Dear Citizens and Elected Officials:
Introduction:
During the fall of 2018, while Ben Jealous was making a mash of his run for governor of Maryland, I decided to spend my time learning about the vast and complicated electronic grid which most of us know so little about, yet are totally dependent upon. That can’t be a healthy situation for democracy. I thought a good centering for my educational project was to ask why the largest solar “farm” project East of the Rockies was going to Virginia and not to “oh so progressive Maryland” and its hyper-active alternative energy organizations. It took me a long essay to answer my own questions, which I published here at the Daily Kos in two parts in December of 2018:
www.dailykos.com/… (the title is “Sifting through the Ashes of Paradise: Electricity Markets in the Age of Climate Disruption”) and one day later, entitled “Why the Largest Proposed Solar Farm East of the Rockies was going to Virginia, not Rural Maryland”: www.dailykos.com/…
Now, more than two years later, with President Biden raising major expectations by promising to address climate chaos, I am worried about the lack of planning and citizen participation in any serious proposal to bring direction and urgency to remaking our electric grid, which everyone seems to agree has to be done. Therefore, earlier this month I sent out an Email to a couple of hundred officials, policy advocates and interested citizens, sharing my findings and questions:
The U.S. has no serious planning in our private sector driven, decentralized electric grid, what has been called by the National Academy of Sciences the world's largest "complex cyber-physical social system" - a mystery to most citizens who are entirely dependent upon it. There is no one federal agency presenting the strategic options, much less the democratically structured institutions for "voting." And the power to execute the choices, to distribute hundreds of billions in federal aid? There is nothing remotely resembling the War Production Board from World War II. (Can we keep its power and decisiveness and yet make its climate action “equivalent” more democratic?) And we've lost four years under Trump with federal employees keeping their heads down even more than state workers...
Let me bring the central dilemmas forward with a few questions: what's the right mix between solar and wind and backup systems, and now battery storage? Does it all unfold helter-skelter, as private landowners strike deals with alternative power generators? Should the mixture vary by geographical and climate regions? Is it under control, with planning in our region essentially done by PJM, the Regional Transmission Organization/Authority, which evaluates the new generators as they percolate up from state processes? PJM's longest planning horizon (for efficiency, cost and reliability, not fighting global warming) is three years! Can Maryland get anything done in a hurry, in time for 2030, 2035 or even 2050 with its very “effective” citizen NIMBYism, its fragmented authority between county planning/political bodies and the state Public Service Commission (The PSC is all Republican, by the way, after 8 years of Governor Larry Hogan)? And with "final" decisions whipsawed back and forth by court cases shifting the locus of power, thus preventing the predictability necessary for successful planning, and policy execution. Example: the still unbuilt Dan's Mountain Wind Turbine project, on the table since 2004. 2004! (How was that site chosen? Answer: some landowners and the corporate project developer, who also happened to be Chair of the Democratic Party in MD, strike a deal.) And maybe it’s better unbuilt, given its location. If there are nodes of power federally, they are blurred between the Department of Energy, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, aka as FERC, and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, dominated by private corporate power. Planning? Economist James Galbraith stated it bluntly in 2008: without comprehensive federal planning, there is no stopping Global Warming. Expedited but fair permitting? Well, that was broached under President Obama - mainly to expedite natural gas infrastructure, as local activists well know.
