The Difference Between Hope and Courage
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Editor’s note: “I think hope is really harmful for several reasons. False hopes bind us to unlivable situations, and they blind us to real possibilities. Does anybody really think that Weyerhaeuser is going to stop deforesting because we ask nicely? Does anybody really think that if a democrat would have gotten into the White House that things would be ok? Does anybody think that vivisectors will stop torturing animals just because we stand outside with a sign?
That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t stand out there with that sign. What it means is, do we really believe that they will stop because we do that? And if you don’t believe that, what does that mean? The book I have just recently completed is really centered around this question. Do you believe that the culture will undergo a voluntary transformation to obtain a sustainable way of living? If you don’t, what does that mean for our strategy and for our tactics? We don’t know. The reason we don’t know is that we don’t ask that question. The reason we don’t ask that question is that we’re so busy pretending that we have hope.” – Derrick Jensen December 1st, 2004
“Biosphere Collapse: We Are in a Terminal Phase
The Sixth Mass Extinction is not a future risk—it is happening now, and human activity is the sole cause.
Extinction Rates: Current rates are 100–1,000 times higher than the “background” rate of the Cenozoic era. While the oft-cited “250–300 species per day” figure is debated (due to undercounting invertebrates and microbes), conservative estimates still suggest ~150 species lost daily. For context, the Permian-Triassic extinction (“The Great Dying”) wiped out 90% of species over 60,000 years. We’re matching that pace in decades.
Habitat Destruction: 75% of Earth’s land surface is degraded by human activity. Forests (critical carbon sinks) are vanishing at 10 million hectares/year. Oceanic dead zones (hypoxic regions) have quadrupled since 1950.
Food Web Collapse: Phytoplankton (the base of marine food chains) have declined 40% since 1950. Insect biomass is dropping 2.5% annually, threatening pollination and soil health.
Conclusion: The biosphere is unravelling faster than evolution can adapt. Humans are not exempt—we are apex predators in a collapsing food web.”
“Hope is, in fact, a curse, a bane. I say this not only because of the lovely Buddhist saying “Hope and fear chase each other’s tails,” not only because hope leads us away from the present, away from who and where we are right now and toward some imaginary future state. I say this because of what hope is.
More or less all of us yammer on more or less endlessly about hope. You wouldn’t believe — or maybe you would — how many magazine editors have asked me to write about the apocalypse, then enjoined me to leave readers with a sense of hope. But what, precisely, is hope? At a talk I gave last spring, someone asked me to define it. I turned the question back on the audience, and here’s the definition we all came up with: hope is a longing for a future condition over which you have no agency; it means you are essentially powerless.”
“A lot of discussion is, how should agriculture prepare for this,” he said. But a collapse of the heat-transporting circulation is a going-out-of-business scenario for European agriculture, he added. “You cannot adapt to this. There’s some studies of what happens to agriculture in Great Britain, and it becomes like trying to grow potatoes in Northern Norway.”
A new study on birds points out yet another symptom predicament I have repeatedly mentioned, especially recently – pollution loading. Here’s the poignant part of the article, quote:
“Ideally, you do not want these substances in your body, but in practice, it is virtually impossible for humans and many other living organisms to avoid them.
Recent research and a new method for detecting PFAS bring both bad and good news. The bad news is that we are finding PFAS in places we have not previously found them. The good news is that this means we have become better at detecting these substances.
“The biggest increase is in the livers of wading birds. We found up to 180 times more PFAS than previously,” said Zhang.“
“And for all of that, these massive, staggeringly complex, bureaucratic systems are so easy to break! All it takes is a few monkeys!
Maybe, as we watch our exhausted, fraudulent, incompetently-‘led’ civilization falling apart all around us, we can finally open our eyes and see that it never has been what we believed it was, with all our smarmy talk of “freedom” and “democracy”. It’s been a sham from the start, but we believed the nonsense we’ve been told about it because we wanted to believe it. Take away everything we have, but you’ll never take away our belief in our human superiority, our manifest destiny, the myth of perpetual progress as we spread across the universe, and, most of all, our certainty that we will be saved.
So we have DOGE, perhaps the most blatantly, overtly incompetent gang of monkeys the world has ever seen, let loose in the ‘power factory’ by the Child King, the most incompetent business person in the history of civilization, wreaking havoc on every essential public service in the US.
