. America’s two main political parties face vanishingly few incentives to legislate, or to work with each other. Raising money, advancing to higher office, and attracting media attention can all be accomplished by doing precisely the opposite—by cultivating an aura of fierce partisanship. The stubborn permitting reform deadlock may simply be the depressing inevitability that occurs when the unstoppable force of Energy Dominance meets the immovable object of the Climate Emergency.

Indeed, my lingering fear amid the pause in negotiations has not been so much that Democrats struck out a poorly considered negotiating position, but rather that they will stand their ground on a thoroughly considered political gamble. The midterms are mere months away, and the generic ballot shows Democrats as the favorites. Most analysts expect Democrats to regain a majority in the House, and taking back control of the Senate is a plausible, though unlikely, prospect as well. Democrats may yet take the advice offered by Miller, McKibben, and other progressives: to kick the can down the road until they’ve once again consolidated political power.

This would be a grave substantive and tactical error if the goal is a pragmatic, durable energy policy. Democrats who fail to work across the aisle on meaningful permitting legislation in the 119th Congress are unlikely to find willing Republican counterparts for a new round of negotiations in the 120th. The irony that the legislative obstruction on display here perfectly mirrors the delayed investment in American energy infrastructure would be bemusing if it were not legitimately tragic.

And the tragedy only deepens if Democrats are banking on total control of the federal government in 2029. Waiting until your preferred party has a political trifecta to advance energy policy reforms not only risks worsening the decay of American infrastructure, it threatens the further disintegration of America’s political and civic institutions. Congress has proven itself fully incapable of even broaching bipartisan talks on issues like immigration, education, and abortion. Until fairly recently, energy policy was a bright exception to the structural and strategic party polarization that has come to define American politics.

Our legislators need to take that seriously. To do so would compel Democrats and Republicans not only to work together to reform environmental review and judicial oversight of NEPA this year, but to work continuously, session after session, on meaningful reforms to the nation’s gauntlet of regulatory barriers to technology and infrastructure investment. The Trump administration is showing us what it feels like for one party to go it alone on permitting policy. Does this feel sustainable to anyone?

As I wrote in my most recent Dispatch column, “The fate of permitting legislation is a test, both of the “all-of-the-above” energy abundance agenda and of a civil, bipartisan politics that has come under threat in recent decades.” Failing to pass meaningful permitting reform this year would signal a harrowing rubicon in our political culture, beyond which it will become unclear whether our federal legislative branch serves much productive purpose at all.

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A wave of high-profile research over the past several years has taken microplastics from a story about pollution in oceans, drinking water, and food to a far more alarming claim: that these particles are “inside you”—in brains, blood, arteries, placentas and testes—and may be tied to serious disease, including cancer and cardiovascular harm. There have been thousands of stories echoing this narrative in the media and on advocacy networks, often framed as proof of corporate malfeasance. A slew of lawsuits is already in the works.

But, in a recent twist, those assumptions are in dispute. A growing swath of scientists says the most widely reported detections may be false positives that reflect contamination and methodological limitations, not proof of widespread internal plastic accumulation, and certainly not proof of harm.

Rather than facing a growing health crisis as so many previous headlines had argued, many experts say the studies claiming to find cancer-causing particles rely on measurement systems that are not robust enough to distinguish genuine plastic signals from ubiquitous lab background or from tissue that can mimic common polymers.

The scare narrative began to fracture publicly in January with an article in The Guardian, a notable venue because it had helped to popularize the “microplastics are inside your body” storyline. The investigation reported that many analytical chemists and other scientists believe the widespread claims and alarmist academic papers are wrong or overstated. Vox republished it, and Fast Company, The Conversation, and The Washington Post followed up with their own analytical pieces. The New York Times, which had featured a range of credulous stories, videos, and even school guides on microplastics’ health threats, ignored the new evidence entirely, and in fact has ran a story reiterating the now-challenged conclusions this week.

The Guardian called its investigation a “bombshell”, and it was, but not just for the medical community. If the critics are right, the revelations cut directly at the rhetorical heart of what has verged on a panic: the leap from “we can detect something plastic-like” to “microplastics are driving disease,” the “settled medical verdict” that had acted as narrative accelerant. But it never was.

The turnaround has reverberated through the ecosystem that helped manufacture the former consensus—a familiar “panic pipeline” that has repeatedly elevated other contested health scares in recent years made up of overlapping networks of environmental advocacy groups, plaintiffs’ lawyers, activist academics, and a media ecosystem that reliably rewards the most alarming interpretations first.

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Microplastic Fears Go Mainstream

How did we get to the point where a tentative conclusion was widely reported as definitive? Concern over microplastics has been building for roughly two decades. For much of that time, it focused on floating trash, degraded bottles, and the unsettling idea that plastic doesn’t disappear so much as it fractures into tiny specks that show up on beaches, and in seafood and drinking water. In reviews of the early evidence, the European Food Safety Authority in 2016 and the World Health Organization in 2019 underscored just how tentative the claims about direct health effects were—in part because most ingested particles were expected to pass through the gut with limited absorption. They urged better methods and more rigorous research, but the advocacy groups and the media rarely restrained their reporting.

The narrative escalated dramatically in March 2024 when a New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) study reported the presence of plastic particles in carotid artery plaque and an association with heart attack, stroke, and death. In an interview with The Guardian, the paper’s lead author, Italian scientist and physician Raffaele Marfella, coined the slogan: “plastic-free is healthy for the heart and the Earth,” claiming “we are defenseless against plastic pollution.”

The findings were uniquely combustible. “Microplastics in the body” media stories can feel abstract; “NEJM study links plastics in arteries to death” does not. The study went viral, widely reported as a “smoking gun.” The Guardian used especially loaded language, characterizing human blood vessels as “contaminated” and describing the findings as “potentially life-threatening.”

What was once speculative science quickly hardened into a popular belief that microplastics are an immediate and escalating health threat. The framing moved from “plastics are everywhere” to “plastics can kill you”—often in ways that read as evidence of a settled causal mechanism for heart attack and stroke.

Concerns heightened even more in February 2025 after an analysis published in Nature Medicine claimed to find trace plastics in the brain. The Guardian, once again, was all in with a shocking headline: “Levels of microplastics in human brains may be rapidly rising.” The study claimed there was a rising trend in micro- and nanoplastics found in tissue from dozens of postmortems carried out between 1997 and 2024.

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Narrative Reversal

Alarmism sells, and many outlets treated early microplastics “detections” as verdicts, not hypotheses. But many experts in the field were never convinced of the gravity of the claims. Last year, nine measurement specialists pushed back in a letter in Nature Medicine, arguing that the February 2025 brain study had too few contamination safeguards and too little validation, making its reported levels hard to trust.

“This paper is really bad—and it is very explainable why it is wrong,” said co-author Dr Dušan Materić, an analytical chemist at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Germany. And it isn’t just about brains: placenta, lipid-rich tissues, and atherosclerotic plaque are exactly the kinds of samples where normal biology can mimic plastic signals.

