Hard Questions About the Permitting Bill

 The permitting bill that’s dominating debate in Washington, D.C., has become a political Rorschach test: Interest groups tend to view it through the lens of their own good intentions and priorities.  

Many climate and clean energy advocates see the bill as a major opportunity. They point to its strong transmission provisions, which could unlock significant clean energy development, reduce carbon pollution, and accelerate the renewable energy deployment needed to slow climate change. There is no doubt that these provisions are good for clean energy—really good.  

Yet enthusiasm for those provisions can create blind spots. While the transmission provisions in the bill will support more renewable energy connecting to the grid, that’s only one side of the climate equation. We also need to understand how much additional fossil fuel development the bill could enable—and at what cost.  

That dynamic is the source of my greatest concern. We have repeatedly accepted modeling and analysis in the past that showed clean energy would prevail, which is why we accepted compromises that gave the fossil fuel industry another leg up in the system that is already rigged in its favor. Past experience shows us that there is a lot of uncertainty in the world that even the smartest modeling and forecasting cannot capture.  

For example, in 2015, Congress made a deal to lift the 40-year-old oil export ban in exchange for extending the investment and production tax credits. At the time, the assumption was that lifting the export ban would not have a material impact on domestic production. Since then, U.S. crude oil production is up 45.7 percent, rising from 9.4 million barrels a day in 2015 to 13.7 million barrels per day in the first eight months of this year. Exports of crude oil and refined petroleum products have risen 157 percent, from 4.7 million barrels per day in 2015 to 12.1 million barrels per day of crude oil and refined products.  

The Inflation Reduction Act is another example of unfulfilled promises. It paired mandatory fossil leasing provisions with transformative tax incentives for clean energy development. I was among those who urged acceptance of that compromise, and I still think it was right to take the win when we could get it. Today, however, the leasing requirements remain—and have been significantly expanded—while the clean energy tax incentives were cut off. This is in direct contrast to the assumptions at the time, which were that no administration would choose to stop projects and pull steel out of the ground. We were wrong on both accounts.  

It is also difficult to believe that an administration using taxpayer funds to halt wind projects while subsidizing coal-fired power plants (which market forces would otherwise have retired) will allow a genuine surge in renewable energy development. Accepting that outcome would require me to disregard what is happening in plain sight and once again trust that market forces alone will enable clean energy to prevail.  

We are also being asked to ignore that the oil and gas industry has currently and entirely rigged the system in its favor. The bill weakens some of the strongest tools available to stop harmful projects. Energy demand is rising rapidly across the country, driven in part by data centers, and some projections indicate that U.S. power sector emissions could increase by more than 20 percent in the coming years as natural gas generation expands. Clean resources should meet as much of that new demand as possible. But if we make fossil fuel projects even easier to build, what reason is there to assume that clean energy will be able to compete?  

Finally, I am an environmentalist who sees climate change and the biodiversity crisis as the great challenges facing humanity. I support the clean energy build-out that we need to meet our climate goals, and at NRDC, we are hard at work pushing for greater, faster deployment of clean energy. We can and should do that, but it is no less critical that we revive and protect resilient ecosystems, thriving species, and healthy communities. We can do both.  

In the context of the permitting bill, it is important to note that advocates spent more than 17 years fighting to protect Bristol Bay, Alaska, home to the world’s largest salmon run, from the Pebble Mine, which would have been one of the world’s largest copper mines. The Clean Water Act authorizes the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to protect especially sensitive places that are unsuitable for development.   

The EPA is judicious in how it uses the authority, which is why it has only been used 14 times in the law’s 50-plus history. I was deeply saddened to see that the permitting bill proposes curtailing the authority that allowed Bristol Bay to be protected. This is one of many rollbacks that the bill outlines for the Clean Water Act. For example, it would also hamstring states and Tribes from using another Clean Water Act authority to protect their waters from spills and contaminated runoff from oil and gas pipelines. Why limit these safeguards just as the country faces another major wave of industrialization? And why make it even harder to protect endangered species at a time when their peril was never clearer? Especially when the Clean Water Act and Endangered Species Act are not what is slowing down transmission and clean energy deployment. 

Taken together, these concerns call for a clear-eyed assessment of the bill’s costs and benefits. Like any major legislation, it reflects compromise. Our responsibility is to understand the consequences of that compromise and weigh them against the world as it is—not the world we wish it to be.  

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