Under the Microscope

Did you know that there is a small group of scientific researchers that study transmission opposition?  We're like some exotic creature that nobody understands.  They speak in hushed tones, like they're narrating a golf tournament, so as not to disturb the creatures in their native habitat.

*Warning!  Strong Language*

When I run across one of their studies, it's usually interesting reading because a scientist without a political agenda will generally hit upon some truth.  Of course, that truth is usually wrapped up in complicated hypotheses and mind numbing statistics, but little truths often escape.

Like in this study.

One of the little truths I gleaned from this one is that "compensation packages" are most often associated with environmental group involvement in transmission siting and permitting.

Environmentalists are associated with compensation packages; marginalized groups are associated with undergrounding and combined remediation; and environmentalists, the federal government, and the breadth of coalition actors is associated with the combined remediation outcome.

A compensation package means that someone got paid off to accept the impacts of the project.  It is never the affected landowner, who bears the greatest impact.

However, opponents often have differentiated goals, and a just outcome for one member of a coalition may be unjust for another.

Environmentalists use landowners as battering rams, and ultimately sacrificial lambs, to achieve their own goals.  An environmental group opposing a project because of its fuel source will pretend it cares about property rights in order to win the support of landowners, but when push comes to shove, the environmental group will often end its opposition if the project owner agrees to fund environmental goals.  Ditto on the local governments, to a degree.  Local governments usually get involved at the request of their constituents.  But a project developer knows that it may end the government's opposition by offering additional payments for the local government.  Neither situation actually provides compensation to affected landowners, but pays others to toss the landowners under the bus in exchange for their own gain.

The take away:  Don't allow your landowner group to be conscripted to fight the battles of others.  Autonomy always.  Just because a well-funded national environmental organization weighs in on your side doesn't mean they have the same interest as you.  In fact, they may be using you.

Local governments don't usually get involved with the idea of using you for their own gain, but sometimes the payola is just too much for these local officials to resist.  When that happens, they are usually tossed out of office at the next election, but that doesn't stop the impacts from happening.

The second truth is that "public meetings" hosted by transmission developers are nothing more than a staged dog & pony show.  These meetings are not meant as a two-way exchange of ideas.  Don't waste your time trying to convince the transmission developer to change its plans.

Developers often determine the dimensions of the project, such as route options, during the upstream phase of the decision-making process (Cotton and Devine-Wright 2013). Public consultation can occur later, and community meetings can have the goals of limiting engagement to final route selection and of selling the project.

That's right, the decision of what to build where has already been made.  You'd be more productive to look at these meetings as an opportunity to gather information for your battle and to make connections with other disgruntled landowners.  I always look at them as first and foremost recruitment venues, and secondarily as a place to document conflicting and misleading information.

It's all good though because transmission developers, governments, regulators and environmental groups dismiss these studies because they often don't agree with their own misunderstandings about grassroots opposition.  They may think they have us all figured out, but they never even get close.  And that's how we win our battles.