The fight shifted from “plastic pollution exists” to whether headline “plastic in human tissue” findings are robust enough to support disease claims. A major target of the skepticism is Py-GC-MS, a heat-based test that some researchers say can misread tissue chemistry as polyethylene or PVC in complex samples.

But even perfect detection wouldn’t settle the bigger point: “found” isn’t the same as “harmful,” and “harmful” isn’t the same as “high risk at real-world concentrations.” Risk assessment requires a chain of evidence, not a single detection: hazard is not the same as risk, association is not causation, and detection is not validated identification.

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The Scare Narrative Ecosystem

Confusion between hazard and risk is a recurring feature of chemical scares. The plastics controversy follows a familiar U.S. “panic pipeline” where advocacy groups, activist academics and plaintiffs’ firms turn contested hazard signals into class action suits. We’ve seen that arc with products and chemicals regarded by regulators and mainstream scientific bodies as generally safe: talc, glyphosate, BPA, antidepressants, Gardasil, and now Tylenol.

Environmental groups moved quickly to frame microplastics as an established health threat. The most vocal, Environmental Working Group, has acknowledged support from plaintiff lawyers (here, here, here). It has published twenty microplastics stories in the past three years, half through its New Lede project edited by Carey Gillam, who has also written microplastics pieces for The Guardian.

Gillam is a polarizing figure in these debates: A former Reuters reporter who left the news agency in 2015 after widespread criticism of her reporting on GMOs and crop chemicals, her work on GMOs and crop chemicals has leaned toward advocacy framing. Her books, Whitewash: The Story of a Weedkiller, Cancer, and the Corruption of Science and The Monsanto Papers, became treasure troves for litigators. Wisner Baum (formerly Baum Hedlund) and its associated counsel, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., coordinated with Gillam in preparing the first successful glyphosate lawsuit—and features in a “Monsanto Papers” section on its website.

In her various articles on plastics and the threats of the chemical industry, Gillam’s go-to academic scientists are Stanford University professor Tracey Woodruff and pediatrician and Boston College epidemiologist Philip Landrigan. They both run programs with missions and messaging that align well with litigation-laden crises and are often quoted together in articles as experts on chemicals. They co-authored with other scientists the launch article for The Lancet Countdown on Health and Plastics, which characterized plastics as a “grave, growing, and under-recognized danger to human and planetary health, and got huge play in the media.

Woodruff was a prominent voice in the endocrine-disruptor/plastic chemicals campaigns aimed at banning the plasticizer BPA (bisphenol A), a chemical found in microscopic quantities in some plastic products and on store receipts, as a reproductive toxin. But the crisis narrative ran into headwinds. The Obama administration funded $30 million in research into its safety and found no basis to ban or restrict it. Nevertheless, the campaign became the centerpiece of environmental groups for years and a target of thousands of lawsuits. Ironically, BPA has been displaced in plastics by BPS even though it is considered even more toxic—a reminder of the “regrettable substitution” dynamic that often follows chemical scares.

Microplastics are Woodruff’s current focus. For 18 years until February she was director of UCSF’s Program on Reproductive Health, which, according to its mission statement, targets “harmful chemicals.” It also houses what it calls “The Poison Papers—documents from encounters with Monsanto and the EPA. Its Center to End Corporate Harm describes plastics and petrochemicals as “health-harming industries” engaged in a “decades-long assault” on regulators—language that reads less like neutral research and more like a prosecution brief. It features a link—“Serve as an expert witness”—and highlights Woodruff by name. Its Risk Management has a section that reads, “A law firm wants to hire me as their expert witness,” and notes it is the individual’s choice whether to serve.

Landrigan is not just a mainstream pediatric epidemiologist; he’s also a high-profile environmental-health advocate whose chemical-risk messaging has drawn pushback from other scientists. He was senior author two years ago of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ GMO guidance that singled out glyphosate residues as a threat to child-health. Science magazine and numerous scientists called it “fearmongering.”

In a letter to The Guardian, Landrigan was dismissive of its investigation that challenged claims that microplastics may not pose a health threat after all. “Microplastics harm health,” he wrote, calling them “Trojan horses” that carry plastic additives into the body and cause diseases “from cancer to heart disease and from IQ loss in children to decreased fertility.”

Landrigan also chairs the Science Advisory Board of the Heartland Health Research Alliance (HHRA)—a nonprofit formed by environmental groups to manage and fund the “Heartland Study”—a vehicle used by tort law firms to feed litigation narratives targeting corporations that make chemical products. Heartland was launched with seed money from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and a principal at Wisner Baum, which has used their research in numerous lawsuits.

Its director, Charles Benbrook, is an economist and organic industry consultant with a long history of controversy. He was an organic industry funded adjunct professor at Washington State University before being fired in 2016 for failing to disclose industry-funded conflicts of interest. Benbrook has served as an expert witness in more than a dozen lawsuits involving GMOs and pesticides, and since 2014 he has been a paid consultant for mass tort pesticide litigators on class action cases involving glyphosate, paraquat and chlorpyrifos, often with Baum Hedlund. He has acknowledged receiving more than $500,000 in related consulting associated with pesticide lawsuits. Landrigan and Benbrook have also co-authored articles on the dangers of chemicals.

HHRA’s vice-chair is Robin Greenwald of Weitz & Luxenberg, whose experience includes environmental and consumer class-action cases. Greenwald was appointed co-lead counsel in the federal Roundup (glyphosate) MDL, a role that sits at the center of mass-tort coordination. With Landrigan holding a leadership role at HHRA, critics point out the tight link between the production of alarming health claims, policy campaigns, and legally actionable narratives.

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How the Microplastics Narrative Became Lawsuit-Ready

The conflict over whether the direction of environmental-health research is being distorted by advocacy and links to the plaintiffs’ bar is not unique to microplastics. But microplastics are uniquely suited to the feedback loop because the story is so emotionally powerful (“harmful plastic inside you”), analytically difficult (easy to overinterpret), and legally portable (products, exposure, alleged concealment). The early litigation template has already formed in high-profile litigation alleging consumer-fraud even while measurement standards and proof of causality are still uncertain.

That combination helps to explain why concerns about microplastics were able to shift so quickly from uncertainty about chemical detection methods to courtroom-ready claims about injury and culpability—and why the January 2026 methodological backlash lands as a challenge not only to a few journal articles, but also to the narrative supply chain that turned them into the source of justified public alarm.

It is not just the influence of academia and “public interest” NGOs at work, of course. The plaintiffs’ ecosystem itself is now openly building “microplastics dockets”: Law firms and websites that generate “leads” for potential litigants are advertising investigations, soliciting clients, and packaging unsettled science into allegations of “negligence,” “toxicity,” “exposure,” and “injury.” Bloomberg Law has described microplastics as a target in a “surge” of lawsuits and noted that repeat-player firms are behind multiple filings in the space. One of many examples: The Lyon Firm publicly states it is “reviewing new cases” involving “microplastics” in food products and invites readers to contact its attorneys for a “free consultation.”

