Tradeoffs are real

Sorry, but it's true

The other day, I found myself clicking on a link to a report from the Roosevelt Institute and the Climate & Community Institute titled “Planning to Build Faster: A Solar Energy Case Study.” This is a topic that I’m really interested in. Solar photovoltaic panels have become quite cheap, but there are still a lot of issues in terms of constructing solar generating facilities at scale and connecting them to the grid. I’m interested in ideas about how to remove some of these barriers and build solar faster.

But reading the report, I felt like I’d gone insane.

Every recommendation the report makes would make solar slower and more expensive to build. The headline feature of the report is that they want to hold “ecologically significant forests” and “arid landscapes” off-limits for solar development. This is, as you could imagine, a big roadblock since utility-scale solar installations tend to be pretty large and there’s a lot of overlap between “arid landscapes” and places where it’s very sunny. An extensive section of the report is dedicated to trying to convince readers that it’s physically possible to meet progressive goals for solar generation while dramatically restricting the geography across which building solar projects is allowed. I’m not sure whether I find that analysis convincing, but what is clear is that if you restrict solar in the way the authors want to restrict it, meeting these goals will be harder, not easier.

But it doesn’t stop there! The authors praise the use of “community benefit agreements,” in which a project developer needs to make side-deals with people who live near the project.

CBAs are, pragmatically, often necessary to get things done in the context of a permitting system that generally gives local views disproportionate weight in deciding what will be allowed. The way to build solar faster would be to reduce local ability to derail solar projects, thus reducing the need for costly CBAs. But the Roosevelt/CCI proposal says the problem with CBAs is that they are “a negotiation between developers with resources and a suite of lawyers versus, quite often, marginalized communities that often do not have the time, capacity, or expertise for meaningful negotiation.” Their proposal is that the federal government “provide resources for communities in negotiations” — in other words, that in addition to restricting the geography on which solar can be built, we should subsidize NIMBYs to help them more effectively litigate against solar projects.

And finally, the report argues that the federal government should push solar projects to require Project Labor Agreements with building trades union stakeholders, rather than allowing them to use the cheapest possible labor. Note that this is often in tension with CBAs, because labor wants you to bring in already-unionized workers, while the community wants you to commit to hiring locally.

A straightforward reading of the document’s proposals might lead you to believe that it’s a brief against solar energy.

The authors worry that utility-scale solar developments will degrade the landscape, that building them almost always ends up trampling the interests of local community stakeholders, and that they undermine union jobs, so they want to make it harder. But the whole framing of the piece is that it’s progressive nonprofits who love renewable energy and want America to achieve net zero emissions. What’s going on?

I think the key idea is lurking in this borderline incomprehensible bit of academic jargon that appears midway through the report (emphasis added):

Our approach to looking for land-sparing opportunities draws from research on techno-ecological synergies, offering opportunities to multi-solve across ecological and technological domains to avoid trade-offs and instead embrace multifunctional landscapes.

A lot of stakeholders in the nonprofit space are verbally adept. And they have an unfortunate tendency to use their verbal aptitude to talk around tradeoffs, rather than to analyze them and find ways to set priorities. And the end result is what you see here from Roosevelt: a policy agenda that will make it harder to build solar, marketed as a brief about how to build solar faster.

Tradeoffs, tradeoffs everywhere

Just saying “tradeoffs are real” is so banal. But Jason Furman, the Obama administration’s former top economist, recently gave a great lecture titled “In Defense of the Dismal Science,” where he talks at length about the importance of acknowledging tradeoffs and the central role of economists in being the tradeoff scolds. And if anything, I think he undersells the point somewhat by distinctively locating tradeoff denialism as a flaw of the left.¹