A bright idea

Since Ralph Nader’s 1965 automobile safety study, “Unsafe at Any Speed,” investigative research has fueled multiple efforts to better align public policy with the public interest.

In the 1970s, PIRG carried on this tradition through dozens, if not hundreds, of timely, publicly accessible reports that helped win landmark limits on sprawling development in Oregon, protection for precious places such as Minnesota’s Boundary Waters, bans on toxics in art supplies in California and federally, 100-plus recalls of unsafe toys from store shelves nationwide, and much more. 

In 1996, The Public Interest Network founded Frontier Group, creating a lasting home and dedicated staff for our research mission.

Reason still matters 

Inherent in Frontier Group’s reports, white papers and other projects are the assumptions that, despite our differences, the merits of an argument still matter, reason can still suffice to persuade, and careful thought and a little creativity can produce smart solutions that appeal to a broad, politically diverse audience. 

This approach has shaped, and sometimes changed, the public conversation about a wide swath of issues, including the role of renewable energy in powering our future; the assumptions upon which transportation infrastructure decisions are made; the flimsy rationales behind many highway expansion projects; the state of recycling in America; the impact of industrial-scale agribusiness on the nation’s waterways; and so much more.  

At a time in American politics when everyone has an opinion, but few can agree on the facts, Frontier Group continues to bring a clear-headed, facts-first, solution-oriented approach to debates about our nation’s problems. Here are just three examples.

Why not a million solar roofs?

In the winter of 2000-2001, millions of California homes went dark. Enron and other energy firms exploited the state’s deregulated electricity market to create artificial shortages and jack up prices, resulting in rolling blackouts. The crisis cost the state $40 billion.

It also set the stage for a clean energy revolution.

State leaders proposed increased investment in new natural gas-fired power plants – but CALPIRG and Frontier Group staff had a different vision. Our researchers and policy analysts made the case that within a decade, California could generate large amounts of energy from wind, solar and other clean, renewable sources.

Frontier Group’s 2005 report, “Bringing Solar to Scale,” argued that by investing in rooftop solar energy, California could create the foundation of a self-sustaining solar market.

The Million Solar Roofs Initiative, championed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and supported by Environment California, embraced this idea. The initiative became law in 2006, setting a goal of installing 3 gigawatts (GW) of rooftop solar — enough to power 1 million homes — throughout the state within a decade.

Costs dropped, the market grew, and in 2011, Frontier Group’s Travis Madsen and Environment California Research & Policy Center’s Michelle Kinman and Bernadette Del Chiaro released “Building a Brighter Future,” which noted the state had reached a key milestone: more than 1,000 megawatts of rooftop solar installations. 

The Million Solar Roofs Initiative succeeded: California achieved its 3 GW goal in 2015 and the goal of a million roofs with solar panels in 2019. It also helped lower the cost of solar energy. In Frontier Group’s 2015 report “California’s Solar Success Story,” we described how “by bringing about economies of scale in the solar energy industry, the Million Solar Roofs Initiative helped create a ‘virtuous cycle’ that will spur further innovation and growth in solar energy.”

A revolution in the making

In 2006, Frontier Group’s Madsen co-authored “Making Sense of the Coal Rush,” a report documenting the 150 new coal-fired power plants that had been proposed around the United States — plants that, if built, would have wrecked America’s chances of effective climate action. 

Yet, if you squinted just a bit, even back then you could see the outlines of a clean energy revolution in the making.

In the years following the Million Solar Roofs Initiative, states across the country set increasingly ambitious renewable electricity standards — requiring utilities to obtain a rising share of the power they supply from clean sources. 

In 2008, Frontier Group’s blueprint, “Renewing America,” published with Environment America Research & Policy Center, reviewed the nation’s renewable energy potential and its nascent progress and challenged the country to embrace a new level of clean energy ambition.

Then, our 2016 report, “We Have the Power,” (since updated) summarized the increasingly robust literature showing that a grid powered largely or entirely by renewable sources was feasible with currently existing technology — and at a cost that was within the realm of what society could afford. 

Explore an interactive timeline of our research milestones.

Soon, advocates and policymakers across the country began to envision a future energy system without fossil fuels — and started working to make it a reality. By 2022, nine states had committed to getting 100% of their electricity from renewable sources by 2040.

Repowering our economy with renewable energy — and doing so in time to prevent the worst impacts of global warming — will still require hard work and raise its share of challenges. But the biggest debates today are not over whether it is theoretically possible to power the nation with clean energy, but rather how best that goal might be achieved. That, in and of itself, is progress.

The text in this chapter was adapted from blogs written by Frontier Group’s Elizabeth Ridlington and Tony Dutzik. Photo: Roschetzky Photography via Shutterstock.

What if the world changed and nobody noticed?

For generations, traffic engineers, policymakers, the media and the public assumed that the number of miles Americans drive in their cars could only go in one direction: up. 

This assumption drove the nation’s conversation around transportation policy. After all, if every passing year brought more cars to the roads, then maybe we had better add more highway capacity to match.

In the mid-2000s, something unexpected happened. The rate of growth in vehicle travel hit a speed bump. 

Frontier Group’s Elizabeth Ridlington was one of the first to pick up on it. Elizabeth had spent years putting together state-level climate policy blueprints that depended on projections of future vehicle travel. In the late 2000s she noticed the forecasts made by state Departments of Transportation (DOTs) were increasingly diverging from what was actually happening on the roads. State DOTs kept forecasting big increases in vehicle-miles traveled (VMT) that never seemed to materialize. 