Here is one more example which my friend and former environmental colleague Bill Wolfe called to my attention. Amtrak has just invested billions to buy new diesel locomotives, some with hybrid battery storage capabilities, 73 or so of them meant to last 30 years or more. But hold on a minute: if we're prioritizing the electrification of everything, doesn't that include most of the rail lines, so why invest in diesel now? Aren't electric locomotives stronger, more efficient, cheaper to maintain, and more environmentally friendly, especially if the sources of electricity are getting greener and greener? Yes, all true as best as I can judge. However, the private freight rail powers do not want to invest the large sums to electrify their lines, and the passenger system is only electric in major urban corridors. Isn't it amazing, this late in the game, because of the lack of effective planning, funding and coordinated execution, diesel locomotives are still in the driver's seat, higher efficiency or not than the older models. To help you get the big picture, A New York Times story from Sunday, July 11, covers some of the make or break decision trails...My take: I think we need as much decentralized micro-gridding as possible, but who will build it, and that direction will still need backup beyond batteries - and therefore a connection to the national and regional grids. Sadly, I don't think there are enough entities, private, public, or non-profit, to get the most desirable degree of decentralization done in time. (It’s a huge issue left up in the air, no national or regional policy, just helter skelter as individual companies come forward with their projects...and strike deals with willing landowners.) We need to think, therefore, about wheeling good solar and wind power from large generator sources into the PJM grid, into Maryland itself. Here's the Times article: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/11/business/energy-environment/biden-climate-transmission-lines.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage§ion=Business ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Since sending out that Email on July 12th, I’ve done some further reading and policy digging. A few in Congress have also thought that well, maybe it’s a good idea to do some serious planning — but by whom and where? And perhaps to make the language/value changes in congressional directives if not in the enabling legislation itself, which in some cases goes back to the 1930’s. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) was one logical possibility, and so Senator Martin Heinrich, Democrat from New Mexico, introduced S-1015, “The Interregional Transmission Planning Improvement Act of 2021.” He has an ally in Representative Sean Casten (D, D-6, IL) who has a technical background as well as business experience relevant to modernizing the grid, and who has introduced the House companion bill, H.R. 2678. (The bills were introduced in March and June, respectively; together they have one one co-sponsor, which shows the steep grade of the hill to be climbed on “planning”). To get a baptism in the issues, and some background on FERC and its interaction with the Regional Transmission Organizations, the RTO’s (in my region it is PJM, the oldest in the country), it’s worth listening to this hour long interview done by Dave Roberts at Volt, with Rep. Casten: www.volts.wtf/…
Here’s the heart of the bill, the congressional instructions for FERC to issue new marching orders by such and such a date:
taking into con19
sideration—
20 (A) the public interest;
21 (B) the integrity of markets;
22 (C) the protection of consumers;
23 (D) the broad range of economic, reli24
ability, operational, public policy, and environ25
mental benefits that interregional transmission
1 provides, including reductions in carbon emis2
sions;
3 (E) the need for single projects to secure
4 approvals based on a comprehensive assessment
5 of the multiple benefits provided;
6 (F) that projects that meet interregional
7 benefit criteria should not be subject to subse8
quent reassessment by transmission planning
9 authorities;
10 (G) the importance of synchronization of
11 planning processes in neighboring regions, such
12 as using a joint model on a consistent timeline
13 with a single set of needs, input assumptions,
14 and benefit metrics;
15 (H) that evaluation of long-term scenarios
16 should align with the expected life of a trans17
mission asset;
18 (I) that transmission planning authorities
19 should allow for the identification and joint
20 evaluation of alternatives proposed by stake21
holders;
22 (J) that interregional planning should be
23 done regularly and not less frequently than
24 once every 3 years; and
Ok, that’s an improvement over current FERC practices, and the powering idea from the Senator and the Congressman is to set up an efficient planning process that will include key values that FERC must consider, now including “reductions in carbon emissions.” The idea is to build the key power transmission lines (the high voltage ones which are very expensive) to take the alternative energy wind and solar from rural regions where it is generated to the more densely populated areas that need it.
So what’s missing? First, it does not address the key policy question up in the air: how decentralized should the national, regional or state system be, how much micro-gridding and “distributed” energy generation should be in the mix? This bill is aimed at something else: expediting alternative energy between regions, or at long distances within an RTO like PJM, which consists of 13 states from the Mid-Atlantic to the Midwest…
And missing is an answer to the reality, cited by Rep. Casten in the interview, that the RTO’s are designed around the electricity generators, mostly “IOU’s” (Investor Owned Utilities) although including some co-ops and non-profits, so that there are no votes, or members on the Boards, for “Labor, Consumers, Environmental Organizations.” That needs to change, even though setting up such “slots” does not guarantee “equality” for the public interest in the current or future “system.” And anyone who has worked seriously in public policy knows that the three “public interest” categories/representatives I have chosen all have a wide range of location possibilities on the political spectrum: for instance the Nature Conservancy vs The Sierra Club vs Food and Water Watch. Since the broaching of the Green New Deal Resolution in February of 2019, the policy dialogue has now emphasized “frontline” communities — black and Hispanic and Native Tribes who have suffered the most from the location of toxic facilities of all sorts. In some of the bills I have looked at, that now includes generic “low income” communities, such as those represented by the Appalachian Regional Commission and the counties in Rep. James Clyburn’s 10-20-30 legislation allocating a portion of the funding from the many Department of Agriculture programs to the distressed qualifying counties (and they really have to be more than distressed to qualify.)