If the scientific debate seems academic, the legal system has been weighing whether it is actionable. Over the last two years, consumer class action lawsuits have increasingly been built on a single, fear-amplifying, litigation-tempting premise: Products marketed as “pure,” “safe,” or “natural” are, it is alleged, contaminated with harmful microplastics and, therefore, are deceptively marketed.

A March 2024 complaint against BlueTriton’s Poland Spring water, for instance, alleged that “every bottle … contains dangerous levels of microplastics.” In May 2025, a federal court dismissed with prejudice a putative class action lawsuit which alleged that Fiji Water’s “Natural Artesian Water” labeling was deceptive due to purported microplastic contamination. The court faulted, among other issues, the inadequacy of the plaintiff’s testing allegations. Meanwhile, the microplastics theory has migrated far beyond bottled water to Ziploc bags, Rubbermaid food containers, and baby bottles.

What is striking and relevant to litigation is how “concentrated” some of this docket is: Multiple microplastics class action lawsuits across different consumer categories are often filed by the same plaintiffs’ firms, notably Clarkson Law, Todd M. Freeman, and Ahdoot and Woolfson, in what seems a coordinated effort to build a scalable “microplastics” theory of liability.

This is where the measurement controversy becomes legally explosive. If courts require product-specific proof—and if the foundational “microplastics are found in human tissue” literature is itself challenged as actually being contamination and misidentification—the evidentiary scaffolding beneath many plaintiffs’ pleadings becomes harder to build. That pressure is already visible in bottled-water rulings emphasizing plausibility and testing specificity.

Allegations of harm, even absent proof, can greatly skew public opinion and the results of litigation. Once a threat narrative has become culturally established, it becomes monetizable. That extends to more than tort litigation. It also includes a growing ecosystem of “microplastics detox” claims and boutique, snake-oil interventions marketed to anxious consumers—all despite continued uncertainty about internal dose, persistence, and demonstrated harm caused by typical degrees of exposures.

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What We Know—and What We Don’t

None of the scientific pushback argues that plastic pollution is imaginary. The Guardian’s investigation stresses that plastic pollution in the natural world is ubiquitous and that people are exposed via food, drink and air. What the backlash challenges is the over-stated confidence about the causality between internal accumulation and harm.

In other words, the public conversation has sprinted to “we’re contaminated and sick,” while the scientific community is still uncertain about whether existing technology can reliably distinguish plastic from the natural tissues in which it is supposedly embedded. That’s why the current rhetoric seems, at the very least, premature.

There is a rational environmental agenda around plastics—waste reduction, smarter materials, and less unnecessary packaging. But turning tentative, contamination-prone detection into a confident claim of a “silent epidemic” risks misdirecting policy, rewarding perverse research incentives, and eroding trust in future research findings.

There is a larger, structural point as well: The near-hysteria over microplastics in the human body is emerging as a case study in how modern “chemical panics” are manufactured and amplified—not only by activists and sympathetic media, but also by a litigation economy that profits when anxiety hardens into presumption. Once a claim becomes culturally “true” (“it’s in your organs,” “it’s causing disease,” and “industry covered it up”), it becomes legally actionable: a ready-made grievance, a monetizable exposure story, a recruitment pitch, and a lure to mass filings. Considering the unqualified headlines that have long accompanied reporting on this issue, pressure to settle unjustified claims is almost a given.

That same fear-to-filing pipeline has appeared repeatedly in other chemical and technology controversies. This is especially true in cases where the science is genuinely complex, the evidence is contested, and the public is primed for a villain. We’ve seen versions of it in litigation and advocacy storms involving talc, herbicides, food additives, vaccines, and other products—where thin or unsettled evidence is treated as final, where “presence” is sold as “harm,” and where the courtroom becomes a substitute arena for scientific closure.

The danger is not that microplastics concerns will be studied too rigorously; rather, it is that misaligned incentives will keep selecting for the most alarming interpretation of uncertain findings: Alarm is what recruits plaintiffs, drives donations, generates headlines, and sustains an expert-witness and litigation-promoting marketplace.

If the backlash against the “plastics-are-killing-us” narrative proves anything, it is that once a “hidden killer” storyline takes hold—solidified in the public consciousness and often embedded in policy—backtracking requires a chain of unlikely reversals: Regulators must walk back prior claims, agencies need to revise already-issued regulations, and newsrooms must replace a scare storyline with the messier conditional reality. That kind of coordinated de-escalation is rare.

Even as scientists attempt to correct the misinformation around plastics, we should not expect a rollback from the loudest constituencies who have benefited substantially from the alarm: Advocacy groups will continue mobilizing around the politicized narrative, which plaintiff law firms will leverage for recruitment. Microplastics-related litigation is already beginning to scale—especially municipal nuisance suits and consumer-fraud class actions. Even as the science on microplastics improves and data accumulate, expect repeat bellwether “test” trials, expert battles, and settlement leverage. In this ecosystem, alarm is rewarded immediately; sound science has a lonely audience and an indolent path.

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Jon Entine is the executive director of the Science Literacy Project/Genetic Literacy Project.

Henry I. Miller is a physician and molecular biologist and the Glenn Swogger Distinguished Scholar at the Science Literacy Project. He was the co-discoverer of the RNA-dependent RNA polymerase in the influenza virus and the founding director of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Office of Biotechnology.

By Deric Tilson and Adam Stein

In December 2025, researchers led by Yazan Alwadi at Harvard’s T.H Chan School of Public Health published a paper in Environmental Health that claimed to find that cancer incidence increased for people living closer to nuclear power plants in Massachusetts. Just this past week, the same researchers published an expanded nationwide study claiming a similar result—this time looking at cancer mortality rates, rather than incidence—in Nature Communications.

If these findings were true, the research would support the fringe idea that nuclear power is actively harmful to the general population even without a catastrophic failure, which has not been confirmed by past research. Anti-nuclear activists would no longer need to point to the possible risk of meltdowns; they can simply point to increased cancer risks just from living close to a plant.

That is an extraordinary claim. But the studies’ design cannot support that claim.

The problem is not that the authors found a statistical pattern. The problem is that their research design cannot determine whether proximity to a nuclear plant is the cause of that pattern. It can only show that cancer rates vary geographically and that cancer detection rates have increased over the past few decades, which we already know.

The two papers make the fundamental mistake of confusing correlation with causation. By failing to provide a control group in their Massachusetts study and using an improperly-sampled group in their national study. This research is not only wrong, it is fundamentally dangerous. By purporting to show increased cancer risks from safely operating nuclear power plants despite providing no real evidence to support the claim, these papers are actually increasing public health risk associated with the US power sector, fueling efforts to shutter operating nuclear power plants and prevent the deployment of new reactors and increasing the air pollution and public health burden from fossil-fueled electricity generation.