And we have the incompetent, miseducated, sci-fi dreamer technophiles, with their wild untested ideas for Marvel Comics-style rescues of our ecosystems, let loose to play at geoengineering, sucking up billions from the dregs of the world’s fast-failing treasuries to play at making fusion energy, and carbon capture, and AI everything, and quantum everything, and starships to anywhere-but-this-fucked-planet, and carbon (and now water) cap-and-trade offset exchanges (for those that flunked science). Gotta be some salvation in there somewhere! It’s ordained!”
Earth’s Water Cycle Off Balance for ‘First Time in Human History’
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Editor’s note: Water, as well as forests, do not need to be managed. They just need to be left alone.
By Petro Kotzé / Mangabay
Water seems deceptively simple and is easy to take for granted. It has no color, taste or smell and is one of the most plentiful chemical compounds on Earth. Recycled endlessly through the biosphere in its various forms, it is fundamental to keeping our planet’s operating system intact, and has done so for millions of years.
Water is life. Earth’s oceans are where life likely originated, and freshwater is essential for plants and animals to persist and thrive. It is basic to all human development. But as our 21st-century world gallops ahead, we are vastly manipulating the water cycle at an unprecedented rate and scale to meet the ever-growing needs of an exploding population.
By 2030, we will have built enough dams to alter 93% of the world’s rivers. Estimates vary, but we already use around 90% of the planet’s freshwater to grow our food. More than half of us now live in cities, but by 2050 a projected 68% of the world’s nearly 8 billion people will reside in urban areas. That metropolitan lifestyle will require astronomical amounts of water — extracted, treated, and piped over large distances. Humanity also prevents much rainwater from easily infiltrating underground, reducing aquifers, as we pave over immense areas with impermeable concrete and asphalt.
But these easily visible changes are only the proverbial tip of the iceberg. Researchers are shining new light on sweeping human alterations to Earth’s water cycle, many playing out in processes largely unseen. In the Anthropocene — the unofficial name for the current human-influenced unit of geologic time — we are already pushing one of Earth’s most fundamental and foundational systems, the hydrological cycle, toward the breaking point.
Trouble is, we don’t yet know when this threshold may be reached, or what the precise consequences will be. Scientists are resolutely seeking answers.
Water cycle basics
The hydrological cycle is powered by the sun and flows through eternal inhalations and exhalations of water in different states, as it is exchanged between the atmosphere and the planet. Liquid water from oceans, lakes and rivers rises via evaporation into the sky, to form water vapor, an important greenhouse gas that, like carbon dioxide, helps insulate the planet to maintain that “just right” temperature to maintain life as we know it.
Atmospheric water vapor then changes to liquid, falling to earth as precipitation. It then flows as runoff again across the landscape, and what doesn’t go back into waterbodies, settles into soils, to be taken up by plants and released via transpiration as vapor skyward. A large amount of freshwater is also locked in glaciers and icecaps.
Within this cycle, there are constant complex interactions between what scientists call blue and green water. Blue water includes rivers, lakes, reservoirs and renewable groundwater stores. Green water is defined as terrestrial precipitation, evaporation and soil moisture.
A fully functioning hydrological cycle, with balanced supplies and flows of blue and green water, is essential to terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, human food availability and production, and our energy security.
It also regulates Earth’s weather and influences climate. Atmospheric temperature, for example, is dependent on evaporation and condensation. That’s because as water evaporates, it absorbs energy and cools the local environment, and as it condenses, it releases energy and warms the world. Throughout the Holocene geological epoch, a relatively stable water cycle helped maintain balanced temperatures and conditions able to support civilization.
However, in the Anthropocene, human activity has impacted the water cycle, the climate and ecosystems. For one, as more human-produced CO2 and methane build up in the atmosphere, more solar energy is held by the planet, causing global warming. And the hotter the air, the greater the quantity of water vapor the atmosphere can hold. That’s bad news because water vapor is itself a powerful greenhouse gas, greatly increasing the warming.
Measuring hydrological cycle change: ‘It’s complicated’
As our anthropogenic manipulation of the water cycle escalates on a global scale, we urgently need a holistic way to monitor these modifications and understand their impacts. Yet, the topic has not received the urgent scientific attention it requires. “To the best of our knowledge, there is no study comprehensively investigating whether human modifications of the water cycle have led, could be leading, or will lead to planetary‐scale regime shifts in the Earth system,” researchers noted in a 2020 paper on the role of the water cycle in maintaining fundamental Earth functioning.
