Jack Stevens: Strangled by Red Tape

There was a time not so long ago when the Republican Party could be relied upon to staunchly oppose unnecessary regulations and red tape.

But that was your father’s GOP.

Today’s Republicans happily embrace over-regulation if the target is something they don’t like. Their current bete noire is renewable energy, specifically wind and solar. They disdain these sources of clean power because they only furnish intermittent electricity and, in their opinion, consume too much land to deploy.

On Wednesday, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum issued a memo imposing a byzantine array of approvals which will be necessary if anyone dares to launch a wind or solar project on state, public or private lands. This multi-layered, political review process applies to 68 separate activities requiring Burgum’s personal approval, including basic project determinations.

Burgum is also going to prohibit wind and solar developers from using the US Fish and Wildlife Information for Planning and Consultation portal, which would alert them to endangered species habitats. This unnecessarily adds time and expense to a project’s environmental review.

All of this is so onerous that it will cause most clean power projects to be aborted – which is the clear intent.

Lost in this tangle of red tape is the reality that the US desperately needs energy from any source and cannot afford to exclude wind and solar, which now are the cheapest and quickest energy projects to bring online.