Should we Duplicate the “Renewable Energy Credit” Markets nationally/regionally?
For those who want a taste of further complexity, consider now H.R. 3959, introduced by Rep. Peter Welch of Vermont and which has 19 co-sponsors. It’s called the “American Renewable Energy Act of 2021” and it essentially intends to duplicate, across the various regional RTO’s, the markets for federal “Renewable Energy Credits” with timelines and percentages to be purchased by the non-renewable energy generators...and includes the noble but hard to flesh out boundaries of the new energy to be purchased from frontline communities, tribal entities, distressed racial, economic and environmental justice seeking communities…
I’m not a big fan of this approach, which basically takes to the federal level the very complex mechanisms that some states have tried to use to drive greater solar and wind power, including markets for the sale of the credits which non-renewable generators are obligated to purchase, and which, in many respects, has been adopted in New England and some Mid-Atlantic state called the RGGI (Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative). The way it has worked out in Maryland does not leave me a fan. Following the details of Maryland’s law and the credit market operations (and the fights over what qualifies as “renewable energy”) is one of the wonkiest policy adventures I’ve ever undertaken as a background for those December 2018 postings. It’s good preparation for learning of the posturing dance between the Federal Reserve, the Treasury Department and the private bidding for government bonds, part of understanding Modern Monetary Theory.
Now let me put this all into some broader historical perspective. The form and governance of our national electric grid has been heavily, but not totally, shaped by the “rage of the age” of Neoliberalism for Markets as being the most efficient allocator of capital and costs and prices. (There is an excellent summary of the power of this movement in the second chapter of Daniel T. Rogers book The Age of Fracture (2011), “The Rediscovery of the Market” — a book which won the 2012 Bancroft Prize in history, a high honor. I’ve never met anyone though, who has read it. ) The RGGI “system” as well as the bidding markets for alternative energy credits reflect this, but what the public usually doesn’t see or realize is that the operation of some of the RTO’s — and PJM is the exemplar — now resemble the complexity of Wall Street financial markets — with bidding, selling and pricing of the electricity coming into our homes varying by the minute (or less) next day or 3 year long term markets, and the motivation of some generators is to game the variation and timing of the price swings by the hour or whatever measure gives them the highest return.) It requires a huge investment not just in generating, transmission and distribution capital equipment but special electronics to monitor the bidders and their credentials, second by second. In addition to all the equipment necessary to keep the frequency (60Hz) and voltage (120V) just right — all the time.
PJM and my home state of Maryland reflect the compromise between the old regulated power system from the Progressive Reform Era (1890-1914, and the New Deal enactments of the 1930’s) and the intense push for the marketization of everything (and full de-regulation) which started under President Carter in trucking and airlines and reached the electricity field in the 1990’s. Maryland has gone in half-way or more, because it still has a Public Service Commission to oversee rates to businesses and generic consumers, with an ambiguous legal nod to local planning boards for the siting of facilities; but the real power is the FERC regulated PJM regime which makes the major planning decisions as to who is obsolete — no longer cost effective — and therefore cannot bid in the markets. And which, with FERC and the courts having the final say — determines how to allocate the costs for the hookup: transmission lines, power substations, distribution wires if needed...for the new entries, especially solar and wind.
In the Southeast, counter-intuitively because it is at odds with the rest of its conservative business /ideology/politics (arguably), the energy industry is still vertically integrated with the same company (or its subsidiaries) owning the generation, transmission and distribution system.
The rage for Markets and “deregulation” has been a mixed blessing: it has given substantial, grudging room to alternative energy, wind and solar primarily, whose prices have continued to fall thereby threatening the market pricing positions of oil, coal, gas (and nuclear) and leading to fierce legal struggles inside the RTO’s, going up to FERC for favorable judgements, and of course to the court system. And also raising another enormous issue: whether to bail out the older, “obsolete” industries “stranded” capital costs: coal, nuclear, and coming up, some of the older natural gas plants. That’s a topic that needs its own essay — or book. Not here and now though.