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Distance Is Not Dose

To establish that nuclear plants are increasing cancer risk, a study must show more than a map-based association. At a minimum, it must demonstrate:

1. A plausible exposure pathway,

2. Evidence that meaningful doses are being received,

3. A credible comparison showing what would have happened in the absence of that exposure.

Neither study does this.

Nor do they attempt to contend with the broader literature on radiation exposure and cancer risk amongst the nuclear workforce and radioactive release data.

Instead, both papers construct a “proximity score” based on distance from nuclear plants, up to 120 km in Massachusetts and 200 km in the national study. Every ZIP code or county inside those radii is treated as exposed, with closer locations receiving higher weights.

But distance from a facility is not a measure of radiation dose. It does not account for wind direction, release rates, shielding, plant operating history, or actual monitored emissions. It does not measure individual exposure. It does not validate whether residents received any incremental dose beyond natural background radiation.

It is a geographic proxy and a very broad one.

When that proxy is applied across large regions where cancer rates, demographics, income, healthcare access, and age structures also vary geographically, statistical associations can emerge even if there is no causal exposure from the plant itself.

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Cancer Incidence in Massachusetts

Alwadi’s research group’s first study, published in December 2025, “investigates the association between residential proximity to nuclear power plants and zip-code level cancer incidence” for the population of Massachusetts. The paper’s abstract makes the strong causal claim, “proximity to plants significantly increased cancer incidence, with risk declining by distance.” But what the paper actually finds is that the aging population of urban and suburban Massachusetts between 2000 and 2018 experienced increases in new cancer cases. What they do not find, however, is that nuclear power plants had anything to do with it. This, at core, stems from a failure to properly assess the question at hand because of shoddy research design.

A primary issue with the paper is that it fails at proper research identification and specification. A model is considered identified when it is able to separate cause from coincidence by showing what would have happened without the exposure or treatment. In plain English, it’s having a credible way to compare reality to a believable “what if nothing changed?” scenario. Because the paper cannot show what would happen to the populations under scrutiny if there were no nuclear power plants, there is no way to say that nuclear plants, in particular, were the cause of increased cancer incidence. The authors then misspecify their model through incorrect assumptions. Misspecification occurs when a model does not correctly represent the underlying statistical or causal relationships, leading to misleading or biased results. In this case, the authors assumed uniform dispersion and distribution of effects based on proximity, did not consider the nonrandom construction of houses near nuclear power plants, had no mechanism for measuring actual doses received, and did not consider the lags involved in the development of cancer.

The paper’s model differentiates proximity to nuclear power plants and assigns exposure rates based on how far from nuclear plants people lived. But, because the population of Massachusetts is in close proximity to seven nuclear plants—Connecticut Yankee, Indian Point, Millstone, Pilgrim, Seabrook Station, Vermont Yankee, and Yankee Rowe, five of which were operational during the study period—the majority of communities were deemed to be affected by more than one nuclear plant. This is due to the authors selecting a very large 120km distance from each plant to evaluate. The emergency planning zone for these plants, even during severe accident scenarios, is only 10 miles (16.1 km) for plume exposures. For ingestion pathways, where contaminants could migrate over time, 50 miles (80.5 km) is the standard radius. The paper includes a sensitivity analysis for distance that would not be able to detect a sensitivity because it only evaluates beyond the standard range, from 80-150 km.

Some zips were counted as having up to four “exposures,” including the heavily populated zip codes between Boston and Springfield. And because the entirety of Massachusetts is counted as “exposed” to a nuclear plant, the study has no control group, nullifying any possibility of the study being able to show a causal relationship. Even the lower bar of showing correlation cannot be adequately attained because any relationship shown in the results would be self-referential due to every observation being “exposed.”

The paper later claims to run a sensitivity analysis by removing the two zip codes with the highest proximity values, explaining that, because results are consistent across the analyses, there are no concerns. In fact, that should have been a red flag that the way the proximity factor is designed must have a problem. The results would be consistent because they depend on analyzing the whole state without a real distance gradient. The parameters changed in the sensitivity analysis, namely the distance, ensured that the whole state was encompassed by the radii around the plant.

Figure 3 shows that the state is treated even more uniformly when the highest two zip codes are removed from the analysis. It visually makes the case that their sensitivity analysis, if anything, exacerbates the design problem instead of testing the sensitivity of the effect.

When we correlate the proximity factor from the paper against distance from nuclear power plants in Figure 4, it is clear that the southern-center of the state, in the area around Worcester, despite being the absolute farthest from all plants, is being over-weighted with this method.

Further, because the paper fails to prove a significant incidence of cancers across time and space, the authors go “model shopping” to find a methodology that gives their preferred result, a strategy known as p-hacking. They chose a cross-sectional model that gives them a positive finding. But the cross-sectional model is weak, and can be driven entirely by demographics, socioeconomic status, healthcare access, and other factors, not nuclear power plants.

The period of analysis (2000-2018) overlaps with a general improvement in the medical profession’s ability to detect cancer. New cancer cases across the country have increased over the past decades. This is due to advances in diagnostic technologies and practices that have allowed doctors to detect cancer earlier and more often than previously. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the number of new cancer cases nationwide rose nearly 35.9% between 2000 and 2018. The number of new cases rose each year, from 1.3 million in 2000 to 1.8 million in 2018. Cancer mortality increased from 553,000 to almost 600,000 annually in the same time period.

Massachusetts saw a decrease in cancer rates during the study period, but saw an increase in new cancer cases each year. Per the Massachusetts statewide report on cancer incidence and mortality 2014- 2018, “The rise in new cancer cases is mostly due to an aging and growing Massachusetts population.”

Combined with the fact that over the same period, the population of Massachusetts aged dramatically, and elderly populations have higher cancer rates, there is little surprise that the researchers would find increasing cancer incidence in the zip codes in question.

Unable to disentangle these factors from their nuclear power plant proximity metric, the study effectively cannot claim to show any causal relationship. And because cancer incidence, by definition, lags any radiation exposure, the study can’t actually claim that living near a nuclear power plant over their study period had any effect on the cancer incidence during their study period. The study did a sensitivity analysis relative to lagged effects, but once again, the method setup would not detect a sensitivity due to the design of the overall study.

While this study alone is problematic—it asserts a causal relationship that it cannot prove, and provides material for an already fact-challenged anti-nuclear movement—that the researchers spun this Massachusetts-specific study into a national analysis is downright catastrophic.

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Nuclear Power Plants Are Not the Cause of Nationwide Cancer Increases

On February 23, Alwadi et al. published their expanded nationwide study in Nature Communications, a premier scientific journal. While the national study had a few differences from their Massachusetts research, both papers suffer from the same fundamental errors.

The national study looks at counties within an even greater distance of 200 km from a nuclear power plant and uses roughly the same model as the Massachusetts paper to test their hypothesis. The authors make some improvements to the model by including proximity to the nuclear power plants 10 years prior to the cancer data and averaging the proximity over 10 years when a nuclear power plant goes offline. But these improvements do not go nearly far enough to make up for the same confusion over cause and correlation.

