In case you weren’t at REV 2022, you need to take a moment to read Pat Parenteau’s forceful remarks on the need to accelerate our transition to a clean energy future and why sensible permit reform is mandatory to get us there:
Sensible Permit Reform Is Needed to Accelerate the Clean Energy Transition
It is hard to build anything in Vermont or anywhere in the United States for that matter. Yet the climate crisis demands that we build a massive amount of renewable energy infrastructure—wind, solar, storage, transmission, EV charging stations, and more—faster and better than anything that has been done before in the United States. And that includes the Interstate Highway System, called the greatest public works project in history, which took 35 years and cost five times more than estimated.
We don’t have 35 years. We must cut US greenhouse gas emissions by 50% from 2005 levels by 2030 to follow the advice of the world’s leading climate scientists, honor our commitments under the Paris agreement, and avoid even worse disasters than the ones we saw this year with record breaking heat, drought, fires, and floods across the country and the globe.
Passage of the $370 B Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (IRA) marks the single largest investment in clean energy and climate mitigation in American history. It also advances environmental justice, strengthens America’s position as a world leader in domestic clean energy manufacturing, and puts us on a path to achieving the goal of a net-zero economy by 2050.
Read Professor Parenteau’s full remarks here.
Patrick Parenteau is Emeritus Professor of Law and Senior Fellow for Climate Policy in the Environmental Law Center at Vermont Law School. He previously served as the Director of the Environmental Law Center, the Vice President for Conservation with the National Wildlife Federation, the Regional Counsel to the New England Regional Office of the EPA in Boston, and the Commissioner of the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation.