America’s largest renewable energy project is finally operational, and frankly, a mere two decades of environmental reviews is a slap in the face to the agonizingly slow death of the planet.
The SunZia wind farm, a sprawling 3,500-megawatt colossus stretching across the pristine, soon-to-be-uninhabitable deserts of New Mexico and Arizona, has finally been completed. Pattern Energy and its boosters in Washington are taking a victory lap this week, celebrating the fact that the largest renewable energy project in American history is finally sending clean power to the grid. They are calling it a triumph of persistence. I call it an appalling circumvention of the democratic process. It took exactly 20 years to get this project permitted and built, and frankly, I am sickened by the reckless haste.
I remember sitting across from a senior Department of the Interior official at a zero-waste luncheon in Davos back in 2011. Over a plate of sustainably sourced lichen, he confided in me that SunZia was on a "fast track." I nearly choked on my bamboo fork. Fast track? For a project that would disturb the delicate aesthetic of a desert we had already earmarked for catastrophic drought? The capitalist machinery was prioritizing the so-called transition over the sacred duty of endless, paralyzing deliberation.
The tech-bro optimists and green-growth apologists love to complain about the red tape that supposedly strangled SunZia. They whine that developers had to submit to more than a decade of environmental impact statements, endless federal reviews, and countless revisions to the 550-mile transmission line route. What these people fail to understand is that the red tape is the only thing keeping us pure. Every day a wind turbine sits unbuilt is a day we do not have to confront the uncomfortable reality that saving the planet might require industrial construction.
Consider the cultural resource management plans drafted for the transmission corridor. In 2018, developers were forced to painstakingly document and occasionally reroute power lines to avoid clusters of mid-century rusted tin cans left behind by cattle ranchers. The green-energy lobby called this a maddening delay. I call it a triumph of priorities. If we cannot perfectly preserve the garbage of the 1950s, do we really deserve to survive the 2050s?
Then there was the brave stand taken by the Department of Defense. In the mid-2010s, the military objected to the transmission lines, arguing they might interfere with low-altitude flight tests at the White Sands Missile Range. I have spent my entire career opposing the military-industrial complex, but when the generals stepped up to delay a zero-carbon energy project that might mildly inconvenience a stealth bomber, I welcomed them to the resistance. It was a beautiful, intersectional coalition of NIMBYs, defense contractors, and conservationists, all united by the noble goal of absolutely nothing happening.
Our mandate was never to halt the delivery of clean energy, but simply to subject it to enough sequential public comment periods that the concept of an electric grid becomes moot before ground is broken.
Let us also talk about the San Pedro River Valley. For years, local activists valiantly stalled the transmission lines to protect the migratory paths of native birds. Did the birds eventually fly around the towers anyway? Yes. Will those same birds inevitably burst into flames when the global temperature rises another two degrees because we could not decarbonize the grid? Also yes. But that is missing the point. The point of environmentalism isn't to build a functioning zero-carbon economy. The point is to feel a profound, weeping connection to a specific patch of dirt while the rest of the world burns.
And let us not ignore the sheer material violence of the supply chain. Do you know how much diesel it takes to haul a 300-foot fiberglass turbine blade from a port in Texas to a mesa in Lincoln County? I stood on the shoulder of US Route 54 last year and wept as the convoy passed. The sheer emissions required to permanently eliminate coal from the regional electrical grid are simply unjustifiable.
Pattern Energy claims SunZia will power three million Americans. Three million Americans continuing to charge their iPads, run their air conditioners, and watch streaming television, completely insulated from the moral consequences of their carbon footprint. By providing them with abundant clean energy, we are robbing them of the character-building experience of rolling blackouts. We are validating their consumption. True sustainability means returning to the caves, not erecting a 1,000-turbine monument to our own hubris.
I tried to explain this to John Kerry over a lukewarm oat-milk cortado at COP26 in Glasgow. I bravely told a room of exhausted climate scientists that hope is a neoliberal construct, and that generating electricity is just feeding the beast. They looked at me with the blank, uncomprehending stares of people who still believe that mitigating the apocalypse is a worthwhile endeavor.
The Biden administration, of course, championed this project, treating the 20-year timeline as an embarrassing bottleneck rather than a breathtaking display of bureaucratic stamina. As predicted, they missed the forest for the trees, mostly because the forest has been reduced to a smoldering ash heap of stranded assets. They think streamlining the National Environmental Policy Act will save us. They want the next SunZia to take five years instead of twenty.
I am trembling with rage just typing that. If we start building gigawatt-scale wind farms in five years, we might actually mitigate the worst effects of climate change, which would entirely invalidate the apocalyptic manuscript I have been drafting since 1998. Let the turbines spin and let the clean electrons flow across the Southwest. Just know that when the grid is fully decarbonized and the air is finally breathable again, I will be the one standing in the pristine, un-warmed sunshine, filing an injunction against the glare.