One key concern of scientists: If severe hydrological shifts occur in too many regions, or in key regions that greatly influence the water cycle or water availability (such as the Amazon), then that could provoke shifts in other regions, in a global chain reaction, says study co-author Dieter Gerten, working group leader and Earth modeling coordinator at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.
“Conceptually we know that there must be a limit for how much we can disturb the [hydrological] system before we start feeling serious impacts on the Earth system and then, by extension, to humanity,” says one of the paper’s other co-authors, Miina Porkka, a postdoctoral researcher at the Water and Development Group at Aalto University in Finland.
International researchers under the auspices of the Stockholm Resilience Centre have been hammering away at answering these questions. They had to start with the basics. One big problem to date has been scientists’ lack of a metric for quantifying serious water cycle alterations. How do we even measure changes to the water cycle?
“It gets complicated,” says Gerten, who has been involved in the research to bring a global perspective to local water management since 2009, as conducted under the Planetary Boundaries Framework; Gerten is also a professor of global change climatology and hydrology at Humboldt University of Berlin.
Measuring change: Blue water
The Planetary Boundaries Framework defines a safe operating space for humanity as represented by nine natural global processes that, if severely destabilized, could disrupt Earth’s operating system and threaten life and civilization. The freshwater planetary boundary presents one such threshold, and scientists are working to define a global limit to anthropogenic water cycle modifications.
Initially, in 2009, river flow was used to try and measure the boundary threshold, Gerten explains, because blue water in all its forms was seen to integrate the three largest anthropogenic manipulations of the water cycle: human impacts on precipitation patterns, modifications of soil moisture by land use and land cover; and water withdrawals for human use.
This research used a simple calculation of the global sum of the average annual surface water flow in rivers, with an assumed 30% of that accessible water needing to be protected. This “freshwater use” boundary was set at 4,000 cubic kilometers (960 cubic miles) per year of blue water consumption. This is at the lower limit of a 4,000-6,000 km3 (960-1,440 mi3) annual range designated as a danger zone that takes us “too close to the risk of blue and green water-induced thresholds that could have deleterious or even catastrophic impacts on the Earth System,” researchers wrote in a 2020 paper that evaluated the water planetary boundary.
With only an estimated 2,600 km3 (624 mi3) of water withdrawn annually at the time of the study, scientists concluded we were still in the safe zone. However, “That [conclusion] was immediately criticized,” Gerten says, in part because scientists were already seeing ample regional water-related problems. Another criticism argued that the measure of blue water alone did not reflect all types of human interference with the water cycle and Earth system.
Gerten later led work that proposed quantifying the boundary by assessing the amount of streamflow needed to maintain environmental flow requirements in all river basins on Earth. This approach had the advantage of recognizing regionally transgressed limits and thereby deduced a global value.
According to this newer calculation, the freshwater use planetary boundary should be set much lower, at about 2,800 km3 (672 mi3), Gerten says, which means humanity is already much closer to the danger zone than previously thought. “Water is more limited on Planet Earth than we think,” Gerten cautions.
Redefining the freshwater boundary: Green water
Over time, a consortium of researchers was formed to deeply scrutinize the freshwater boundary. This resulted in follow-up work in 2019 and 2020 proposing that the freshwater boundary be divided into sub-boundaries related to major stores of freshwater: namely atmospheric water, frozen water, groundwater, soil moisture, and surface water.
Since then, scientists simplified their approach further. “Even though we are talking about very complex matters,” Porkka says, the boundary definition, to be useful as a metric, needed to stay “relatively simple.”
The most recent and sweeping reassessment of the freshwater planetary boundary was published in 2022. “Our suggestion is to … change the name from ‘freshwater use planetary boundary’ to ‘freshwater change planetary boundary,’” says study lead author Lan Wang-Erlandsson from the Stockholm Resilience Centre. “Then, to have two components,” she adds, “One for green water, and one for blue water.”
“Water has so many functions in the Earth system, and many of them happen invisibly via green water,” Gerten explains. “We don’t see it and we don’t feel it. That’s why [green water] has been neglected over decades. The focus has been on river flows and groundwater because we can see it, feel it, use it, and touch it. But [as a result] a big share of the water cycle has been overlooked.”
The newly accepted metric for tracking green water: The soil moisture in the root zone of plants, or more technically: “the percentage of ice-free land area on which root-zone soil moisture anomalies exit the local bounds of baseline variability in any month of the year.”
