Here’s how wind-energy projects aren’t built in America. This particular story took place a decade ago but could easily have unfolded last year or last month. In 2013, a Texas-based company put forward a proposal to build two windmill farms in northeastern Alabama. The company said that the farms would generate enough power for more than 24,000 homes, eagerly projecting that it would break ground by the end of 2013. But local opposition swiftly defeated the project. Opponents also won stringent regulations that made future wind farms in the area extremely unlikely.

“I think this is a great example of ordinary people with determination and a certain amount of political cooperation successfully standing up to defend their community,” one critic of the project told a local reporter. “It was literally a David versus Goliath thing,” another said.

Jerusalem Demsas: Tress? Not in my backyard

Americans have generally understood the transition to a clean-energy economy as a technological or an economic problem: Can renewables be reliable? Can they compete with cheap fossil fuels? Recent advances have answered these questions with a resounding yes. But climate change is also a democratic problem: Can our political institutions quickly and equitably facilitate 91,000 miles of transmission lines? The problem is not just that entrenched oil-and-gas interests reject the need to end reliance on fossil fuels; it’s also that the environmental playbook was written to stop rather than create change.

In the typical cultural script, a polluting corporation tries to crush the little guy; a pipeline threatens a defenseless fox; a faceless bureaucrat charts the course of a highway through a thriving neighborhood. Accordingly, American environmentalists have developed tools to help citizens delay or block development. These tools are now being used against clean-energy projects, hampering a green transition. The legal tactics that allow someone to challenge a pipeline can also help them fight a solar farm; the political rhetoric deployed against the siting of toxic-waste dumps can be redeployed against transmission lines. And the whole concept that regular people can and should act as a private attorneys general has, in practice, put the green transition at the mercy of people with access, money, and time, while diluting the influence of those without.

Five landowners filed a lawsuit against the wind developers in Alabama; two of them were well-connected local politicians. They alleged the following concerns: noise from the turning of the windmills; an “overwhelming” negative aesthetic impact; hypothetical harms to tourism, recreation, and home construction (again due to noise); the “flashing of the blades when the sun strikes at a particular angle”; harm to wildlife (unspecified); harm to nearby lakes and ponds; and “significant danger” that could occur from broken blades, lightning strikes, or collapsing towers. In sum, the property owners claimed that the two farms, containing eight wind turbines, would hurt property values as well as destroy “the way of life of the surrounding land owners.”

Another 32 property owners in the adjacent county had already filed a suit opposing the development on similar grounds. But neither lawsuit was ultimately necessary, because the state legislature granted broad authority to the two county governments at issue to oversee future wind permitting. The legislature also created stringent requirements for wind projects that make them legal in name only. So died a project meant to provide millions of dollars of local tax revenue and play a small part in the clean-energy transition.

Jerusalem Demsas: The great defenders of the status quo

This case was not unusual. The UC Santa Barbara professor Leah Stokes recently led a study looking into wind-energy opposition in North America from 2000 to 2016. She estimated that in the U.S., 1