Casey Handmer

It's insane.

The regulatory environment.

Okay.

So in the United States, part of the reason that solar has not been deployed at massive scale yet is that a bunch of laws went into action in the early 1970s that were intended to protect our environment.

And that makes a lot of sense.

And our environment's a great thing.

Well, let's say you've got a bunch of private land out in the middle of nowhere, right?

And you want to build it, solar on it.

You'll probably end up triggering NEPA, right?

At which point you now have to do what is not in the law, but considered necessary under current regulations, which is like your four-year environmental impact review, which generates like so much paper that just the environmental impact of producing the report, because you have to cut down trees to make paper,

is more than the environmental impact of just deploying the solar.

This is bonkers.

It is crazy town.

The thing that drives me particularly crazy in Southern California is that just because solar is kind of new and off-grid solar is very new, unless you're very, very careful, you end up getting regulated as though you're trying to build a chemical plant, even though it's a solar array.

And the impact of solar around desert is arguably positive because it shades the ground and improves soil moisture retention.

Like if you wanted to reverse desertification, you would basically just place all the panels on it and that would pay for the process.

But you end up having to go through more stringent environmental review process than if you just wanted to like grade the whole thing and cover it in concrete or grade it and then park a bunch of like old rusting cars that are dropping oil into the aquifer.

Right.

Which in many cases you don't need a permit for at all.

Right.