This new proxy is appealing because it is directly influenced by human pressures with change over time measurable. In turn, soil moisture directly impacts a range of large-scale ecological, climatic, biogeochemical and hydrological dynamics.
Using this novel green water boundary transgression criteria, scientists detected a major hydrological departure from the baseline set during the Holocene. And the evidence for such a departure is overwhelming: Researchers found “unprecedented areas [of Earth] with root-zone soil moisture anomalies,” indicating an exit from the so-called “safe zone.”
A second criteria, Earth Systems Resilience, was also instituted. Researchers evaluated the state of regional climate systems (ranging from monsoons to land carbon sinks and large biomes) to see which have seen enhanced changes in their process rates, resulting in ripple effects that could destabilize the Earth system, Wang-Erlandsson explains.
A transgressed freshwater change boundary
Unfortunately, examples of compromised Earth System Resilience transgressions are rife across the planet.
Take the Amazon Rainforest, for instance. It is now understood that carbon uptake likely peaked there in the 1990s, with a sequestration decline since then driven by escalating climate change and fires, along with global demand for agricultural commodities, which spurred extensive Amazon forest clearing, bringing major land-use change. More recently, African tropical forests have passed their carbon uptake peak.
When these vast biomes and natural systems are put under extreme multiple stressors, the effects can self-amplify and lead to greater, more rapid, rates of change, Wang-Erlandsson says: In South America, this combination of stressors, particularly deforestation and climate change, is inducing intensifying drought, which is now leading to cascading perturbations in living systems. Scientists now think the rainforest biome, stable for thousands of years, is reaching a tipping point, and could quickly transition to seasonal forest, or even a degraded savanna. This shift could lead to the transformation of the South American monsoon system, and a permanent state of reduced rainfall and impoverished biodiversity.
But what starts in the Amazon won’t likely stay there: The rainforest’s destruction will release massive amounts of carbon, intensifying climate change, potentially leading to climate and ecological tipping points in other biomes.
Another concerning example (although debated) of an Earth system shift is the suggestion of a weakening carbon fertilization process, in which higher atmospheric carbon concentrations result in speeded-up photosynthesis as plants try to improve water efficiency in the face of drought. It is thought that this effect is happening already, brought on by limitations in nutrient and soil moisture availability.
In drylands, climate change and ecosystem degradation are triggering vicious cycles of infiltration capacity loss — a decrease in soil moisture and moisture recycling, resulting in increasing desertification and biodiversity loss. In polar permafrost regions, soil moisture saturation could accelerate thawing, generating dangerous methane emissions. Methane is a greenhouse gas far more powerful than carbon dioxide.
Alarmed by the water cycle’s departure from the Holocene baseline, and noting “worrying” signs of low Earth System Resilience, researchers early in 2022 declared the green water boundary to be “considerably transgressed.” The situation, they said, will likely worsen before any reversals in the trend will be observed. “Green water modifications are now causing rising Earth system risks at a scale that modern civilizations might not have ever faced,” the study states.
We don’t yet know what the planetary-scale impacts will ultimately be, but, Porkka says, we have an idea of how impacts could be felt in different parts of the world.
Disastrous extreme weather events
Regional extreme events, including floods and mega droughts, are already occurring, Porkka notes. Examples are to be found on every continent.
On Africa’s southeast coast, as just one example: the World Weather Attribution (WWA) network of scientists has found that human-induced climate change has increased the likelihood and intensity of heavy rainfall associated with tropical cyclones. The group based their findings on an analysis of tropical storms Ana and Batisrai, which battered parts of Madagascar, Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe in early 2022. Both cyclonic systems brought devastating floods that caused severe humanitarian impacts, including many deaths and injuries and large-scale damage to infrastructure. These sorts of extreme weather events put great pressure on socioeconomic and political institutions, and could easily destabilize struggling developing nations.
And the situation is worsening. The number of disasters related to weather, climate or water hazards has increased fivefold over the past 50 years, according to the World Meteorological Organization. An assessment from 1970 to 2019 found more than 11,000 reported disasters attributed to such hazards globally, resulting in more than 2 million deaths and $3.64 trillion in losses. All are indicative of a careening hydrological cycle.
Of the top 10 climate disasters, those causing the largest human losses during that period were droughts (650,000 deaths), storms (577,232), floods (58,700), and extreme temperature (55,736 deaths). In economic terms, the top 10 events included storms (costing $521 billion) and floods ($115 billion).
