Here’s how wind-energy projects aren’t built in America. This particular story took place a decade ago but could easily have unfolded last year or last month. In 2013, a Texas-based company put forward a proposal to build two windmill farms in northeastern Alabama. The company said that the farms would generate enough power for more than 24,000 homes, eagerly projecting that it would break ground by the end of 2013. But local opposition swiftly defeated the project. Opponents also won stringent regulations that made future wind farms in the area extremely unlikely.

“I think this is a great example of ordinary people with determination and a certain amount of political cooperation successfully standing up to defend their community,” one critic of the project told a local reporter. “It was literally a David versus Goliath thing,” another said.

[Jerusalem Demsas: Tress? Not in my backyard]

Americans have generally understood the transition to a clean-energy economy as a technological or an economic problem: Can renewables be reliable? Can they compete with cheap fossil fuels? Recent advances have answered these questions with a resounding yes. But climate change is also a democratic problem: Can our political institutions quickly and equitably facilitate 91,000 miles of transmission lines? The problem is not just that entrenched oil-and-gas interests reject the need to end reliance on fossil fuels; it’s also that the environmental playbook was written to stop rather than create change.

In the typical cultural script, a polluting corporation tries to crush the little guy; a pipeline threatens a defenseless fox; a faceless bureaucrat charts the course of a highway through a thriving neighborhood. Accordingly, American environmentalists have developed tools to help citizens delay or block development. These tools are now being used against clean-energy projects, hampering a green transition. The legal tactics that allow someone to challenge a pipeline can also help them fight a solar farm; the political rhetoric deployed against the siting of toxic-waste dumps can be redeployed against transmission lines. And the whole concept that regular people can and should act as a private attorneys general has, in practice, put the green transition at the mercy of people with access, money, and time, while diluting the influence of those without.

Five landowners filed a lawsuit against the wind developers in Alabama; two of them were well-connected local politicians. They alleged the following concerns: noise from the turning of the windmills; an “overwhelming” negative aesthetic impact; hypothetical harms to tourism, recreation, and home construction (again due to noise); the “flashing of the blades when the sun strikes at a particular angle”; harm to wildlife (unspecified); harm to nearby lakes and ponds; and “significant danger” that could occur from broken blades, lightning strikes, or collapsing towers. In sum, the property owners claimed that the two farms, containing eight wind turbines, would hurt property values as well as destroy “the way of life of the surrounding land owners.”

Another 32 property owners in the adjacent county had already filed a suit opposing the development on similar grounds. But neither lawsuit was ultimately necessary, because the state legislature granted broad authority to the two county governments at issue to oversee future wind permitting. The legislature also created stringent requirements for wind projects that make them legal in name only. So died a project meant to provide millions of dollars of local tax revenue and play a small part in the clean-energy transition.  

[Jerusalem Demsas: The great defenders of the status quo]

This case was not unusual. The UC Santa Barbara professor Leah Stokes recently led a study looking into wind-energy opposition in North America from 2000 to 2016. She estimated that in the U.S., 17 percent of wind projects faced opposition, usually by a small number of people. (The median figure was 23.) As in Alabama, opposition was most likely to take the form of litigation and legislation, not mass protest.

Stokes’s research likely undersells how rampant opposition actually is. She relied on media coverage to measure it, which means that her data set doesn’t include nonpublic actions such as making calls to legislators or local elected officials, or lawsuits not covered by local newspapers. Nor can her research capture the cascading effects of opposition on renewable-energy development. Whether it kills a project or merely delays one, opposition has broad ramifications beyond the enterprise in question, because it raises the costs of development. Moreover, broad ordinances such as the ones in Alabama don’t just stop current projects; they prevent future projects as well.

Community opposition holds back the broader green-energy economy well beyond onshore wind projects. The Stanford researcher Michael Bennon studied 355 major transportation and energy-infrastructure projects from 2010 to 2018, and found that nearly two-thirds of proposed solar-energy projects were litigated. Fourteen percent of these projects were canceled, and fewer than half of them were in operation by the time the study was published this month. Transmission lines necessary to connect renewable-energy sources to the grid also face intense local opposition. And carbon-dioxide pipelines that seek to ferry the substance away to underground storage locations rather than releasing it into the atmosphere are also blocked by local opposition.

