Casey Handmer: commitment

Transcript context

…I think people will be familiar with NEPA and whatever, but how is it especially impacting solar? Let's say you've got a bunch of private land out in the middle of nowhere, and you want to build solar on it. You'll probably end up triggering NEPA, at which point you now have to do what is not in the law but considered necessary under current regulations. That’s your four-year environmental impact review, which generates so much paper that just the environmental impact of producing the report—because you have to cut down trees to make paper—is more than the environmental impact of just deploying the solar. This is bonkers. It is crazy town. The thing that drives me particularly crazy in Southern California is that just because solar is kind of new, and off-grid solar is very new, unless you're very, very careful you end up getting regulated as though you're trying to build a chemical plant even though it's a solar array. The impact of solar arrays on desert is arguably positive because it shades the ground and improves soil moisture retention. If you wanted to reverse desertification, you would basically just deploy solar panels on it and that would pay for the process. But you end up having to go through more stringent environmental review process than if you just wanted to grade the whole thing and cover it in concrete, or if you grade it and then park a bunch of old rusting cars that are dropping oil into the aquifer, which in many cases you don't need a permit for at all. But to build solar, you have to go through this whole process. If there's one thing that anyone listening to this can do, it would be to have a categorical exemption for solar deployment. Or if I put money in an escrow account that says after 20 years we have to pull this out—we'll pull all the solar out of the desert and it goes back to being desert—I will do that in a heartbeat. But if I have to hire another biologist for $10,000 to be like, "Well, on that 40-acre plot we found a tuft of grass which we believe might be one of the 20 species that this particular species of bee sometimes eats, and this species of bee is not technically endangered but it might be at some point in the future… Therefore, you can't deploy there. " Even though it's zoned unrestricted industrial and it's sandwiched between a rocket test stand and a chemical plant, for example, in an industrial part of the desert… I'm going to become the Joker. It is insane. We need to be a bit balanced about this. I don't want to drive species into extinction. But the meta problem here is if we don't move our industrial stack off fossil fuels in 10 or 20 years… First of all, we'll get poor the same way the UK did, because they ran out of coal, basically. The second thing is we'll get poor because we'll flood our coastal cities than Florida underneath climate change. We need solar synthetics for that part. We also need to do sulfur injection and a couple of other things. People will point out that transmission line growth has been stuck in a rut for decades. We have all these bottlenecks in terms of substations and transformers, etc. Why will this not hamper this abundant solar future?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.