ICYMI: Evergreen Action’s Lena Moffitt and Pete Wyckoff Talk Permitting Bill on Heatmap’s Shift Key Podcast

Contact: Samah Shaiq

Evergreen Action Executive Director Lena Moffitt and Vice President of Policy Pete Wyckoff joined Robinson Meyer on Heatmap’s Shift Key podcast to discuss why Evergreen is supporting the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act (BAAJA) and why passing this legislation is crucial to building out much needed clean energy infrastructure to lower energy costs for American families and tackle the climate crisis. 

Lena Moffitt’s background as a former anti-pipeline campaigner and environmental leader and Pete Wyckoff’s firsthand experience helping write and shape the Inflation Reduction Act — the largest climate investment in American history — contributed to a compelling conversation around why permitting reform is urgently needed and why BAAJA is the way to do it.

Highlights from the episode:

“[Evergreen is] committed to [tackling] climate change and building an inclusive, thriving, clean energy economy at the same time… And to power our economy with clean energy means a couple of things. Building a whole lot of clean energy fast and building a lot of transmission to carry that clean energy from where it’s generated to where people live… But unfortunately, that is not happening in our country right now.”

“And even though this is very much a compromise bill, it has a lot of really hard tradeoffs in it. [But] we believe that this bill would take us one step closer to tackling the climate crisis, and therefore it is worth it because we’re not going to be able to make that transition, simply put, without this transmission. And if we don’t, the climate crisis will just get worse and worse and more people will die. And so we decided to support it mostly because of that.” 

“We can’t afford to wait for five years. We can’t afford to wait for two years… Hopefully, this bill will pass and we will be able to build on it.” – Lena Moffitt, Executive Director

“[In Minnesota I saw] firsthand that limitations on transmission were holding us back on moving to clean [energy].”

“We have a long ways to go and it’s not just about getting clean, it’s about getting affordability and reliability up to snuff. What this bill recognizes is that the really hard thing to do is move energy from market to market, from state to state, across utility lines.”

“This is really about affordability… And as someone who advocates very hard for a transition to clean [energy], particularly clean electricity to power our climate progress in so many sectors, we need to do that transition to clean [energy] in a way that is also maximizing why clean [energy] is affordable.” – Pete Wyckoff, Vice President of Policy

Listen to the full episode here. Read the full transcript here.

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