Porkka points out, however, that freshwater system destabilization impacts can be more subtle than extreme events. Widespread irrigation of croplands, for example, can increase evaporation to such a high degree that even distant precipitation patterns are altered. Part of the problem is that we do not know if consequences like these are negative or positive.
“[W]e know that we’re changing the [hydrological] system in fundamental ways and, once we do, we don’t really know how the impacts accumulate,” says Porkka.
While many riddles remain, scientists now feel they have a reliable metric for accurately tracking transgressions of the freshwater change boundary. “The prime question was what the key variables are, and I think that is relatively solid now with soil moisture [green water] and river flows [blue water],” Gerten says. “The next questions are, where exactly to put the boundaries, and what happens if they are transgressed?”
Based on these findings, researchers are calling for urgent action: “The current global trends and trajectories of increasing water use, deforestation, land degradation, soil erosion, atmospheric pollution, and climate change need to be promptly halted and reversed to increase the chances of remaining in [Earth’s] safe operating space.”
That’s a tall order, and no matter humanity’s actions, we don’t know how things will play out. “Water is so fundamental and elemental, and at the same time, so varied,” Gerten says, and there is no silver bullet for solving our hydrological problems.
Banner image: Farmers tending to their agricultural land in Uzbekistan. Image by Petro Kotzé.
Citations:
Scanlon, B. R., Jolly, I., Sophocleous, M., & Zhang, L. (2007). Global impacts of conversions from natural to agricultural ecosystems on water resources: Quantity versus quality. Water Resources Research, 43(3). doi:10.1029/2006wr005486
Gleeson, T., Wang‐Erlandsson, L., Porkka, M., Zipper, S. C., Jaramillo, F., Gerten, D., … Famiglietti, J. S. (2020). Illuminating water cycle modifications and earth system resilience in the Anthropocene. Water Resources Research, 56(4). doi:10.1029/2019wr024957
Gleeson, T., Wang-Erlandsson, L., Zipper, S. C., Porkka, M., Jaramillo, F., Gerten, D., … Famiglietti, J. S. (2020). The water planetary boundary: Interrogation and revision. One Earth, 2(3), 223-234. doi:10.1016/j.oneear.2020.02.009
Gerten, D., Hoff, H., Rockström, J., Jägermeyr, J., Kummu, M., & Pastor, A. V. (2013). Towards a revised planetary boundary for consumptive freshwater use: Role of environmental flow requirements. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 5(6), 551-558. doi:10.1016/j.cosust.2013.11.001
Zipper, S. C., Jaramillo, F., Wang‐Erlandsson, L., Cornell, S. E., Gleeson, T., Porkka, M., … Gordon, L. (2020). Integrating the water planetary boundary with water management from local to global scales. Earth’s Future, 8(2). doi:10.1029/2019ef001377
Wang-Erlandsson, L., Tobian, A., van der Ent, R. J., Fetzer, I., te Wierik, S., Porkka, M., … Rockström, J. (2022). A planetary boundary for green water. Nature Reviews Earth & Environment. doi:10.1038/s43017-022-00287-8
Hubau, W., Lewis, S. L., Phillips, O. L., Affum-Baffoe, K., Beeckman, H., Cuní-Sanchez, A., … Zemagho, L. (2020). Asynchronous carbon sink saturation in African and Amazonian tropical forests. Nature, 579(7797), 80-87. doi:10.1038/s41586-020-2035-0
Wang, S., Zhang, Y., Ju, W., Chen, J. M., Ciais, P., Cescatti, A., … Peñuelas, J. (2020). Recent global decline of CO2 fertilization effects on vegetation photosynthesis. Science, 370(6522), 1295-1300. doi:10.1126/science.abb7772
Ravi, S., Breshears, D. D., Huxman, T. E., & D’Odorico, P. (2010). Land degradation in drylands: Interactions among hydrologic-aeolian erosion and vegetation dynamics. Geomorphology, 116(3-4), 236-245. doi:10.1016/j.geomorph.2009.11.023
Van Luijk, G., Cowling, R. M., Riksen, M. J. P. M., & Glenday, J. (2013). Hydrological implications of desertification: Degradation of South African semi-arid subtropical thicket. Journal of Arid Environments, 91, 14-21. doi:10.1016/j.jaridenv.2012.10.022
Knoblauch, C., Beer, C., Liebner, S., Grigoriev, M. N., & Pfeiffer, E. (2018). Methane production as key to the greenhouse gas budget of thawing permafrost. Nature Climate Change, 8(4), 309-312. doi:10.1038/s41558-018-0095-z
Photo by Leslie Lopez Holder on Unsplash
Community Backlash to Renewables
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With states, corporations, utilities and the federal government setting aggressive renewable energy goals, as well as big tax incentives such as in last year’s Inflation Reduction Act, wind and solar developers have been pushing projects that are igniting fierce battles over property rights, loss of farmland, climate change, aesthetics, the merits of renewable power and a host of other concerns.
