A Pop Star’s Wonky Climate Campaign

A Pop Star’s Wonky Climate Campaign - The New York Times

Climate Forward

Adam Met wants to make it easier to build wind and solar projects.

There’s a major bottleneck impeding the development of new wind and solar projects in the United States: permits. File them under “seemingly boring but supremely important.”

It can take years for proposed renewable energy developments to win the necessary approvals from the environmental and zoning authorities. The red tape is causing a devastating slowdown in the country’s transition to a cleaner energy system.

But what if there was a way to fast-track wind and solar developments with a hack: place the projects on state and federal lands that have already been approved for oil and gas production.

That is the unusual plan being promoted by a somewhat unlikely policy buff, a pop star named Adam Met.

Met is one of the three brothers that make up AJR, the multiplatinum New York indie pop trio behind upbeat anthems like “Bang!” and “Way Less Sad.” AJR (as in Adam, Jack and Ryan) just released its fifth studio album and is gearing up for a big tour.

Met also is a climate wonk who has spent the past few years developing a plan to help expedite the energy transition.

At first blush, the plan is as idealistic as AJR’s bouncy arena pop. Wouldn’t it be easy, Met reckoned, if you could simply sidestep years of onerous permitting work by piggybacking on existing energy permits?

That simple premise is showing early signs of traction. Last year, Met found a bipartisan pair of allies on Capitol Hill: John Curtis, a Republican congressman from Utah, and Mike Levin, a Democratic congressman from California.

In November, the lawmakers sent a letter to Deb Haaland, the Interior secretary, asking if Met’s idea might be feasible. Curtis, Levin and Met followed up with a video promoting the plan.

Permits for wind and solar projects are separate from oil and gas permits, so each potential development would still need to go through some reviews. Still, Met believes his plan would streamline the process. And last week, the Bureau of Land Management issued an encouraging response, suggesting the whole thing might just work.

“Once the BLM has authorized a certain use of the public lands — such as by issuing a lease for oil, gas, or geothermal development — the agency may authorize additional uses of that land if it determines that those additional uses are compatible with the existing authorized use,” Tracy Stone-Manning, director of the Bureau of Land Management, wrote to Curtis and Levin. “The B.L.M. recognizes the potential value of co-locating renewable energy projects with existing fossil fuel resource development.”

A winding path to climate activism

When Met was in high school in New York City, he went to a talk by Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland, and came away inspired to work on human rights issues. “That was the moment where I was, like, this is what I want to do,” Met said.

As an undergrad at Columbia University, he studied with the economist Jeffrey Sachs, who was working on the Millennium Development Goals, and became more interested in climate issues. He then got a Master’s degree at New York University in constitutional religious law. “I really liked being in school,” he said.

All the while, AJR was taking off. The brothers began by busking in New York City, moved on to playing parties at Columbia, cracked the club scene, and released their first major-label album in 2015. Soon, they were touring the world, where Met began to witness the effects of climate change in Europe, Asia and beyond.

“It was really hearing people’s stories and seeing the world that really got me energized around climate,” he said. “Seeing the extreme heat, the floods, the storms and how it was affecting people on the ground, that gave me a whole different perspective.”

Several years ago, he decided to get another degree, this time a Ph.D in international human rights law from the University of Birmingham in England.

While doing that, he founded a nonprofit organization, Planet Reimagined, which aimed to put obscure environmental policy proposals into action. Through this work, and his efforts promoting the Inflation Reduction Act, Met came up with his own idea about co-locating renewable energy with fossil fuel production, figuring it would appeal to both Republicans and Democrats.

“There’s an energy security argument which works really well with the right, and an expansion of renewables, which works really well on the left,” Met said.

Next steps

Met said his team had identified some 23 million acres of land that is already producing oil and gas that might also be suitable for wind and solar development. But there is still a long road to travel.