Rejecting clean power in your own backyard means accepting pollution in someone else’s. And the costs of that bargain are unevenly felt: Environmental-justice advocates have long pointed out that politically marginalized communities—those with less power usually due to their class or race—face the brunt of climate change’s negative effects, and they have successfully pushed legacy green organizations to recognize that pollution has disparate impacts.

Stokes brings a new phrase into the lexicon: energy privilege. It refers to her finding that in the U.S., whiter census tracts were more likely to oppose wind-energy projects. Opposition was also more intense in whiter tracts. This finding adds to a growing literature in political science showing that race, age, class, and homeownership status predict involvement in local government. The people who show up to land-use hearings, the people who vote in local elections, and thus the people aware of and equipped to fight changes in their community, are not reflective of the broader population. Relatedly, opposition tends to require access to lawyers, connections to local elected officials, and practice with lobbying.

I spoke with environmental-justice advocates about energy privilege and the broader issue of opposition privilege. At the center of my conversations was this question: Isn’t there a tension between pushing for a fast transition to a green economy and giving local objectors so much power to block renewable-energy projects? They all told me that I was focusing on the wrong problem: Instead of removing veto points from the clean-energy process, we should instead invest more in community input to ensure that projects get the necessary buy-in early.

Johanna Bozuwa, the executive director of the Climate and Community Project, wants to focus on integrating input early in the community process, to avoid easy pitfalls. Catherine Coleman Flowers, the vice chair of the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council, made a similar point. “I’m sure things would look very, very different if there was stakeholder engagement from the very beginning,” she told me, pointing to a finding in Stokes’s paper that opposition to wind-energy projects was less likely if those projects were community owned.

[Read: Floating wind farms are about to transform the oceans]

Flowers is right about this finding, but when I pressed Stokes about it, she ran the numbers and found that community-owned projects in her sample had a median of just two wind turbines, whereas non-community-owned projects had a median of 44. Giving local communities significant control over these projects may alleviate opposition, but at a significant cost.

Marion Gee, an executive director of the Climate Justice Alliance, sees a problem with scale. She believes that instead of reforming our processes to speed up the development of large new projects, we should question whether we need them at all. “You’re probably setting up for conflict when you have such big projects,” she told me, recommending a focus on distributed energy rather than on “huge, concentrated wind farms or huge, concentrated energy installations near any community.” Gee thinks that the path forward looks like rooftop solar, energy-efficiency investments, and reduced demand for energy.

These are empirical questions: Can we do without big energy projects and large transmission lines? Is distributed generation enough? The answer is no. According to a 2016 assessment by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, even if the U.S. put rooftop solar on every single building where it was technically feasible, that would generate only 1,432 terawatt hours of energy annually. In 2022, the U.S. used more than 4,000 TWh of electricity. And our electricity needs will skyrocket as people switch over to electric cars, buildings switch to heat pumps, and industrial production switches away from fossil fuels. To reach net-zero emissions in 2050, the U.S. will need to generate nearly 11,000 TWh of electricity a year, according to one model. Given the urgency of the climate crisis, the best approach is to do it all. Yes to rooftop solar; yes to utility-scale solar; yes to wind; yes to carbon-capture technologies.

Flowers, Bozuwa, and Gee are united in their belief that local objections are inherently legitimate. There are good reasons to oppose a development, of course, even a renewable-energy one—if it blocks public access to a national park, for instance. But opposing a wind turbine because you think it might be ugly is not reasonable. Delaying a solar project because you have a vague notion that it might affect tourism is not reasonable. And the reality is that our legal and political systems are incapable of differentiating reasonable from unreasonable objections.

Let’s return to the Alabama wind-energy example. Many of the detractors’ objections were patently unreasonable. Wind farms simply aren’t particularly noisy, for instance. (Listen for yourself.) Nor do they really hurt property values. And even the top bird-conservation organization says that outdoor cats are a greater threat to birds than windmills are. But this is how the system works: Local opposition, even if it is unreasonable or narrowly held, can derail projects and slow the green-energy transition without ever proving any of its claims.

Highways that cut through downtowns were bad, because they destroyed vibrant neighborhoods, entrenched car dependency, targeted poor and minority communities, and locked in climate-unfriendly infrastructure. The problem with bad projects isn’t the local opposition; the problem is that they are bad. Local opposition can be a sign of that, but it can also just be a sign that people fear change. The green-energy transition rests on our ability to distinguish between the two. Right now, we can’t.

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