Just like the Massachusetts study, the national study has no control group. The authors include all of the U.S. counties within 200 km (124.2 miles) of a nuclear power plant that was operational between 1990 and 2018, and assign a proximity score or a cumulative score if they are close to multiple power plants. Most nuclear power plants are located in rural areas, but not extremely far away from population centers, because power generation tends to be located near loads due to transmission constraints. The proximity score allows for counties further away to have less of a treatment effect, but the further away from population centers one gets, the less representative the sample becomes. The counties with lower proximity scores are disproportionately poorer and have more rural populations, with lesser access to hospitals, treatment centers, and other non-medical life-extending amenities. Because of relative affluence and proximity to urban centers with medical facilities, those with greater proximity to one or more nuclear power plants are likely to live longer lives, with thus a higher chance of dying of cancer later in life, rather than some other cause earlier in life.

The researchers, to their credit, added controls for median income, distance from hospital, and other important factors. However, this matters little when the treated sample includes the Northeastern Corridor, containing 1/7th of the US population, which, due to the proximity of several nuclear power plants, is weighted many times more than any county further away from a nuclear power plant. Even then, every county included in the study is counted as affected, so there is effectively no control group against which to compare outcomes. Causation is out of the question, and any correlation is once again doubtful due to being self-referential and without an identified exposure pathway.

One significant difference between the two studies is what they are, in fact, measuring. In the Massachusetts-specific study, the authors look for rates of cancer incidence (cases of cancer). In the national study, they are looking for increased rates of cancer mortality (deaths caused by cancer). It is unclear why the authors chose to examine a different outcome. Perhaps cancer incidence did not give them a positive or significant result at the national scale, and by changing to a different focus, the authors would get the result they wanted. This would also be a form of p-hacking. Nevertheless, the switch to cancer mortality creates a few additional problems for the national study, mainly because mortality is an even noisier proxy for environmental causes of cancer than incidence rates because it incorporates treatment and healthcare disparities. Mortality also has an even greater lag problem: it can take decades for an exposure to lead to cancer, and can take even more years for cancer to cause death. Also, because of earlier detection, years between a cancer diagnosis and mortality are increasing. To make this problem worse, the authors lump all kinds of cancers together, conveniently ignoring variations across cancers—especially when it comes to latency period and mortality.

In the national study, the authors are explicit that they cannot establish causality, but still use a formula for “Attributable Fraction”, how much of cancer mortality was caused by being in proximity to a nuclear power plant, that assumes a causal relationship between distance from a nuclear power plant and cancer mortality. Attributable fractions are causal quantities. Using them here quietly assumes the conclusion.

Using this Attributable Fraction, they then go on to make the causal claim that they “show that U.S. counties located closer to operational nuclear power plants have higher cancer mortality rates than those farther away.” Their results do no such thing; the resulting indicator is nothing more than a division of relative risks based on bad assumptions and ignores the fact that the authors never measured dose or defined an exposure mechanism based on reality.

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What We Do Know About Nuclear Power Plants, Radiation, and Cancer Incidence.

To have a health risk, there must be an exposure to a hazard. The papers assume there is chronic and significant pollution coming from nuclear power plants, citing a different paper that makes the same assertion, but makes no attempt to evaluate that exposure. If there is no exposure, it is equivalent to saying someone has a higher chance of getting black lung, even if they never breathed coal dust, or being in a plane crash, having never stepped on a plane. This was also a major concern of a peer reviewer, but the issue was not addressed before publication.

Data has shown that the radiation produced by nuclear plants is orders of magnitude lower than the typical exposure from medical imaging or long flights on airplanes. Data availability is not a barrier; data for each nuclear facility is publicly available from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

But considering exposure from nuclear power plants would force the authors to confront other sources of radiation. Spatial variation in radon exposure alone dwarfs plant emissions. Routine emissions from operating nuclear power plants are extremely small, usually hundreds to thousands of times lower than natural background radiation and well below regulatory limits. There is far greater variance in the natural background variation that the national sample is exposed to than any excess dose that could conceivably come from nuclear power operations. For people living near plants, measured doses from plant operations are often indistinguishable from zero relative to background radiation, meaning any statistical association between proximity to plants and cancer is far more likely to reflect demographics, detection, or geography rather than radiation exposure from the plant. Given this, it would be surprising to find any measurable correlation, much less one that is statistically significant.

How do we know this? As one of us, alongside colleagues, recently pointed out in their article in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, “large sample studies have tracked the health of millions of workers exposed to routine ionizing radiation and found no definite link to increased risk of cancer at low effective doses.” For example, there are almost 80 journal articles published based on the Department of Energy’s Million Person Study, a major, long-term epidemiological research project designed to understand the health effects of chronic occupational radiation exposure experienced by U.S. workers and military veterans. It is the largest study of its kind in the United States. The Million Person Study is designed to measure long-term health outcomes associated with chronic, low-dose rate radiation exposures, such as cancer, cardiovascular disease, neurological conditions, and other chronic ailments.

While the radiation exposure of nuclear workers will always be greater than or equal to those received by the surrounding public, most of the closely monitored US nuclear workforce receive no measurable annual dose. When workers are exposed to radiation, the average dose received is only 2 percent of the occupational limit. People do not build their houses on the sites of nuclear power plants, and even if they wanted to, the exclusion perimeter would prevent them from doing so. If operators and workers who are on-site at nuclear power plants receive an annual dose between zero and one-fiftieth of the occupational limit, how is it possible that residents 5, 10, 25, 50, 120, or 200 kilometers away would receive any measurable dose from the same plant?

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Papers Masquerading as Science

The Harvard studies’ results are surprising given the well-established literature and studies that refute the authors’ claims. When results are surprising, we want to know what mechanism is causing them; however, the authors do not seem to have a good grasp on what drove their results. Still, good science can just find a new data point and then wait for others to determine what the new data point means. Unfortunately, the studies fail to even provide a new or valid data point. The model was not properly identified, was misspecified, is replete with errors, and therefore cannot show any causation.

These studies do a great job showing the prevalence of cancer, or really its detection, and mortality rose from 2000 to 2018, even if the authors don’t recognize that contribution. Unfortunately, it does little else.

Wealth, exercise, better nutrition, and access to healthcare have increased human life expectancy. With longer lives, the probability of cancer increases. This is obviously due to a plethora of factors, not simply aging. But, it’s assuredly not caused by any one specific factor, such as proximity to nuclear power plants.

The debate over nuclear power is too important to be contaminated by bad science.

Environmental Health, the journal that published the first study, indicated that a code sample would be available upon request. We emailed the lead author shortly after the paper was published in December and requested a sample of their code. The author has not returned or acknowledged the request. The code we at the Breakthrough Institute used to make the proximity indicator and radius maps is available here.

