Accelerating Decarbonization in the United States Technology, Policy, and Societal Dimensions (2024) / Chapter Skim
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Pages 241-276
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1993. "Earnings Losses of Displaced Workers." American Economic Review 83(4)
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2022. "Mapping County-Level Vulnerability to the Energy Transition in US Fossil Fuel Communities." Scientific Reports 12(1)
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2021. "Long-Term Employment Effects from Job Losses During the COVID-19 Crisis?
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Public engagement is a crucial element of the social contract necessary to sustain the political will for decarbonization. It is needed to prepare and marshal individuals and communities to act; deliver tangible and meaningful benefits to all; and acknowledge, mitigate, and compensate for the disruptions, risks, losses, and added burdens many will experience.
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Unfortunately, in many parts of the country, the opposite is occurring: a growing number of people are feel ing left out of decisions that are affecting the communities, places, and landscapes where they live and work -- decisions that they see as having little to no local benefit. The number of communities placing significant new restrictions on actions required to achieve deep decarbonization is growing rapidly, especially in the deployment of renewable energy (Aidun et al.
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Without synergistic, innovative public engagement opportunities, the nation's ability to achieve deep decarbonization may be put at risk. This chapter maps out the public engagement innovations required to facilitate a social contract for deep decarbonization, which go well beyond "social accep tance" of technology.
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. Many as pects of the first report's recommendations explicitly and implicitly called for inclusive public engagement: • A White House–level Office of Equitable Energy Transitions; • A National Transition Corporation to ensure coordination and funding for assistance to communities and regions; • National laboratory support to subnational entities for planning and imple mentation of net-zero transition; • Educational and training programs to train the net-zero workforce; • Ten regional centers to manage socioeconomic dimensions of the net-zero transition; • High-profile regional public dialogues and listening sessions to discuss decarbonization pathways and goals; 247 A00026 -- Accelerating Decarbonization in the United States_CH05.indd 247 3/30/24 3:04 PM
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The IIJA and the IRA authorize and appropriate es sential funding for infrastructure deployment but only feature modest opportunities for engaging the public, primarily through funding requirements that distribute ben efits via access to technologies and economic opportunities. Public engagement is a significant barrier to IIJA and IRA implementation in both areas of low and high readi ness to capitalize on available funding.
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This is especially true for the siting of extensive infrastructure within communities and the adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) and heat pumps by households.
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. Federal Research and Development and Capacity-Building Investments • Integrate human dimensions research and graduate training into all clean energy technol ogy research, innovation, and deployment programs (Recommendation 5-9a)
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. • Reform fiscal policy to increase direct local benefits for hosting renewable energy facili ties (Recommendation 5-4)
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There is potential for innovative public engagement to be developed and incorporated into a social contract to support the pace and scale of infrastructural investment and construction needed for the transition of the national energy system to net zero. STRENGTHENING ENERGY DEMOCRACY THROUGH INCLUSIVE POLICY DIALOGUES The Challenge Energy democracy is the ability of democratic publics to meaningfully participate in governing U.S.
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. In the context of decarbonization, inclusive policy dialogue includes two-way, multi-sited,5 and continuous engagements that connect policy to affected publics from the local to the regional to the national scale.
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. Continued innovation will support the diversity of public engagement opportunities that are available during the transition to a net-zero energy future.
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2022a) , and imagining the impacts of future renewable energy development on urban and rural life (Eschrich and Miller 2019, 2021)
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Elsewhere, there is support for deliberative dialogue about energy futures in re gions experiencing widespread abandonment of fossil fuel facilities. In Australia, practitioners and academics -- and in some cases, industry -- support consider ation of social impacts of and public perspectives on mine closures in addition to the policy focus on environmental rehabilitation in coal-dependent areas (Cameron and Gibson 2005; Measham et al.
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Several new offices have been established to facilitate federal support of public engagement in the energy transition.
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As further discussed in Chapter 12, the IWG is an explicit acknowledgment that maintaining a social contract in support of decarbonization demands engaging impacted communities by "[r] ecognizing the importance of meeting these communities where they are" in the energy transition (IWG 2023, p.
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Box 5-4 highlights an engagement practice from Canada's Participant Funding and Policy Dialogue program, which provides compensation for participation. There are substantial opportunities for states, localities, and tribes to leverage the ap propriated funding of the IIJA and the IRA for participatory and innovative planning and visioning for local and regional energy transitions.
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21) The Participant Funding and Policy Dialogue programs and other proactive policies to advance public inclusion in climate planning provide an adaptable template for nascent U.S.
