Carbon County Wyoming, of all places, is currently being used as a hotspot for wind farms. There is so much open land in Wyoming, and not a lot of people who need to use the energy with Wyoming's population of 580,000. Philip Anschutz, a billionaire who made his fortune from fossil fuels, wants to turn his Wyoming ranch into a sea of turbines. This is because energy that is made in Wyoming can be transferred to anywhere in the United States. This means that a wind turbine in Wyoming and power a Tesla in Los Angeles.
President Biden’s most popular legislation is the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), and provides tax credits to clean energy projects. This incentivizes people like Mr. Anschutz to move from fossil fuel projects to renewable energy projects. The only problem is that getting these projects approved is lengthy, and can take up to five years to fully develop a solar farm, which is causing a major lag in the fight to slow climate change.
What this means is that although the IRA seems to have a lot of potential in fighting climate change, it is happening too slowly to be efficient. This coincides with the idea that some parts of an economic system can actually slow the other down. Although it is more equitable to have a healthy climate, it is not efficient (yet). If we can speed the process of approval for clean energy projects, then it would be more efficient.
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2023/01/29/america-needs-a-new-environmentalism
2 comments:
While I do agree that the switch to renewable energy isn't being done efficiently, I do think it's important to distinguish between the efficiency or using renewable resources and the efficiency of setting up the use of those resources. A cleaner environment itself would likely lead to an increase in efficiency because there would be fewer environmental factors to cause injuries or sickness that would remove people from the labor force. While this is contingent on setting up these technologies, the only issue seems to be the approval process, in which case it's the legislation that's inefficient and not the projects themselves. I realize that this was likely part of your angle when writing this post, but I felt is was necessary to elaborate since you wrote "Although it is more equitable to have a healthy climate, it is not efficient (yet)." which implies it's the cleaner climate that isn't efficient and not the efforts to get there.
I would be interested to know the economic impact Wyoming if the state used some of it's open land to implement a nuclear power plant. Not only would it help the environment, but it would also likely create many jobs for it's operation. Not to mention all the other jobs it would create downstream in the area.
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