Let’s take a look.
Famously, opposition to an offshore wind farm off Cape Cod united the Kennedy and Koch families under a single banner. They’ve successfully stalled the project in litigation for more than a decade, though the Biden administration is trying to push forward with a smaller version of it.
A similar story is playing out in the Hamptons. “We just want a site that is consistent with the least environmental impact and not just a site that maximizes profits for the developer,” Michael McKeon, a communications consultant for the residents who’ve organized in opposition to a different wind farm, told The Guardian.
Environmental groups that were founded on conservation, and often on an explicitly anti-growth politics, routinely find themselves at odds with their local chapters who still hold those views even as the national organizations now obsess over the climate crisis. The Sierra Club published a revealing report on how Vermonters were organizing against renewable power. “In 2012, Vermont had at least a dozen wind projects in development,” it noted. “Today, there are none.” The article had to awkwardly note that the Vermont chapter of the Sierra Club had helped kill several of those projects.
I don’t want to leave the impression that this is all just a bunch of rich boomers trying to protect what they already have. The trade-offs between building renewable energy and conserving existing lands is hard even for young, radical organizations that speak of climate in existential terms. Go to the website of the Sunrise Movement and you’ll see, in huge letters, “WE ARE THE CLIMATE REVOLUTION.” But in Amherst, Mass., the local chapter of the Sunrise Movement backed a moratorium on solar development until the consequences for nearby forests could be more fully studied.
“It’s not just the laws, but the environmental movement right now,” Stokes told me. “It really excelled, especially in the Trump and Bush eras, at blocking things. Think about the big wins in climate lately: blocking the Keystone XL Pipeline. Blocking development of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. It’s often organized around saying no. A lot of people have structured their organizing and tactics and identities around blocking things. That creates conflict when you’re trying to get to yes — to build the future.”