 My name is Michael Gerard. I'm a professor at Columbia Law School and director of the Saban Center for Climate Change Law. I'm also co-editor with John Dernbach of the book Legal Pathways to Deep Decarbonization in the United States. We need a massive scale-up of renewable energy, wind and solar, and hydro and geothermal, and the associated transmission and storage on a scale far larger than has ever been built in the United States. We need to be increasing by a factor of 10 in some states, in some years the amount of renewables that we build. Well, at the federal level we have the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, the land acquisition process. We have interconnections with the grid, and in many places we also have state and local approvals that are necessary. Well, under the Federal Power Act the states are responsible for regulating the generation of electricity and its local distribution. They also have the central role with the energy efficiency of buildings, and together with the cities the land use patterns that will fundamentally affect the consumption of energy for transportation purposes. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 provided an interesting model. It was passed at a time when we needed to build a lot of new cell phone towers, but local opposition was resisting that, was stopping it. A comparable kind of situation could be adopted for renewables. We need so many renewables that local opposition is really becoming a major impediment. The FAST Act is a statute that was enacted by Congress in 2016 that, among other things, had a procedure for speeding up federal approvals of infrastructure projects, including renewable energy as well as conventional energy. Very little has been done to actually utilize its provisions, but if fully utilized it could speed up considerably the federal approval process for renewable energy. The federal process, the federal statutory process for siting of electric transmission lines is broken, and Congress needs to fix it by allowing a faster, more effective way of building these new power lines that are necessary to hook up between the utility scale generators and the load, the users of the electricity.