Judge William M. Conley watched as the Cardinal-Hickory Creek Transmission Line inched toward the Upper Mississippi River National Wildlife Refuge—a 240,000-acre bird sanctuary through which the fully funded power project lacked the permits to pass. By January 2022, he’d seen enough. It “amounts to little more than an orchestrated trainwreck,” Conley, an Obama-appointed federal judge from the Western District of Wisconsin, wrote in a scathing 23-page opinion that delayed construction. More than two years have passed since Conley blasted the consortium of utilities and government entities behind the massive clean energy project for “playing a shell game,” accused them of behaving “cavalierly,” and derided their legal arguments as “thin porridge indeed.” Since then, the legal battle has continued ricocheting through the courts, shedding light on one of the most intractable debates in the struggle to decarbonize the US economy.