“My guess is that we’re going to need a lot of “renewables” built on public lands further west, just because we’re seeing so much opposition growing up, especially sort of the middle of the country that’s already very dense on wind,” said Rich Powell, CEO of Clear Path, a nonprofit policy group working to curb carbon emissions, during a panel discussion on the state of the electric grid since the deadly 2021 winter storm Uri.
What is happening in these backlash battles is a lot of what is called misinformation that is skewed by political polarization. Community resistance to these projects sends a clear message to the powers that be that there are legitimate concerns that run across party lines about “renewables” energy. The issue concerning “renewables” shouldn’t be a left or right discussion but one that looks forward at the cost environmentally and economically instead.
“A week after enacting one of the state’s strictest ordinances governing commercial wind energy production, Washington County Supervisors directed staff not to accept any applications for turbine development until after the code can be amended with provisions governing debris cleanup for the generators.”
Will local control be lost? State climate bill likely to usurp authority over siting of clean energy infrastructure
Coalition broadens attack on offshore wind with pledge to scrap second declared zone
END IT! National Protest in Opposition of Offshore Wind
Michigan wants to fast-track renewable development. Local townships are suing.
By Izzy Ross / “This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here.”
This coverage is made possible through a partnership with Grist and Interlochen Public Radio in Northern Michigan.
A backlash lawsuit is challenging how the state of Michigan plans to approve large renewable energy projects, just weeks before a new law is set to go into effect.
About 80 townships and counties are suing the Public Service Commission, the state’s energy regulating body, over how it plans to grant siting permissions to renewable projects. The suit, filed November 8, could shape how and where solar, wind, and battery storage are developed — and it muddies the process for projects to be approved in the meantime.
Last year, Michigan’s Democrat-controlled Legislature passed a bundle of ambitious climate policies, including changes to the application process for large renewable projects. One of those laws, Public Act 233, allows the state to greenlight utility-scale renewables — like solar arrays of at least 50 megawatts — that in the past could have been slowed or blocked by local governments. The bill passed on promises that it would help meet clean energy goals and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by providing developers with additional paths forward.
Renewable energy advocates had high hopes that it would mark a turning point for Michigan, which has a deep history of local control. In crafting PA 233, lawmakers followed the example of states like Illinois that in recent years have worked to streamline permitting and curtail local governments’ power to restrict renewables.
“I think there was a huge amount of relief on the part of landowners, who have had options agreements and contracts to participate in wind and solar projects, but have been blocked from getting lease payments, essentially, by backlash from local governments,” said Matthew Eisenson, a senior fellow at the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School. Eisenson has argued for regulators to clarify Michigan’s law to ensure projects are protected from local restrictions. According to the Sabin Center, by the end of 2023, at least 22 clean energy projects had been stalled throughout the state by local governments (though some have since moved forward) and at least seven townships had placed severe restrictions on developing industrial solar in areas zoned for agricultural use.
Critics of the law, meanwhile, allege that it wrests control away from the people who live in these areas, and the local governments that know what’s best for their communities.
Legal challenges to Michigan’s new climate laws weren’t exactly unexpected; an effort to repeal the siting law entirely failed earlier this year, because organizers didn’t collect enough signatures to put it to a vote. But this latest appeal in Michigan has gained national attention, with the climate news site Heatmap News writing that it may be “the most important legal challenge for the “renewables” industry in America.”
The lawsuit is challenging the Public Service Commission’s plans to implement the renewable siting law, not the law itself. And as other states consider permitting reform — and whether to keep big “renewable” projects under local or state control — such legal actions could be easier than trying to repeal an entire law, Eisenson said: “There are more options.”
This latest legal challenge was filed after the Public Service Commission announced how the new law for approving project sites would work — a process that involved months of public engagement by the commission in an effort to clarify the rules, including what, exactly, local governments need to have on the books to get the first say on a proposed project.
