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Or maybe you want to go electric? Because yes, they are different.
Have you given much thought to the inner workings of your stove? Me neither. Your home probably came with one already installed, and so long as you can turn it on, boil some water and simmer up a sauce, perhaps that’s reason enough not to second guess it.
But if you’re cooking with gas, we’re here to let you know that, culinary connoisseur or not, there are undeniable benefits to switching to either electric or induction cooking. First and foremost, neither relies directly on fossil fuels or emits harmful pollutants such as nitrogen dioxide into your home, making the switch integral to any effort to decarbonize your life — not to mention establish a comfortable living environment. Second, both electric and induction are far more energy efficient than gas.
“So on a gas range, about 70% of the heat that is generated from the gas goes into your kitchen,” DR Richardson, co-founder of the home electrification platform Elephant Energy, told me. “So it's very inefficient. You get hot. The handle gets hot. The kitchen gets hot. Everything gets hot, except your food. And it takes a really long time.” With an electric or induction stove, you can boil water faster and heat your food up quicker, all while reducing your home’s carbon footprint.
Convinced yet? If you’re reading this guide, we sure hope you’re at least intrigued! But even after you’ve decided to make the switch, confusion and analysis paralysis can still loom. Are your needs better suited to electric or induction? Will expensive electrical upgrades be required? How will this impact your cooking? And where are all the stove stores, anyway? So before you start browsing the aisles and showrooms, let’s get up to speed on all things stoves… or is it ranges? You’ll see.
Friday Apaliski is the director of communications at the Building Decarbonization Coalition, a nonprofit composed of members across various sectors including environmental justice groups, energy providers, and equipment manufacturers, seeking alignment on a path towards the elimination of fossil fuels in buildings.
DR Richardson is a co-founder of Elephant Energy, a platform that aims to simplify residential electrification for both homeowners and contractors. The company provides personalized electrification roadmaps and handles the entire installation process, including helping homeowners take advantage of all the available local, state, and federal incentives.
It depends on the cookware you currently own, but you will almost certainly need to replace some items. Induction stoves work with pots and pans that are made of magnetic materials like cast iron and stainless steel, but not those made of glass, aluminum, or copper. You can check to see if your cookware is induction compatible by seeing if a magnet will stick to the bottom, or if the induction logo is present on the bottom.
Everyone has their own affinities, but what we can tell you is that both traditional electric stoves and newer induction stoves are more energy efficient than gas stoves, and when it comes to temperature control, induction stoves are the clear winner. They allow you to make near instantaneous heat adjustments with great precision, while gas stoves take longer to adjust and are less exact to begin with.
Cooking on a new stove will undoubtedly come with a learning curve, what with all the new knobs and buttons and little sounds to get used to. Many cooks are used to relying on the visual cue of the flame to let them know how hot the stove is, but now you’ll be relying on a number on the screen, instead. Especially if you go with induction stove, be assured that you’ll be in good company among some top chefs.
This is indeed a key question — more on this one below.
If you don’t know already, it’s not too hard to find out. When you turn on the stovetop, is there fire? That, folks, is a gas stovetop. It will have a gas supply line that looks like a threaded pipe that connects to the back of the appliance. Gas stovetops are tricky to clean, not particularly sleek, and most prevalent in California, New Jersey, Illinois, Washington DC, New York, and Nevada.
If you have an electric range, the stovetop will be flat with metal coils either exposed or concealed beneath a ceramic glass surface. The coils will glow bright when they’re on. Electric ranges plug directly into 240-volt outlets (newer versions have four prongs, older ones have three), with a cord that looks like a heavy vacuum plug or a small hose. Electric stovetops are always paired with electric ovens — this is the setup that the majority of Americans already have according to the Energy Information Administration.
“So if you have an electric range and you like it, that's wonderful. You should keep it. But generally, when we're talking about transitioning from a gas experience to something else, induction is a much more analogous cooking experience,” Apaliski said.
If you have an induction range, it was probably a very intentional choice! According to a 2022 Consumer Reports survey, only about 3% of Americans have an induction range or cooktop, so big ups if you’re a part of that energy efficient minority. But if you just wandered into a new home and are wondering if it’s got the goods, you might have to turn on the stove to tell. Unlike an electric stovetop, you won’t see the cooking area glow because the surface isn’t actually getting hot, only the cookware is. Induction stoves also plug directly into 240-volt outlets.
But wait! There’s a chance you’re cooking with both gas and electric on a dual-fuel range. The telltale sign will be if your range connects to both a gas supply line as well as a 240-volt outlet (remember that plug?). But if it’s difficult to determine what’s going on back there, here’s what else to look out for: A metal device at the bottom and/or top of the oven’s interior that glows bright when the oven is on indicates that it’s electric! Sometimes these heating elements will be concealed, though. In that case, look for telltale signs of gas: An open flame when the oven is on or a visible pilot light when off. Newer gas stoves might not have either, but rather use an electronic ignition system that you can hear fire up about 30-45 seconds after turning on the oven. If you’re still confused, there’s always your user manual! (You kept that, right?)
If you’re going from an all-gas range to electric or induction and your stove is located on a kitchen island, for example, this could make installing the necessary electrical wiring more complex. It’s something to ask potential contractors about when you get to that stage.
Whenever you add a new electric appliance to your home, there’s the possibility that you’ll need to upgrade your electric panel to accommodate the new load. A new panel can cost thousands of dollars, though, so you’ll want to know ahead of time if this might be necessary. First, check the size of your current electric panel. You can find this information on your main breaker or fuse, a label on the panel itself, or your electric meter.
According to Rewiring America, if your panel is less than 100 amps, an upgrade could be necessary. If it’s anywhere from 100 to 150 amps, you can likely electrify everything in your home — including your range — without a panel upgrade, although some creative planning might be needed (more on that here and below, in the section on finding contractors and installers). If your panel is greater than 150 amps, it’s very likely that you can get an electric range (as well as a bevy of other electrical appliances) without upgrading.
As of now, federal incentives for electric and induction ranges, cooktops, and ovens are not yet available. But Home Electrification and Appliance Rebates programs, established via the Inflation Reduction Act, will roll out on a state-by-state basis over the course of this year and next, with most programs expected to come online in 2025. These rebates could give low- and moderate-income houses up to $840 back on the cost of switching from gas to electric or induction cooking.
While many details have yet to be released, it’s important to note that qualifying customers won’t be required to pay the full price and then apply for reimbursement — rather, the discount will be applied upfront. Once the program becomes available, your state will have a website with more information on how to apply. If you’re cash-strapped today, it could be worth waiting until the federal incentives roll out, as rebates will not be retroactively available.
Many states and municipalities already have their own incentives for electric appliance upgrades though. Unfortunately, there’s currently no centralized database to look these up, so that means doing a little homework. Check with your local utility, as well as your local and state government websites and energy offices for home electrification incentives. If you happen to live in California or Washington state, you can search for local incentives here, via this initiative from the Building Decarbonization Coalition. The NODE Collective is also working to compile data on all residential incentive programs, so keep checking in, more information is coming soon!
Assuming you currently have a gas stove or a dual fuel range, this is the first big choice you’ll have to make. For customers interested in upgrading from electric to induction, let this also be your guide, as an induction stove is indeed the higher-end choice. Here are the main differences between the two:
Electric
Induction
*According to Rewiring America
** According to this paper
Heatmap Recommends: Spring for the induction stove if you can. Not only will it provide a superior cooking experience, but it’s safer too. Induction stoves only heat up magnetic pots and pans, so if you touch the stove’s surface, you won’t get burned. Most will also turn off automatically if there’s no cookware detected.
“Induction is definitely the upgrade in basically every sense, if you can afford it. Induction is a way better cooking experience. It's got way more fun heating and cooking control. It's much more energy efficient. It's much faster,” said Richardson.
If you’re curious about what it’s like to cook with an electric or induction stove, you can buy a standalone single-pot cooktop for well under $100; it will plug straight into a standard outlet. Additionally, Apalinksi says that many libraries (yes, libraries!) and utilities allow residents to borrow an induction cooktop and try it out for a few weeks, completely free of charge.
New electric and induction ranges and cooktops will only be eligible for forthcoming federal incentives if they’re certified by Energy Star, a joint program run by the Environmental Protection Agency and the DOE that provides consumer information on energy efficient products, practices, and standards. You can check out what models of ranges and cooktops qualify here. But to get a handle on the actual look and feel of various options, you should try and find a showroom or head to a large retail store.
“Go to your local big box retailer, whether it's a Home Depot or Best Buy or Lowe's, they tend to have a bunch of models on the floor. Their representatives can talk to you about all the different options out there. But you have to research a little bit ahead of time, otherwise they're going to point you to the latest gas appliance,” said Richardson.
If you learn that making the switch is going to entail particularly cumbersome electrical upgrades, Apaliski said there are some innovative companies such as Channing Street Copper andImpulse Labs that make induction ranges and cooktops that plug into standard outlets. They’re much pricier than your standard range, but if you can afford it, one could be right if you’re looking for plug-and-play simplicity and sleek design.
“So this is great, for example, if you are a renter, or if you are someone who has limited capacity on your electrical panel, or if you are someone who has one of these kitchen islands that is just impossible to get a new electric cord to,” Apaliski said.
If you buy your new range or cooktop from a big box retailer, they’ll typically haul away your old appliance and deliver and install the new one for you at either low or no cost. Don’t assume this is a part of the package, though, and be sure to ask what is and isn’t included before you make your purchase.
But if you’re moving from an all gas range or cooktop to an electric or induction range or cooktop, the complicated part isn’t the installation process, it’s everything that must come before. That includes capping and sealing the gas line for your old stove (this is a job for a plumber) and installing the requisite electric wiring to power your new stove (this is a job for an electrician).
As noted, making the switch could also mean a costly electric panel upgrade. You should ask potential electricians about this right away, as well as about creative solutions that would let you work with your existing panel. If you’re running out of space, you could buy a circuit sharing device like a smart splitter or a circuit pauser, which would allow multiple loads, such as an EV charger and your stove, to share a circuit, or ensure that specific appliances are shut off when you’re approaching your panel’s limit. Richardson recommends getting opinions from a couple different electricians, seconding the idea that if your panel is 100 amps or more, an upgrade is likely not necessary.
Above all, you should make sure that the gas line and electric work is taken care of before the stove installer comes to your home. Richardson said that occasionally, retailers will provide plumbing and electrical services as an add-on option, so it never hurts to ask. But most likely you’ll be sourcing contractors and compiling quotes on your own. If you don’t already have a go to person for the job, ask friends, family, and neighbors for references. Google and Yelp reviews are always there too.
New electric ranges do not usually come with a power cord. You must purchase your own power cord prior to installation.
Once you get time on the calendar with a trustworthy, knowledgeable and fair-priced plumber and electrician, it’s time to schedule the installation of your new range or cooktop. And after that it’s time to metaphorically fire up those resistive coils or electromagnetic fields and make yourself an electrified meal for the ages.
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In defense of “everything bagel” policymaking.
Writers have likely spilled more ink on the word “abundance” in the past couple months than at any other point in the word’s history.
Beneath the hubbub, fed by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s bestselling new book, lies a pressing question: What would it take to build things faster? Few climate advocates would deny the salience of the question, given the incontrovertible need to fix the sluggish pace of many clean energy projects.
A critical question demands an actionable answer. To date, many takes on various sides of the debate have focused more on high-level narrative than precise policy prescriptions. If we zoom in to look at the actual sources of delay in clean energy projects, what sorts of solutions would we come up with? What would a data-backed agenda for clean energy abundance look like?
