The Tennessee Valley Authority couldn't be done today. When it was done, it transformed an area mired in poverty. With affordable electricity, they had water. With water, they could farm. With farming, food became affordable.
In a generation, the area was transformed and soon had libraries, schools, and much better quality of life.
Environmentalists need to be needed, it is how they feed their $3 billion-per-year appetite, and so TVA could never happen today. Environmental lawyers are so obstructionist and culturally corrosive, TVA can't even replace a coal plant without a lawsuit.
A coal plant. When activists claim they care about climate change.
Wheeler Dam under construction in 1933. For no science reason, environmentalists now think dams are bad, and in 1933 the fortunate few agreed. Those who controlled the river didn't want TVA at all, it was worse for them. Newspapers covered their plight, just as they did for the fortunate few Baathists in Iraq when Saddam Hussein was deposed. As we see with coastal elites, progressivism is for others, if it impacts them, it is going in someone else's back yard. Credit and link: TVA
The reason environmentalists object is because TVA wants to replace coal with natural gas. Environmentalists used to love natural gas but, like ethanol and hydroelectric, it was a money grift. They get paid to oppose things and to look like they are part of the solution they also lobby for something to be mandated and subsidized by government. Then they can turn on it and sue over it. They cheered when Clinton Vice-President Al Gore forced EPA to endorse ethanol and 15 years later were suing over it. They demanded natural gas until it actually became affordable, then they wanted it gone and claimed "fracking" was causing earth to deflate and sued. They endorsed dams but once 60 percent of vegetables were grown using water from government dams and canals, they wanted those torn down. And states like California, swimming in debt, brownouts, and the nation's highest energy costs, are doing it.(1)
Environmentalists want to block the new cleaner power plant using regulations and blockades they wrote, and have the kookiest unscientific EPA in my lifetime helping them. The Biden administration is helping environmentalists sue...the Biden administration.
Our tax dollars at work.
The EPA claims the new plant's environmental impact analysis won't meet the standards of what the Biden administration's epidemiologists claim must be met under the revised the National Environmental Policy Act. Yes, environmentalists want all energy plans to stop unless the government somehow knows to draft up plans for future regulations that may never exist.
No science involved, just epidemiologists using correlation. And EPA head Michael Regan, who has done more to erode public confidence in the scientific acumen of EPA than anyone since the Carter years, is doing what he was already doing when I fact-checked his bizarre testimony to Congress, who wanted to know why he used armed federal agents to knock on the doors of farmers using a never-enacted rule that was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court - twice - and asking TVA not to replace the coal plant unless it is with solar.
TVA doesn't want to look like failures when they are one of few government organizations that look like they understand the assignment so they declined to take orders from EPA and install something that isn't going to help, will take too long, and they can't afford.
The only legitimate argument EPA had was that the Biden administration would give them subsidies to install solar. Yet TVA, nearly 70 percent of them Biden appointees, said no, for the best reason, one that Regan does not understand; it is not about doing progressive good works, it is about affordable energy.
Solar and wind would be more expensive and less reliable for consumers. Government giving a rebate to government won't change the laws of physics.
Imagine that. A public energy agency that cares about the public. It is a surprise that Regan and other EPA bureaucrats didn't burst into flames even reading such a scientifically acute response.
So with TVA ignoring the EPA using language they got from environmental groups, environmental groups are going to have to do it themselves. They won't be able to stop it in Appeals Court, those use science, but they really don't want to stop it. They want to force government to do another environmental review - and pay the environmental groups behind the lawsuit to conduct it.
NOTES:
(1) Politicians can't seriously be stupid enough to believe solar and wind are viable, when everyone can see that the world spent $4 trillion subsidizing those and changed existing energy needs by 0.1%. Except in California, where this summer they will again ask EPA to waive emissions standards so they can burn enough fuel to keep brownouts from happening during hot days.
