We learned late last month that the trial in the latest phase of the lawsuit over the stalled hydropower corridor will not take place until April – eight months after the Maine Supreme Judicial Court sent it back to a lower court.

The lower court’s decision might take another several months thereafter. In the face of Maine’s growing climate crisis and energy vulnerabilities, this threatens a further unacceptable delay in a sorely needed and time-sensitive project that is due to be operational in August 2024.

In August, the Maine supreme court, having heard all the evidence and arguments, asked itself whether certain sections of last November’s ballot initiative to block the New England Clean Energy Connect transmission corridor violate the Maine Constitution.

Would the ballot initiative violate the state constitution, the court asked, if – before the initiative was enacted – NECEC had carried out substantial construction work on the line in good faith and consistent with the permission granted by the Maine Public Utilities Commission?

The answer was a unanimous yes; If NECEC acted in good faith, the referendum to block the power corridor would violate the Maine Constitution.

It’s now up to the Business and Consumer Court to determine whether the project had in fact been started and continued in good faith. In the meantime, no new construction may take place – and time is on the side of the project’s opponents.

Global warming is the most consequential challenge facing Maine, the nation, and the community of nations today; and the pace of warming – largely manmade and attributable to fossil fuel use – is accelerating rapidly. Life on planet Earth and human civilization as we know it now depend on our ability to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions from our heating, lighting and transportation systems. The 2022 United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report paints a dire picture of planetary warming, with impacts more swift, more widespread and more horrific than previously anticipated.

The NECEC line is designed to bring power from Canada-based Hydro-Quebec, among the largest producers of hydro-generated electricity in North America, to the New England electric grid. For more than 30 years, the New England grid has imported large volumes of this clean energy. Hydro-Quebec today stands ready to increase its exports by up to 1,200 megawatts of energy annually, from existing reservoirs, using the NECEC transmission line. This would benefit Maine and all of New England.

To put it into perspective, 1,200 MW is enough to power 1 million homes and to displace greenhouse-gas emissions equal to removing 700,000 cars from the road annually.

More than half a century has passed since a presidential commission created by President Lyndon B. Johnson warned that fossil fuel emissions might well be warming the Earth’s atmosphere, with uncertain and potentially catastrophic consequences for all.

Since then, observable warnings of impending crisis have become more dramatic and clear. This year’s massive forest fires, brutal heat waves, epic downpours and monstrous hurricanes and tornadoes testify to all we have failed to do in this time. We stand today at the cusp of being too late to avert the changing climate’s worst effects.

Happily, Maine’s executive and legislative branches have of late created sound environmental, conservation, energy and climate policies for our state. In September 2019, Gov. Mills stood before the General Assembly of the United Nations and said Maine would not wait, “… and the course we take will set an example for others to follow.”

Maine’s regulatory agencies have followed all required steps to evaluate NECEC in light of these sound policies.

Opponents’ attempts to halt NECEC stretch back nearly five years, following a playbook developed earlier in New Hampshire. Their initiated referendum question went before Maine voters Nov. 2, 2021. Following a heated campaign, the question passed, and – with almost $450 million of the billion-dollar project spent and approximately 124 miles of the corridor cleared – all work on the project was halted.

The public campaign against NECEC has been financed largely by three national fossil-fuel energy companies interested in preventing NECEC from entering the regional energy market. Not one of the critiques of NECEC used by these fossil fuel companies and their local allies has stood up under rigorous, objective scrutiny.

Multiple state and federal regulatory agencies carefully assessed all the evidence, charges and issues. Here are just a few of these agencies’ findings:

• Maine will receive significant energy, economic and land conservation benefits from NECEC, with no back-filling from fossil fuel sources.

• Canada’s Indigenous peoples will not be displaced or harmed by NECEC.

• The Upper Kennebec Region is not “pristine wilderness”; it has long been a working industrial forest.

• NECEC will not adversely affect the region’s scenic values, wildlife habitat and fisheries.

No disinterested, independent, authoritative party has contradicted these and other truths in the matter.

The strategy of the national oil and gas industry, here as elsewhere, has been to stall clean-energy development, thereby to delay as long as possible the needed shift from fossil fuels to clean renewables, including baseload hydroelectricity. This deliberate and deceitful strategy succeeded in convincing a majority of Mainers who voted on Question 1 (representing just 23 percent of eligible voters) to disregard careful and lawful permitting by Maine’s professional, well-informed and impartial regulators.

In a campaign of disinformation and base appeals to public anger, fear and NIMBYism, fossil fuel interests and their local allies contributed millions of dollars to subvert a transparent and respected regulatory process. In short, Maine’s referendum process was hijacked by fossil fuel competitors whose misleading claims were aimed directly at the duly permitted NECEC.

If this hijacking of the rule of law is allowed to stand, then our entire regulatory regime, respect for finality in executive and judicial decisions and climate and decarbonization policy goals will be greatly damaged, and the opportunity for Maine to lead in the fight against climate change will be dashed.

Imagine, if you will, that lawful regulatory decisions to restrict use of pesticides in Maine had been challenged 50 years ago, then reversed by an initiative campaign funded by the chemical pesticide industry – one in which relatively few Maine people participated. Such weaponization of the ballot initiative process in Maine by greenhouse-gas polluters unhappy with environmental, health and public safety decisions by authorized regulatory bodies is, in a word, intolerable.

To allow this strategy to succeed will not only cancel a project with important and time-sensitive public benefits; it will give serious pause to any entity, public or private, seeking to make significant investments in Maine and the well-regulated development of Maine’s natural resources and infrastructure.

Global warming and rising sea levels put the Earth on a path to catastrophe. In essence, Maine’s courts must now decide: Will Maine in fact wait, succumbing to fossil fuel industry disinformation and pressure tactics? Or will Maine lead, doing its part to help keep Earth habitable for our children and grandchildren?

An environmental legal system put in place largely by Ed Muskie 50 years ago now encourages and rewards defeat-by-delay strategy and tactics that allow corporate malice, in league with environmental purists and local NIMBYists, to make ill-gotten gains at the expense of the greater public good. It is beyond time to stop this destructive playbook.