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Findings and Recommendations The examples and conceptual underpinnings of inclusive policy dialogue described above underscore the importance of the public contribution to energy transition dialogue and visioning. These approaches help to align public values and policy goals; build public understanding and awareness; incorporate community perspectives into policies and infrastructures; uncover potential roadblocks or policy gaps; allow com munities to shape and design meaningful co-benefits; and coordinate across scale, region, and sector with multi-scalar planning activities.
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This includes increased opportunities for small groups or communities to own and oper ate energy processes and to directly benefit from decarbonization actions, includ ing through community and tribal energy systems that provide collective benefits. For low-income communities, the benefits of clean energy development have the potential to permanently lower energy burdens, with proper policy support (Biswas et al.
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Individual ownership is not the only mechanism for distributed solar systems. In the European Union, for example, energy cooperatives and neighborhood microgrids have emerged as an important strategy for enhanced public engagement and in volvement in the clean energy transition (Inês et al.
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. Similarly, the agreement between the Navajo Nation and Salt River Project surrounding the closure of the Navajo Generating Station coal-fired power plant and associated mine also gave the Navajo substantial access to transmission capability for future renewable energy development (Pyper 2019)
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Indeed, payments and other monetary benefits to individuals, communities, and governments do influence both the social acceptance and local impacts of energy developments -- although public acceptance and local impacts are not always corre lated in straightforward ways. However, collective payment schemes and community benefits agreements in renewable energy development are very novel tools with many potential legal issues yet to be identified and resolved (Fazio and Wallace 2017)
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. and the communities they serve to develop clean energy resources and workforce skills needed for the transition (USDA n.d.)
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Nonetheless, community solar remains a small portion of the nation's solar installa tions. Project-based collective benefits models are advanced and challenged by their relative flexibility and direct dependence on the capacity and will of non-regulatory actors.
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See the section "Meaningful Engage ment in Siting and Permitting" below for more information about utilizing funding to build community capacity. Collective Benefits One challenge for the deployment of utility-scale infrastructure is the variability in how public revenue policies approach renewable energy facilities (Hintz et al.
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. In almost all cases, revenue opportunities for renewable energy are far smaller than they are for fossil fuels and mined minerals because -- unlike for oil, gas, and hard rock minerals -- there is no severance tax on renewable energy (Godby 2022)
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Finding 5-4: A lack of adequate expertise and institutional capacity hinders the dif fusion and successful application of processes that can facilitate renewable energy development and provide collective benefits, including Community Benefits Agree ments; collective leases and payments; and federal, state, and local revenue policies. Recommendation 5-2: Accelerate the Development, Implementation, Assess ment, and Sharing of Energy System Policy and Approaches That Deliver Local Benefits from Decarbonization Investments.
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Finding 5-6: State-level policies often suppress the potential for renewable energy facilities to create direct local benefits in the form of public revenues. The mecha nisms include aggressive tax rebates for certain types of energy, which often result in fossil fuel facilities being more lucrative than renewable energy projects, as well as less well-known limits on budget and expenditure discretion for local governments.
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MEANINGFUL ENGAGEMENT IN SITING AND PERMITTING The Challenge Innovation in public engagement to ensure distributive and procedural justice will be essential to the deployment of all deep decarbonization infrastructure across the full diversity and heterogeneity of communities and landscapes. While the factors influencing the social acceptance of energy infrastructures are multi-faceted (Boudet 2019)
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This means that communication between project representatives, contractors, government officials, and local and public stakeholders is conducted in multiple languages and in diverse and accessible formats; begins early in the process and features continuous updates of project progress with easily accessible archives of past discussions; and utilizes both low- and high-tech strategies to help different groups visual ize and guide changes to the natural and built environment.
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. Where the electric grid meets the built environment in key shared 17 See Chapters 2 and 3 and Appendix E for more information about the environmental justice concerns and health risks associated with carbon capture investments and other decarbonization technologies.
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Opportunities and Barriers in Current Policy Calls for more robust and innovative public engagement found in the social science literature on renewable energy project development seem at odds with widespread concern in public policy circles about the need to reduce permitting barriers through major policy reform. Legal scholars find that permitting processes for large-scale infra structure are made burdensome by a lack of interjurisdictional alignment, the ensuing redundant and circular processes of both public participation and detailed environ mental review, and their vulnerability to litigation by project opponents (Gerrard 2017; Ruhl and Salzman 2020)
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An effective public engagement work force for decarbonization includes public and community engagement professionals from utilities; community-advocacy groups; tribes; clean energy demonstration proj ects; local, state, and federal agencies; and other relevant organizations and programs. Federal Actions The IRA directs funds to improve environmental review processes in multiple agency budgets, namely: $40 million for EPA to invest in more accurate and timely environ mental reviews (§60115)
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