Every year or so, for as long as either of us can remember, there is a great Twitter/X pile-on from a segment of the clean tech and climate movement attacking the Breakthrough Institute for having been insufficiently bullish about solar energy and renewables. Our long-standing take on solar and renewables—that they are an important and growing part of the global energy mix, deserving of appropriate policy support, but nowhere close to a complete replacement of fossil fuels—is far from the most controversial stance we have taken over the years. But the intensity of these attacks often takes friends of ours in the broader abundance, progress, and techno-optimist communities by surprise because they often come from figures who are not the usual green, degrowth, or left-wing suspects.

When Noah Smith tweets that “The Breakthrough Institute will be a recurring minor comic villain in the eventual history of the energy revolution” or futurist Ramez Naam accuses us of generating “terrible solar projections” and deliberately attempting “to cast doubt on renewables,” it is jarring because on most subjects, there just isn’t some radical divergence in worldview between us. We’re all champions of abundance and progress. We are all pro-growth and pro-technology and have little use for degrowth. Neither Smith nor Naam is a technological decel like most of our anti-nuclear, anti-biotech critics. So what gives?

On the one hand, Smith’s and Naam’s problem with Breakthrough stems from a simple unwillingness to acknowledge our actual views on solar, nuclear, and energy transitions. We have, for the record, never argued that “nuclear – and only nuclear – must be the energy source of the future,” a position that Smith erroneously ascribed to us. Nor have we ever produced our own solar projections, as Naam repeatedly claimed.

A decade or more ago, we cited mainstream forecasts, from the International Energy Agency, the US Energy Information Agency, BP, and other analysts, which projected that global adoption of wind and solar energy would be much lower than ended up being the case. Notably, most of these projections were made as the enormous scale of Chinese clean tech industrial policy, mercantilism, and/or overproduction depending upon one’s perspective, was only beginning to become apparent. Typically, we noted that we thought real-world deployment would be higher than these projections. And in general, we cited those projections both to make the case for continued policy support for wind and solar, including subsidies and deployment mandates, and to push back against the idea that these sources of variable renewable energy could do most, if not all, of the heavy lifting when it came to decarbonizing the global economy.

On the other hand, the misrepresentation of our position and history on these questions by Smith, Naam, and others is not merely one of misunderstanding. Rather, it is another illustrative manifestation of the solarmaxxers’ hubris. Smith’s truculence in particular is testament to the widespread teleological faith that falling photovoltaic costs will beget permanent dominance of energy systems by solar, which has led many advocates to dismiss or even obstruct progress in other energy technologies. This has always been the basis of Breakthrough’s critiques of renewable energy maximalism. The most prominent champions of solar power—figures like Amory Lovins, Mark Jacobson, Bill McKibben, and many more—have leveraged the vision of a solar utopia to advance openly anti-nuclear policies, as well as other policies that make energy affordability, abundance, and decarbonization harder, not easier.

Making the case for nuclear energy in particular, and for all-of-the-above energy innovation in general, has required pushing back on the Lovinsian solar maximalism in which Smith and Naam are trafficking, whether wittingly or unwittingly. And in one sense, we’re happy to take one side in this dispute. Time and tide will tell whether the future is mostly solar-powered or mostly nuclear-powered or, indeed, a healthy mix of the two technologies.

What’s more pernicious about the solarmaxxers is not that they represent the other side of an open, even-odds game of technological advocacy, but that they charge their opponents as the more tribalist of the two camps, when the truth is more often precisely the opposite. Despite having consistently promoted a growing and substantial role for wind and solar energy in the global economy and supported policies to accelerate that growth for over two decades, we are branded as being against wind and solar by these critics because in their eyes, anything much short of promoting 100% renewables as being desirable, feasible, and inevitable is deemed to be “anti-renewables.”

Breakthrough has long been a special source of anger to this crowd because we played such a major role in creating the investment-centered paradigm that has accounted for much of the progress that wind, solar, batteries, and electric vehicles have made over the last 15 years, and yet refuse to sign on to the maximalist gospel that most proponents preach. In the land of solar maximalism, supporting a diverse portfolio of energy technologies and being open to a diverse range of possible energy futures makes one an enemy.

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Twenty Years of Solar Optimism

To understand our dispute with the solarmaxxers, you have to go back to the beginning. Long before either Smith or Naam was prognosticating on energy, the Breakthrough Institute was a fairly lonely voice making a quixotic case for massive state investments in expensive but promising renewable energy technology.

Across most of the aughts, the overwhelming focus of the environmental community on climate change was to regulate emissions. Insofar as there was any debate within the community, it was between proponents of traditional command and control regulatory policies and market-based trading schemes. Environmental philanthropy went all-in on the $100 million “Design to Win” effort to pass a cap-and-trade program. During this period, Breakthrough was arguably the most prominent public critic of this strategy, arguing that pricing carbon wouldn’t ultimately achieve much decarbonization so long as solar, wind, batteries, nuclear, and other low-carbon technologies remained significantly more expensive than incumbent fossil fuels.

This has largely become conventional wisdom even among mainstream greens today. But it was controversial at the time. Joe Romm wrote in response that “pollution limits are far, far more important than R&D for what really matters.” David Roberts argued that “a price on carbon would do more to stimulate productive energy research than targeted grants for specific research programs.” And Brad Plumer, then a young blogger at the New Republic, described Breakthrough’s preference for “subsidizing clean-energy sources” as “weird.”

Weird or not, our investment-centered clean tech optimism was based on an understanding of the history of energy innovation that would become central talking points for a growing chorus of solar champions. In a 2008 essay for the Harvard Law and Policy Review titled “Fast, Clean, & Cheap.” we proposed a massive public buydown of the cost of solar energy, arguing that “solar has special potential, and merits special attention. Solar panels, like microchips, have their own kind of ‘Moore’s Law’: the price of solar comes down roughly 20% every time production capacity is doubled.” Not long after, we released an influential report called “Where Good Technologies Come From,” arguing that public investment in R&D, demonstration, and deployment had played a critical role in the commercialization of most transformative technologies throughout American history and that similar policies would be necessary to achieve a clean energy transition. Naam, by contrast, wouldn’t write his first post about a Moore’s Law for solar until 2011. Smith wouldn’t publish anything about solar until 2012.

With our partners at Third Way, ITIF, and elsewhere, we made the public case for investments to drive down the price of solar, wind, and other clean technologies. Breakthrough’s renewables advocacy helped lead to tens of billions of investments in the 2009 Recovery Act. Our research was cited in congressional hearings and called out multiple times in President Obama’s State of the Union addresses.

But over time, as we gained a better understanding of energy systems and technologies, a couple of things became clear to us. The first was that electrifying most end uses of energy, dramatically increasing the global demand for energy, and then running that system overwhelmingly on intermittent renewables was a fantasy, and that what would become known as “clean firm” technologies, especially nuclear, would be essential to energy abundance and decarbonization. The second was that the fiercest champions of renewables were almost always fierce opponents of nuclear power.