It’s a decentralized, slow and unpredictable system viewed from the national perspective, and doubly so given the realities of stopping climate chaos (slowing it more likely, if we’re lucky) , which calls for national directional guidance, speed and spending in the trillions. Most of the aged, existing statutory and regulatory guidance barely addresses the realities of the climate crisis, which makes the setting of coherent policy almost impossible. That must change. But the language which needs to be inserted, sometimes in the founding laws themselves, sometimes in the regulations and congressional directives, depends on the resolution of the issues I am raising here, touching on only some of the complexity of choices not yet made.
Some recommended reading
Let me therefore offer a structure of reading to help citizens comprehend the playing field of what the Biden administration is about to attempt.
Start with a primer on the electronic grid, its vocabulary and its structure from the National Academy of Sciences: www.nap.edu/… Don’t expect much on stopping global warming and policy prescriptions, but it’s clear and readable on laying out the system — virtues and flaws — of what we have now.
Next, from Speaker Pelosi’s Democratic Majority Report from the Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, her response to the challenge of the Select Standing Committee on the Green New Deal which we didn’t get, is this 500 page plus report: climatecrisis.house.gov/…
I’ve invested a considerable amount of time in looking it over. It’s awash in all the hopes, dreams, and practical suggestions from the center and left of the party (and the still formidable defensive power of the old coal, oil and gas powers) and its many bills that went nowhere under the four years of Mr. Trump. So it’s fragmented, all over the board in terms of policy and strategic coherence, but loaded with nuggets of policy wisdom if given directional guidance and policy planning in a forceful way...so I read each of the sections, all 224 of the pages which turned up when I searched the word “planning.” That’s almost one out of every two pages of the entire document, which reflects the practical reality that if you have a big, long term project requiring large amounts of spending, you have to plan in a practical sense, which the private sector does firm by firm and sometimes sector by sector, legally or not...but which is a term still ideologically loaded from the Cold War if applied to the federal government. But it has to be done as the frequency of the term here shows.
But if there are 224 appearances in the text, there are only 2 in the headings of the four page Table of Contents, versus 19 uses of “Resilience/Resilient,” which has become the contemporary equivalent of that old favorite, now almost eroded into meaninglessness: “sustainability.” One of the variants of the “R” word occurs 970 times in the full text, or four times as frequent as the word “planning.” My view: we will be on the defensive, having to give ground or elevate at the coast, have many types of backup systems for the grid...and so forth: we will be under extreme stress and need to have flexibility. And if we really want to give the full bore meaning to the “R” word, we would have to have a national debate on the degree of decentralization for the new totally “electrified” system; how much micro-gridding is called for, and is it doable given the complexities it triggers inside the existing power structure (including political power) of the distribution network. This discussion, such as it is, appears under the heading, in the documents I’ve been reading, as “Distributed Energy.”
According to Democratic Congressional wisdom It seems we need planning and a plan for each of the nodes of policy and public authority affected by Climate chaos: “Develop a National Offshore Wind Transmission Plan”; “Strengthen National Planning on Climate Threats to Public Health and the Health Care Sector”; “Make Climate Resilience Planning an Essential Element of Federal Agency Operations”; and so on to reach the 224 page references that I found. Even planning for the Western Sage Grouse (and I’m a birder so I can poke fun at this detail.)
Yet no decision on where the overall guidance and big picture planning should take place: by a revamping of FERC and its governing laws and regs, or in the Department of Energy...I sense that decision is being left to our President, Joe Biden, and his inner circle.
I did find, however, in addition to the practical endorsement of the need for “planning,” these nuggets on the problems of FERC and the promise of Distributed Energy:
“Legal experts have highlighted that ‘serious accountability problems arise from the fact that RTO’s and ISO’s are quasi-autonomous nongovernmental organizations.” (Page 72 — the PDF page No., not the document’s)
“In 1978, Congress authorized the Office of Public Participation and Consumer Advocacy at FERC, but this office has never been created or funded.” (Page 72)
“Provide Financial Incentives to Help Communities Deploy Distributed Energy Resources/Micro Grids with storage...” (Page 80).
It is also worthwhile to see what the corporate “white hats” of alternative energy are saying to all that is in play, the six pages of testimony of the American Council on Renewable Energy,” sent to Select Committee Chair Kathy Castor and minority ranking member Graves on May 20, 2021: acore.org/…
The letter is particularly insightful in pinpointing where the wind and solar proposed projects are piling up in the waiting lines inside the RTO’s because these deciding bodies do not have national guidance on allocating the costs and benefits of the new generation (and required transmission lines and substations) among all the beneficiaries. So they stall.