The lawsuit says the commission’s regulators didn’t follow the proper rulemaking procedures to issue such requirements, and that they undermined the local control that’s baked into PA 233. In particular, the suit challenges the commission’s definition of a “compatible renewable energy ordinance” — a local law that complies with specific state guidelines. PA 233 stipulates that renewable project developers first apply locally as long as the government has a compatible ordinance. If that local ordinance is more restrictive than state law, developers can instead apply directly to the state for approval.
That left some big questions.
Sarah Mills, a professor of urban planning at the University of Michigan who researches how renewable energy impacts rural communities, said while parts of PA 233 are clear — such as the sections on setbacks, fencing, height, and sound — others are murky.
“There’s a whole bunch of things that are traditionally regulated for renewable energy projects that are not mentioned in the law,” she said, like whether local governments can require trees and bushes or ground cover.
The Public Service Commission claims that for a local ordinance to be compatible, it can’t include restrictions on things not included in the law. The plaintiffs behind the appeal disagree.
“That’s not the state of the law, and frankly, it rewrites the legislation, because it doesn’t say that,” said Michael Homier, an attorney with the firm Foster Swift Collins & Smith, who is representing the plaintiffs.
What it comes down to, Homier said, is the scope of the commission’s authority: While he acknowledges regulators can still weigh in on applications, the suit challenges the commission’s broader interpretation of how the law should work.
A commission spokesperson said they couldn’t comment.
Under the commission’s order, only the local government that is zoning a renewable project needs to be considered when granting an approval. But the lawsuit argues that when more than one jurisdiction is affected — like when a county overlaps with a township — both entities should be included in the decision-making.
Mills points out this would affect how much money would flow to local communities from these projects. The state’s law says communities where large projects are located would receive $2,000 per megawatt, along with any required legal fees, which the developer would pay.
“If the affected local unit of government isn’t only the zoning jurisdiction, then the developer would need to pay $2,000 to the county and to the township. So it would be $4,000 per megawatt,” Mills said, in which case “developers are going to have to pay more money.”
Those represented in the appeal are a minority of local jurisdictions; Michigan has 83 counties and more than 1,200 townships. Many are to the south and around the agricultural region in the east colloquially called “The Thumb,” though a few are farther north.
Watchdog groups that track efforts to oppose renewable energy projects say legal challenges are part of coordinated opposition to such development.
“The lawsuit is an extension of ongoing efforts by anti-renewables interests to thwart clean energy in Michigan, and seeks to open the door to poison-pill local rules that effectively prohibit renewables development,” said researcher Jonathan Kim of the Energy and Policy Institute in an email.
In Michigan, debates over large-scale clean energy projects have been acrimonious, and have had consequences for elected officials. Douglass Township, with a population of a little over 2,200, held a recall election in 2022 — part of a wave of unrest in Montcalm County driven by opposition to renewables. “So our community was totally behind us working on ordinances that would protect them from industrialized wind and solar energy,” said Cindy Shick, who won the race for township supervisor as part of the recall.
The state’s recent siting law drastically diminished the local control they had crafted, according to Shick, and the commission’s order eroded it even further, which is why the township joined the lawsuit.
Reasons for opposing utility-scale renewable projects vary widely, from concerns about a loss of agricultural land to the effects such developments would have on the environment. Other critics point out that companies too often fail to consult tribal nations and ignore Indigenous rights when pursuing projects.
Still, others in support of more development say it’s a boon to communities and people looking to make money by leasing their land. Clyde Taylor, 84, is a farmer who grows hay in Isabella Township in central Michigan. The township is among those suing, though Taylor hasn’t looked into the lawsuit.
He’s allowing a company to build a solar array on around two dozen acres of his land. While he has “mixed feelings” about the state’s new siting law, he generally supports it.
“We have to have laws on the books to make this thing fly,” he said, referring to renewable energy adoption. “And they’ve made it fair enough,” with solar projects under 50 megawatts staying in local control.
Ultimately, the local governments involved in the lawsuit are asking the Court of Appeals to cancel at least part of the commission’s order. The law is set to go into effect on November 29. If the appeal is successful at halting the Public Service Commission from implementing the order, it’s unclear how PA 233 would work as the suit moves through the court, a process that could take more than a year.
This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/energy/michigan-public-service-commission-permitting-reform-lawsuit/.
Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org