Take the New England Clean Energy Connect, a transmission line that came online in January which delivers 1,200 megawatts of Canadian hydropower to New England. It cuts approximately three million metric tons of emissions per year and was originally scheduled to kick on in spring 2023. The Sierra Club and allied environmental groups sued to block it and helped campaign for a Maine ballot referendum to kill it outright, acting in parallel with NextEra and the other natural gas companies who were the primary funders of the opposition campaign. The environmental groups were right that there were potential local tradeoffs, but instead of accepting that every relevant regulatory body had approved the project only after extensive environmental impact reviews, they litigated against it on behalf of an outcome that primarily served fossil fuel interests. The referendum passed but was subsequently ruled unconstitutional. When Massachusetts regulators finally tallied the damage, the delays had added >$500 million to r…