Also of note in making the case for the addition of new high energy transmission lines is the assertion that the 15 states between the Rocky Mountains and the Mississippi River contain 86% of the nation’s wind potential, and 56% of the solar generating potential. And of course, that makes the case for being able to wheel the power the large distances needed to get it to the regions with high demand...very different than the states with the highest generation potential.
Just Transition?
Before I leave the vast Democratic Report on the Climate Crisis, now more than a year old, I should mention that I searched the phrase, an important one, “Just Transition.” I turned up just four references in some 547 pages. Since this has been such a contentious issue between key segments of the AFL-CIO and the GND’s proponents in opposing the Green New Deal Resolution, it is amazing to see how little space is devoted to it in this vast reporting from Democrats in Congress. And their most substantive proposal is to devote the proceeds from fossil fuel leases on public lands to the cause, amounts of course unspecified, an outrageous linkage and completely unacceptable as policy guidance, compared even to the “The Clean Energy Worker Just Transition Act” from Senators Sanders, Merkley and Markey.”
Role for Public Ownership of Electricity Generators?
Another huge issue that seems to be evaporating before our eyes because of the wind change inside the Democratic Party from March 2020, the crushing of the formal Sanders campaign, is that of publicly owned power generation and leveraging it to drive distributed energy development to municipally or co-op or non-profit owned local systems. Thus Sanders’ plan would have leveraged power and money from the existing regime of federal government power generation, the four Federal Power Marketing Administrations, five when counting the TVA, serving some 33 states. Sanders wanted to add a fifth to cover the states not reached by the existing jurisdictions and essentially nationalize the power they generate.
And the “Castor” report, what does it say in its 547 pages on this issue? There are eight references to the Federal Power Marketing Administrations and the most significant one for policy is that they are to work with the private sector, and their existing transmission line “corridors” might serve as a cheaper and expedited way to built the much touted new high voltage transmission lines. So much for the too radical idea of publicly owned power, despite its roots in American history in the Progressive Era and the New Deal.
Conclusion: Of Markets, the Electricity Grid, Planning, Democracy and Public Participation in Stopping Climate Chaos
First, let me say something about what I see to be Congressman Casten’s “genuflection” towards markets, still the dominant paradigm in energy matters as we are still in the Neoliberal conceptual world which has centered them, far from the perspective of the Progressive Era on the need for some public ownership of electricity production, transmission and distribution; and also far from the Rural Electrification program of FDR’s New Deal, which, in quite a few aspects, leans towards the Distributed Energy paradigm and greater decentralization in our energy choices.
I believe that conversations in economics and ecology should begin with markets, but, as with farm policy, they usually don’t end up there in a pure form of market worshipping. Casten’s own biography shows he was subject to a hostile takeover attempt and serious resulting court battles. Under the idealized banner of “Free Markets” the public is shielded from the often vicious battles which, as in Woodrow Wilson’s days, lead to the concentration of private power in, if not monopoly — oligopoly. It’s a general phenomena, not limited to electricity markets. If solar and wind are the good guys, they complain that the “markets” they are trying to enter are dominated by a FERC and the RTO’s that lean towards the old system of coal, oil, nuclear and now natural gas power generators (and transmission line owners); and the old hands trying to put the whole burden of the costs of new infrastructure on the newest entries. No one has fully aired the complexities of going local - Distributed Energy - a power struggle also over cost allocation in getting the new power sources’ electricity out to individual homes and businesses; the more Micro-gridding the more complex (and time consuming, time which we don’t have) the resolution of the issues.
If we did not face a climate emergency, a race against time with mounting consequences for every decade of further foot dragging, the current system of divided power in our energy world might suffice to slowly work the conflicts out. But if what I see before me in Maryland and inside the PJM RTO is close to the national experience, the current system is not going to rise to our challenge for policy decisiveness coupled with better public participation. And surely some will argue that the greater participation I’m calling for will backfire into more delays...the history of FERC still haunting us.