Manish Bapna, the chief executive of the Natural Resources Defense Council, said that he broadly supported creative ideas around permitting, but questioned whether they might allow fossil fuel interests to stall the development of renewables. He noted that environmental reviews for renewable and fossil fuel projects were very different, and questioned whether the government had the resources to effectively oversee such projects.

With the encouraging response from the Interior Department in hand, Met’s team is moving forward with a plan to help facilitate pilot projects in seven states. After that, the goal is to create a tool kit that will help match oil and gas developers with renewable energy companies. If all goes well, the first pilot projects will break ground late next year.

“If there’s oil and gas currently on the land, that means we can speed up the process,” he said. “You don’t need to build new roads. You don’t need to build a lot of new infrastructure, and there’s less environmental review. There’s so much potential here.”

The ZIP codes leading the electric vehicle charge

California has been leading the national shift toward electric vehicles. And the Bay Area has led California, with San Jose and San Francisco boasting the highest E.V. adoption rate among major U.S. metropolitan areas last year.

Electric cars, pickup trucks and S.U.V.s accounted for nearly 40 percent of new auto registrations in the San Jose area in 2023 and about 34 percent in San Francisco, according to data from S&P Global Mobility, an automotive market research firm, that we published last week. For comparison, E.V.s made up less than 10 percent of registrations in the New York City area, and 3 percent in Detroit, America’s automotive capital.

Today I’m sharing new data, shown on the map above, that offers an even more detailed view of E.V.s in the Bay Area.

Some of the areas with the highest share of electric vehicles are associated with the E.V. industry (see: Fremont, where Tesla has a factory). But more often, high electric vehicle penetration correlated with higher incomes and with a higher ratio of single-family homes to apartments.

In wealthy suburbs like Los Altos and Saratoga, more than half of the new autos registered last year were electric. In lower-income areas like North Richmond and East Oakland, the share was closer to 15 percent. The lowest rates of all tended to be in more rural ZIP codes north of the Bay Area, like those near Ukiah.

That pattern echoes a nationwide trend. Americans who have made the shift to electric vehicles so far tend to be richer and younger than average and more likely to live in urban or suburban areas, research shows. Many buyers say they are motivated by environmental concerns, and some by interest in the latest cutting-edge technology.

Many consumers, though, still have reservations about going electric.

The lack of widespread and reliable public charging stations is one of the biggest roadblocks, experts said. That partly explains why small towns and rural areas with few charging stations have some of the lowest rates of E.V. use in the country. But even people in urban areas can have trouble plugging in if they live in an apartment building rather than a single-family home with a garage.

“Being able to charge at home is the thing that very much still divides the E.V. experience from pretty easy and kind of hard,” Ken Kurani, a researcher focused on electric vehicles at U.C. Davis, told me.

The Bay Area, which leads the nation in electric vehicle registrations, also leads in public charging infrastructure. But a study that looked at access to public charging stations in California found “stark disparities” by income and race: Lower-income and Black- and Hispanic-majority neighborhoods tended to have less access to public chargers than whiter, wealthier neighborhoods did. That trend was more pronounced in areas with higher proportions of multiunit housing.

The high price tag on many electric vehicles is another big concern for many consumers. Federal tax credits are available for used electric vehicles and for a limited list of new vehicles. Last year, California shifted its own popular E.V. rebate program to focus more specifically on lower-income car buyers. And the state and many local governments are pushing to close the charging gap.

With all of those factors in mind, the Bay Area has an opportunity to set out a road map for the rest of the country, said Ted Lamm, who leads the E.V. Equity Initiative at the U.C. Berkeley School of Law.

“The challenges that are faced here are the things that will play out years down the road elsewhere, just ideally with less friction,” he told me. “We often figure out the kinks, so others can do it more straightforward.” — Nadja Popovich

This item was adapted from our sister newsletter California Today.

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David Gelles reports on climate change and leads The Times’s Climate Forward newsletter and events series. More about David Gelles

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