Why America Doesn’t Build

Here’s how wind-energy projects aren’t built in America. This particular story took place a decade ago but could easily have unfolded last year or last month. In 2013, a Texas-based company put forward a proposal to build two windmill farms in northeastern Alabama. The company said that the farms would generate enough power for more than 24,000 homes, eagerly projecting that it would break ground by the end of 2013. But local opposition swiftly defeated the project. Opponents also won stringent regulations that made future wind farms in the area extremely unlikely.

“I think this is a great example of ordinary people with determination and a certain amount of political cooperation successfully standing up to defend their community,” one critic of the project told a local reporter. “It was literally a David versus Goliath thing,” another said.

[Jerusalem Demsas: Tress? Not in my backyard]

Americans have generally understood the transition to a clean-energy economy as a technological or an economic problem: Can renewables be reliable? Can they compete with cheap fossil fuels? Recent advances problem: Can our political institutions quickly and equitably facilitate ? The problem is not just that entrenched oil-and-gas interests reject the need to end reliance on fossil fuels; it’s also that the environmental playbook was written to stop rather than create change.