I do believe, however, that we can design governing bodies at the national and regional levels that can be fairer in representing those currently left out — those who don’t produce energy or not enough of it to count — and setting the nation on a expedited and decisive path away from fossil fuels and towards that vast restructuring of our full economic processes necessary to repair the damage already done to Nature. And to we humans, who depend upon it.
The odds are against this happening, because the American system, especially after forty years of Neoliberal Market Worshipping and federal government bashing by the Republican Right (that much of corporate America seemed well able to live with) can’t do anything big any more, much less at the quick step march that we did from 1939-1945, needed now to slow or stop Global Warming. The state has been humbled in its New Deal powers to regulate and spend by the elevation of The Market, whose markets in turn are dominated by the largest corporate powers, whether we’re talking about agriculture, energy, the Internet or retailing.
What I have really been discussing, in the context of the electricity grid, is the nature of democracy itself. It’s under direct attack, the right to vote, by the Republican Right, no question about that. But the historic left since the mid-nineteenth century has also argued that the right to vote doesn’t guarantee a full airing of democratic possibilities, least of all in matters of political economy. As Yanis Varoufakis argued in February of 2014 in an essay asking “Can the Internet Democratize Capitalism,” here at Naked Capitalism — www.nakedcapitalism.com/… — the answer was no, decisions that voters should have had a say in directly were being passed to experts in hard to reach non-legislative bodies: financial markets, central banks, PJM type managers of the electricity Grid.
What also drew my attention to Varoufakis was his citing of the work of the late (Sir) M.I. Finley (1912-1986), the classical scholar. I had read his “Democracy: Ancient and Modern,” (1973, 1985) and been impressed by his handling of the causes of the growing political apathy from working class voters and beyond even in the successful modern European social democracies. Watching the political evolution of the issues embedded in solving the Climate crisis tells me that Finley got a lot right about the role of elites, economic and political, in keeping key decisions out of voters hands. I had hoped that a Select Standing Committee on the Green New Deal might have presented an golden moment to make the process more inclusive and more open in sorting out the options and taking the choices to the public. How many Daily Kos readers testified at the Castor Committee hearings, or have read the 547 page report? — which waved goodbye to public ownership of at least some of the new “Clean” energy, and looks like it has settled, rightly or wrongly, in regional wind and solar being wheeled great distances to the largest and neediest markets. And if we go “all in” for electric cars, buses and trucks, will we have any substantial rail backup, electric or diesel?
And does not the heavy leaning towards private corporate sector power to carry out the bulk of the work reflect in good part, not just where the technical expertise lies, but the vast political power accumulated by “the greatest transfer of wealth in human history,” some $50 trillion dollars upwards to the top 10% between 1975-2018, caused by Neoliberalism’s reversals of the tax and regulatory policies of the fading New Deal, as summarized by the Rand study authors for Time magazine in September of 2020 — yes the issue that never surfaced in the election: time.com/...
Varoufakis and Sanders and not enough others saw, and still see the Green New Deal as a model for a more equitable and participatory economy, one that is necessary also to effectively deal with the coming climate chaos, and the yet to be fully realized political chaos stemming from that greatest transfer of wealth in human history.
Your thoughts and recommendations are welcome. I hope I have not imposed too heavily on your “digestive” systems.
Best to you all,
Bill of Rights,
Frostburg, MD
PS I would be remiss were I not to add that for more than a year now I’ve been following Todd Fernandez’s work, and many other fine activists and scientists, with and around the Climate Crisis Policy.org group. They have bundled at least ten major climate bills together into an effort they call the Earth Bill here climatecrisispolicy.org/… and here at
The organizing idea behind Climate Crisis Policy’s formation was to unite all the nation’s environmental groups behind a set of bills and use the power of those thousands of groups to move the political stalemates in Congress. Anyone who has spent serious time in the environmental movement knows its history of sometimes nasty policy and turf fights, which I can testify to personally after my environmental career in New Jersey, 1988-2001. And subsequent later forays on various issues. Trying to pull this together is on the order of herding the nation’s feral cats, but what I’ve heard and seen about Todd’s skills, and assessments, has left me with the feeling it is worth a try. I like the nerve of someone coming from two other major policy arenas trying his hand at “unifying” the nation’s very fragmented environmental organizations. I invite you to give the group a look.
It’s a long shot, but, as environmental writer Dave Roberts has said previously of the Green New Deal’s chances, “Long shots are all we have left.”