This was circa 2010, in the years immediately before and after Fukushima and in the midst of America’s faltering “nuclear renaissance.” It was also in the midst of flatlining demand for electricity in the wake of the Great Recession, with cheap shale gas and subsidized renewables further depressing the wholesale electricity costs that baseload nuclear plants depended on for their operations. Environmental groups and so-called ratepayer advocates were in open war against nuclear plants like Diablo Canyon and Indian Point. There were no notable next-generation nuclear startups compared to the dozens that exist today. There was no civil society pro-nuclear movement, because the Breakthrough Institute hadn’t yet launched it.

The climate movement, led by figures like Bill McKibben and Robert Kennedy Jr., insisted that declining renewable energy costs heralded not just the end of fossil fuels but of nuclear power too. These claims were not new. They had been around since long before anyone had ever heard of climate change, dating to the mid-1970’s, when Rocky Mountain Institute founder Amory Lovins invented the original solarmaxxing imaginary, the “soft energy path,” not as a solution to climate change or even a replacement for fossil fuels (Lovins, in the 70’s, actually advocated for decentralized mini-coal generators for residential use) but as an alternative to nuclear energy.

Lovins famously claimed in the early 1980s that solar was already cheaper than both fossil fuels and nuclear and forecast that solar would account for a third of US energy generation by the year 2000, a forecast that solarmaxxers conspicuously ignore when pointing the finger at erroneous solar predictions. By the early 1990s, the soft energy path had become the basis for virtually all environmental advocacy in the United States and globally.

The renewable energy avatar for a new generation of green activists is a former atmospheric scientist named Mark Jacobson, who since 2009 has produced modeling that purports to show that the world’s energy consumption could easily and quickly be met by 100% wind, water, and solar. Jacobson’s modeling was always transparent first-order nonsense. Even many energy modelers who have long been extremely bullish on renewable energy growth have stated publicly and privately that his analyses simply don’t add up, and even violate basic biophysical principles.

When not spinning out preposterous renewable energy models and suing other researchers, Jacobson makes the remarkable claim that nuclear energy is carbon-intensive, based on life-cycle analysis that among other analytical sleights of hand, assumes that the existence of nuclear energy results in nuclear warfare and hence includes the carbon content of the resulting mushroom clouds. Nevertheless, Jacobson has been celebrated as a visionary researcher by the National Academies and the American Meteorological Society, is regularly quoted authoritatively by outlets like the New York Times, and showered with philanthropic dollars by Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, and other benefactors.

Over the last 15 years, Jacobson and a handful of other academics and advocates have produced hundreds of technical-seeming analyses purporting to demonstrate that a hypothetical future powered entirely by existing renewable energy technologies is close at hand. With these promises of solar inevitability in hand, environmental groups like Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and Riverkeeper waged campaigns against new and existing nuclear power plants, leading to the premature closure of Duane Arnold, Three Mile Island, Indian Point, among many other plants. Over the course of the 2010s, about 8.5 gigawatts of US nuclear capacity was shuttered, about enough to power the state of New Jersey or Virginia.

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Finland Succeeds. Energiewende Chickens Come Home to Roost

One notable target of anti-nuclear solarmaxxers was Olkiluoto 3, a nuclear plant that began construction in Finland in 2005 and by 2013 was years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget. Olkiluoto became a symbol of nuclear energy’s decadence. This was in contrast to Germany’s “energiewende,” a nationwide mission to replace fossil fuels and nuclear with wind and solar.

In 2013 we compared Finland’s investment in Olkiluoto with Germany’s enormous subsidies for solar generation, demonstrating that Olkiluoto would provide electricity at approximately a quarter of the cost per unit as solar would under energiewende subsidies. This became Exhibit A in the solarmaxxers’ case against Breakthrough. In a 2015 blog post titled “Nuclear will die. Solar will live,” Smith alluded to this analysis, claiming that Breakthrough typified “the anti-solar antipathy of the pro-nuclear crowd.”

Notably, we don’t hear so much about that analysis today. Olkiluoto 3 opened in 2023 and generates a quarter of Finland’s total electricity. At the time that we completed our analysis, Finland’s electricity system, which already had a lot of nuclear and hydro generation, was about half as carbon intensive as Germany’s. Today, it is 8 times lower. And Finland’s average industrial electricity prices are now about two-thirds lower than Germany’s.

Germany, meanwhile, mortgaged its energy future to Russia and its claims to climate leadership to domestic coal and lignite, both of which were necessary to keep the lights on and its solar dreams alive. Especially since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, high energy costs and shortages have devastated Germany’s industrial base. Today, its political leaders acknowledge the huge economic cost of those decisions.

Neither this particular comparison nor Germany’s particularly zealous energy policies should suggest that solar power isn’t an important energy technology. We believed in solar back in 2013 and we still believe in it now. Notice that we never wrote that “solar will die and nuclear will live.”

But it is also important to note that even with the massive delays and cost overruns that solarmaxxers endlessly emphasize, nuclear power plants generate clean, affordable, and reliable electricity, with a tiny land footprint and secure supply chains, and will do so for 60 to 80 years or perhaps longer. Places like Finland that manage to build new reactors—even when they take longer than planned and cost more than anticipated—will benefit from cheap, clean electricity for the rest of this century.

That said, we have never been sanguine about the megaproject approach to nuclear power expansion. Even in Finland, a small country with a vertically integrated electric power system, it took many years and many more billions of dollars than originally envisioned to complete construction of Olkiluoto 3. A similar story played out with the Vogtle nuclear project, which also went considerably over deadline and over budget, even in Georgia’s vertically integrated market that allowed Southern Company to ratebase the plant’s construction.

Outside these cost-of-service markets—which is to say, in most of the United States—it’s even harder to finance construction of a multi-billion dollar commodity-producing megaproject. If this represents the future of nuclear energy, we are not likely to get very far with it. Large, conventional reactors will continue to have a role in places with the right political and institutional arrangements. But much as solar and wind cannot be the sole energy source powering a fast-growing global economy that needs electricity that is available all the time, conventional nuclear cannot be the sole pathway to expanding the role of nuclear power.

For this reason, we have focused our research and advocacy on the commercialization and deployment of a next generation of smaller reactors with different fuels and fuel cycles that will enable modular production, right-sizing power plants to varying geographies and customers, economies of scale and multiples, and other features to lower the costs of nuclear construction. In other words, our ambition as technology advocates has been to make the nuclear industry look a bit more like the solar industry.

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Innovation vs. Forever Subsidies

One of the ironies about the intense reaction to our comparison of Finland and Germany was that despite the excessive cost of Germany’s solar subsidies, we supported them as innovation policy. The hundreds of billions of euros that Germany poured into its feed-in tariffs and other policies were both necessary to drive down solar costs and proof that it was, in fact, very expensive. The energiewende proved to be a fiscal, economic, and geopolitical disaster for Germany and demonstrated that attempting to power a modern, industrialized economy entirely with variable renewable energy is a terrible idea. But it has significantly benefitted the rest of the world.