Transportation for a new generation

One reason, it turned out, was that young people were driving less. In 2011, Frontier Group found that vehicle travel had fallen sharply among young people — a 23% per-capita decline between 2001 and 2009.  

That seemed like a big deal. And yet virtually no one was talking about it. 

In fact, from the U.S. Department of Transportation on down, the professionals whose job it was to anticipate future demand for transportation continued to tell the public and decision-makers that America would be getting back on the path to rapid growth in VMT any minute now.

The data also showed that our car-centric transportation system was making a major contribution to global warming. If driving was down, did we really want it to go back up? 

Frontier Group started to factor changing trends in travel into our own analysis and writing as early as 2009. By 2012, Frontier Group researchers were ready to make the case – through a report entitled “Transportation and the New Generation” – that the decline in driving among young Americans had meaningful implications for the nation’s transportation future. 

The report received media attention in The Washington Post, the Financial Times, The Economist and Car & Driver, on National Public Radio, and in media outlets across the country. It sparked earnest conversations among local and state policymakers around the country about whether and how transportation policy could better serve the emerging needs of young people.

Meanwhile, with partners including the State Smart Transportation Initiative, Frontier Group called attention to the wildly out-of-step VMT forecasts made by state and federal DOTs. A new generation of Americans might prefer less car-dominated lives — requiring policymakers and the public to have a different kind of conversation about our transportation future. 

The conversation has changed

This conversation, finally, has started to change. The U.S. DOT has altered its methodology for making national VMT projections — and unsurprisingly, the new method forecasts more modest growth in VMT (an average of 1.2% annually over 20 years in projections made before COVID-19).

The idea that transit, bike lanes and improved pedestrian infrastructure are desirable options — for millennials and members of every generation — has taken firm root. And slowing the growth of vehicle travel has finally come to be seen as an essential strategy to address climate change.

The call for cleaner, more efficient, more sustainable transportation is being echoed more clearly and more strongly than at any time in recent history. And it’s not out of the realm of possibility to imagine that this time — maybe this time — leaders in Washington, D.C., and the states will recognize the changes taking place. And listen.

The text in this chapter was adapted from a blog written by Frontier Group’s Tony Dutzik. Photo : Regional Transit System (RTS) for the City of Gainesville, Florida

The Consumer Bureau database

The economic collapse of 2008 was precipitated by alarming trends in the financial marketplace that, for the most part, people didn’t see until it was too late.

As America picked up the pieces, the newly-created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) created a unique opportunity for researchers at Frontier Group to better understand the scope, severity and patterns of threats that consumers face in the financial marketplace — and to use that information to educate consumers and policymakers.

Originally dreamed up by then-professor Elizabeth Warren, and made real with the help of PIRG’s advocacy and organizing, the CFPB represented a revolutionary step forward for consumers. For the first time, the public could rely on a federal agency with the sole mission of protecting them in the financial marketplace — not just from predatory mortgage companies, but also from unscrupulous or careless banks, debt collectors, credit agencies and more.

The key to unlocking the CFPB’s full potential? The agency’s consumer complaint database — a massive record of any problems consumers might be having, and therefore a way to better educate consumers and policymakers on how to mitigate threats in the marketplace.

As we described it, the bureau’s complaint database created a two-way flow of information that was a model of “effectiveness and responsiveness”: Consumers could register complaints with the federal government, which would then forward those complaints to the responsible company, keep track of the company’s response, and take appropriate action if that response was inadequate.

Combing through data, finding patterns, getting results

In September 2013, Frontier Group published “Big Banks, Big Complaints,” written by Tony Dutzik and Spencer Alt of Frontier Group, and Ed Mierzwinski, Laura Murray and Ashleigh Giliberto of PIRG. For the report, we sliced and diced nearly 19,000 complaints about banks.

The team described how “banks have often taken advantage of consumers through excessive fees, hidden charges, and other abusive practices.” Researchers found that Wells Fargo was the most complained-about bank — and not long thereafter, the CFPB caught Wells Fargo scamming its customers with expensive fake accounts, ultimately leading to a $3 billion fine.

This report and those that soon followed — analyses of complaints about credit bureaus, debt collectors, student loans and more — were covered in The New York Times and The Washington Post. Each report and new story not only helped consumers protect themselves, but also gave them a better understanding of the resources available to them through the CFPB.

Defending the bureau’s mission

From the moment of its creation, the CFPB routinely came under attack from financial companies that preferred a return to the Wild West days of pre-2008. 

So one function of Frontier Group’s consumer reports was to demonstrate how necessary and useful this agency actually was. The arrival of the Trump administration in 2016 made that function critical. To defend the agency against an administration hostile to its mission, we published a steady stream of new reports highlighting the CFPB’s role in protecting consumers, with the dual aim of uncovering consumer problems and educating the public that their new cop on the beat was at risk of being dismantled.

Under the Trump administration, the CFPB dramatically scaled back its consumer protection efforts. But our work was part of a broader campaign to protect some of the bureau’s key functions, including its continued operation of a public complaint database. The public supported the effort; in 2017, the New York Times wrote that the CFPB “may be too popular” for its opponents to sideline.

The text in this chapter was adapted from a blog written by former Frontier Group Policy Analyst Gideon Weissman. Photo credit: Kris Connor