Historian T.J. Jackson Lears once said, "All history is the history of unintended consequences." This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with Ted Nordhaus, the Founder and Executive Director of The Breakthrough Institute, about when laws designed to protect the environment are misused in order to block efforts that would combat climate change. We look at some recent examples where wealthier communities have exploited environmental regulatory loopholes, stymieing progress toward renewable energy and thwarting the protection of vulnerable populations.

Narrator 0:01  This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I'm Alex Wise.

Ted Nordhaus  (TN) 0:28  You know, the kind old narrative is that no, this is sort of this tool, we have to stop these corporate bad guys from doing terrible things to the environment. But it's actually quite the opposite. Now it's being used by powerful interests, to stop public institutions and government from building infrastructure that we need to protect the environment and do a lot of other things that are just very, very clearly in the public interest.

Narrator 0:56  Historian T.J. Jackson Lears once said, "All history is the history of unintended consequences." This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with Ted Nordhaus, the Founder and Executive Director of The Breakthrough Institute, about when laws designed to protect the environment are misused in order to block efforts that would combat climate change. We look at some recent examples where wealthier communities have exploited environmental regulatory loopholes, stymieing progress toward renewable energy and thwarting the protection of vulnerable populations.

Alex Wise (AW) 1:55  I'm joined now on Sea Change Radio by the Founder and Executive Director of The Breakthrough Institute, Ted Nordhaus. Ted, welcome to Sea Change Radio.

TN  2:04  Thanks for having me. Good to be here.

AW  2:07  So yes, we spoke around five years ago, it's good to check back in with you, you have a piece, an op ed in the Wall Street Journal that I found very thought provoking that I wanted to discuss with you. It's entitled for a clean energy future, we need deregulation, give us kind of the executive summary first, and then we'll dive into the details.

TN  2:27  Yeah, you need to build a to have a clean energy future. I mean, America is still 70 plus percent dependent on fossil fuels, you hear a lot about the sort of renewable energy clean energy revolution, we've been talking about it for a long time, we've made some progress. But still, 70% plus of our total energy consumption is still fossil fuel base. So if you want to really do something about that, you want to really quickly cut emissions, you've got to build a whole lot of stuff really fast. And it's not just going to be solar panels on people's roofs, and even that, in a lot of places, is really slow and hard to do. Because of various permitting and approval issues, things like that. We've gotten a little bit better at it. But you know, as soon as you start talking about even building like a big solar or wind facility, out in the California desert, or wherever you're going to build it. I mean, it can take, you know, a decade plus to get that permitted and built. And and that's just a small number of things we've built so far, when you look at the scale of renewable energy, nuclear energy, electric vehicle, charging systems, all of the things that it would take to really deeply cut emissions in this country. It's just a huge infrastructure project, we have to build the entire infrastructure from scratch with a clean energy economy.