Federal Highway Act and climate change

This summer, many people around the country experienced extreme weather — heat, drought, thunderstorms, and flooding. After undergoing the hottest July on record, there is a sense of urgency about addressing climate change. The good news is we have an abundance of clean energy resources in this country that don’t emit greenhouse gasses, the primary factor that is causing the climate to change.

The problem is that our electrical transmission system is out-of-date and we are unable to move all that clean energy around. We need to upgrade our transmission system.

In the 1950s, our country experienced a similar issue with a different kind of infrastructure problem. The roads and bridges were out-of-date and unable to accommodate all the additional new cars and drivers. 

In 1956, President Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower signed the Federal Highway Act and described the interstate highway system as a vital civil defense measure. Having been a general in WWII, he understood the importance of infrastructure to national security. Today, most Americans see our interstate superhighways for what they are — a quick efficient means of travel. 

Now, we are facing a climate disaster and we need to move clean electricity from where it’s produced to where it’s used quickly and efficiently. This will enable us to transition off fossil fuels and stabilize the climate.

We have to triple our current capacity to transmit clean energy by 2050. This means building and connecting lots of new transmission lines in the next 5-10 years. Right now, it takes an average of 4.5 years to complete environmental impact studies for big energy projects. It takes 10 years to build a new electrical transmission line. 

As Gary Wiens, CEO of Montana Electric Cooperatives’ Association said: 

“Recent modeling by the Electric Power Research Institute concluded that achieving net-zero economy wide emissions by 2050 could require generation capacity to increase by as much as 480 percent compared to what’s in place today.” (Rural Montana, August 2023, page 1.)

Big wind and solar farms tend to be built out in rural areas. We need transmission lines to transport the clean electricity from where it’s produced to where it’s predominantly used in large population centers.

95% of energy projects waiting in line to get built and 84% of the new energy capacity added in the USA in each of the past three years is clean (solar, wind, and battery storage), with the rest being natural gas. Because clean energy is cheap and in high demand, a streamlined permitting process will benefit zero-emissions energy the most.

Citizens’ Climate Lobby, among other clean energy permitting reform advocates, supports policies that improve early community involvement in these projects. 

We need to take drastic action just like Congress and Ike did in 1956 when we jumped from inefficient roads to superhighways. 

Please contact our Members of Congress: Sens ,. Daines and Tester and Reps. Rosendale and Zinke. Ask them to work in a bipartisan manner on an energy infrastructure permitting reform bill so that when we reach 2050, we will have a clean energy “superhighway” to power our country. 

To contact Montana’s Members of Congress, go to https://citizensclimatelobby.org/call-your-representative .

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Mary Mulcaire-Jones

Dr. Sandra Welgreen

Alexandra Amonette

Volunteers with Citizens’ Climate Lobby