Solarmaxxers during this period, by contrast, typically played a motte and bailey game, touting the ascendance of solar in Germany’s energy system as proof that it was cost effective and feasible at large scale and then retreating to an argument about its importance for innovation and the future of the energy system whenever anyone pointed out the extraordinary cost of the energiewende, Germany’s world leading electricity prices, or its curious dependence on coal.

Our view of Germany’s solar investments was consistent with our broader take on energy innovation. We championed solar subsidies in the US for well over a decade, in the face of critics from the Left who insisted that carbon caps and pricing had to be the central focus of climate policy and critics from the Right who argued that state support to commercialize new energy technologies amounted to “picking winners and losers,” because we believed that solar was a technology with enormous potential and that commercializing solar would require state support for a period of time.

Throughout those years, we insisted that public investments in nascent technologies were the historic norm, and that deployment subsidies to help drive down the cost of solar panels were an entirely appropriate clean energy policy. We also argued that deployment subsidies should be temporary as technologies like solar power achieved price parity with fossil fuels. As Jesse Jenkins and Tyler Norris wrote for Breakthrough in 2009, “we are proposing to use public investments in a highly specific and targeted way, at several defined points in the innovation process, in order to drive cost reductions in the unsubsidized price of clean energy technologies.”

That’s why, starting in 2020, we advocated that federal deployment tax credits for solar and onshore wind be phased down. Solar and wind had become mature, competitive industries. The point of the subsidies, we had always argued, was to achieve precisely this state of economic parity. More so than any energy technology save perhaps fracking, solar panels provided a positive proof point of the “make clean energy cheap” thesis that had made Breakthrough so controversial in the first place.

But the controversy didn’t end with solar’s success. At the onset of the Biden Administration, we advocated shifting federal clean technology supports towards less commercially mature technologies like advanced nuclear, deep-earth geothermal, and long-duration storage. The climate movement had other ideas and ultimately prevailed, passing hundreds of billions of dollars in expanded subsidies for solar and wind in the Inflation Reduction Act. In contrast to our solar optimism, solarmaxxers like Naam, despite their claims that solar is already the cheapest form of electricity in most places, continue to push for longer and larger subsidies.

It is slowly dawning on the more pragmatic quadrants of the climate movement what a mistake that was. Transforming once-bipartisan technology deployment tax credits into hyperpartisan emissions reduction subsidies polarized energy policy to an unprecedented degree, earning Democrats a bruising punishment in the form of Our Big Beautiful Bill only three years after the IRA’s passage. Spending hundreds of billions of inflation-juicing taxpayer dollars on an issue that, it turns out, the public doesn’t care very much about did not yield the political benefits climate hawks were counting on during the Biden years. As energy demand and interest rates have spiked, more and more researchers are recognizing the ways in which renewables subsidies—especially ratepayer subsidies for rooftop solar and state-level renewable energy mandates—are driving electricity prices upwards, not downwards.

And yet, even as federal subsidies sunset, solar power continues to expand impressively in the United States. Industry analysts expect annual solar deployments to decline somewhat after the expiration of the tax credits, but to remain nearly double 2020 rates each year through the end of the decade. And where solar and wind are not mandated by policy, they are associated with marginally lower power prices.

That’s because we solar optimists were right and the solarmaxxers were wrong. Solar power is an important, affordable, commercially mature technology that energy producers and consumers will now deploy for economic reasons without subsidies or mandates. What they will not do is rely on solar power for 100% of their energy system, even with the behind-the-meter and grid-scale battery storage technologies that have also come down significantly in cost.

Solar’s impressive success story is not a sign that it is “winning,” per se. The power grid has been and remains a mix of generation technologies. US natural gas generation, for instance, increased by over 300,000 MWhs from 2021 through 2024—approximately equal to total US solar generation in 2024. This is a complementary, not a competitive, relationship that we at Breakthrough have long observed.

The maturation of solar energy as a commercially viable energy technology, meanwhile, has not coincided with the death of nuclear. In fact, just the opposite: As electrification and power-hungry data centers are pushing US electricity demand up for the first time in a generation, large load customers are looking for electrons wherever they can get them. In some cases, that has meant investing in grid expansion and power purchase agreements for solar and battery storage. But there has been little appetite for behind-the-meter solar and batteries to power these loads. Rather, hyperscalers and other large load customers are betting on natural gas in the short term and clean, firm generation in the future, inclusive of new, existing, and restarted nuclear power plants, emergent geothermal, and natural gas with carbon removal technologies.

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Against Energy Technology Fanaticism

Smith and Naam will surely tell you that they support all of these technologies, especially the low-carbon ones. As Smith wrote in his first inaccurate critique of Breakthrough over a decade ago, “Our government should continue to fund research into next-generation nuclear power.” Their problem with Breakthrough, purportedly, is not so much our nuclear advocacy as our perceived “anti-solar” bias. But as this history should establish, that perception is false.

We have not only been optimistic about solar but championed sensible policies to support solar and its deployment for twenty years. Even today, we most often find ourselves reassuring deflated climate hawks that solar and batteries can stand on their own two feet without subsidies, and that the Trump Administration’s various broadsides against renewables will not be enough to stop the solar train from chugging along.

So what is contested here is not whether solar energy has gotten very cheap, or whether IEA projections for solar and wind energy in 2010 or 2014 were accurate, or whether solar and wind are likely to grab significantly larger shares of global electricity generation in the coming decades. It is whether solar and wind can plausibly power most or all of the global economy, and whether betting the future of the energy economy and decarbonization solely on variable sources of renewable energy is a good idea.

Since our founding, we have argued that solar power merited special consideration in forecasts of a clean energy future. In 2015’s “An Ecomodernist Manifesto,” we called out solar and nuclear as the two technologies capable of achieving “the joint goals of climate stabilization and radical decoupling of humans from nature.” Even so, we have also supported ongoing oil and gas production in the United States, as well as public policies to support wind, geothermal, hydrogen, carbon removal technologies, electric vehicles, and other plausible complements to a future of energy abundance.

By contrast, and in somewhat different ways, both solarmaxxers like Smith and Naam and nuclearmaxxers such as our former colleague Michael Shellenberger are promoting extremely deterministic views of the energy system and its future. We would counsel both sides in this ancient feud that technological futures unavoidably involve deep uncertainty. Energy systems are both path-dependent and emergent. They are shaped by unpredictable macroeconomic and technological forces and by policy in both intended and unintended ways. Different energy technologies can both compete with and complement one another depending upon the context.

And so, more than a decade after first suggesting this to Smith, we would remind him, Naam, and all the solarmaxxers that wisdom and humility dictate that we hedge our energy technology bets. Neither solar nor nuclear is remotely on track to meet all of the world’s future energy needs any time soon. We are far more likely to succeed in building an abundant energy future if we pursue a broad portfolio of technologies and strategies rather than insisting fanatically upon a single technological solution.

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