The most glaring threat to clean energy deployment is, of course, the Republican Party’s plan to gut the Inflation Reduction Act. But “abundance” proponents posit that Democrats have imposed their own hurdles, in the form of well-intentioned policies that get in the way of government-backed building projects. According to some broad-brush recommendations, Democrats should adopt an abundance agenda focused on rolling back such policies.
But the reality for clean energy is more nuanced. At least as often, expediting clean energy projects will require more, not less, government intervention. So too will the task of ensuring those projects benefit workers and communities.
To craft a grounded agenda for clean energy abundance, we can start by taking stock of successes and gaps in implementing the IRA. The law’s core strategy was to unite climate, jobs, and justice goals. The IRA aims to use incentives to channel a wave of clean energy investments towards good union jobs and communities that have endured decades of divestment.
Klein and Thompson are wary that such “everything bagel” strategies try to do too much. Other “abundance” advocates explicitly support sidelining the IRA’s labor objectives to expedite clean energy buildout.
But here’s the thing about everything bagels: They taste good.
They taste good because they combine ingredients that go well together. The question — whether for bagels or policies — is, are we using congruent ingredients?
The data suggests that clean energy growth, union jobs, and equitable investments — like garlic, onion, and sesame seeds — can indeed pair well together. While we have a long way to go, early indicators show significant post-IRA progress on all three fronts: a nearly 100-gigawatt boom in clean energy installations, an historic high in clean energy union density, and outsized clean investments flowing to fossil fuel communities. If we can design policy to yield such a win-win-win, why would we choose otherwise?
Klein and Thompson are of course right that to realize the potential of the IRA, we must reduce the long lag time in building clean energy projects. That lag time does not stem from incentives for clean energy companies to provide quality jobs, negotiate Community Benefits Agreements, or invest in low-income communities. Such incentives did not deter clean energy companies from applying for IRA funding in droves. Programs that included all such incentives were typically oversubscribed, with companies applying for up to 10 times the amount of available funding.
If labor and equity incentives are not holding up clean energy deployment, what is? And what are the remedies?
Some of the biggest delays point not to an excess of policymaking — the concern of many “abundance” proponents — but an absence. Such gaps call for more market-shaping policies to expedite the clean energy transition.
Take, for example, the years-long queues for clean energy projects to connect to the electrical grid, which developers rank as one of the largest sources of delay. That wait stems from a piecemeal approach to transmission buildout — the result not of overregulation by progressive lawmakers, but rather the opposite: a hands-off mode of governance that has created vast inefficiencies. For years, grid operators have built transmission lines not according to a strategic plan, but in response to the requests of individual projects to connect to the grid. This reactive, haphazard approach requires a laborious battery of studies to determine the incremental transmission upgrades (and the associated costs) needed to connect each project. As a result, project developers face high cost uncertainty and a nearly five-year median wait time to finish the process, contributing to the withdrawal of about three of every four proposed projects.
The solution, according to clean energy developers, buyers, and analysts alike, is to fill the regulatory void that has enabled such a fragmentary system. Transmission experts have called for rules that require grid operators to proactively plan new transmission lines in anticipation of new clean energy generation and then charge a preestablished fee for projects to connect, yielding more strategic grid expansion, greater cost certainty for developers, fewer studies, and reduced wait times to connect to the grid. Last year, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission took a step in this direction by requiring grid operators to adopt regional transmission planning. Many energy analysts applauded the move and highlighted the need for additional policies to expedite transmission buildout.
Another source of delay that underscores policy gaps is the 137-week lag time to obtain a large power transformer, due to supply chain shortages. The United States imports four of every five large power transformers used on our electric grid. Amid the post-pandemic snarling of global supply chains, such high import dependency has created another bottleneck for building out the new transmission lines that clean energy projects demand. To stimulate domestic transformer production, the National Infrastructure Advisory Council — including representatives from major utilities — has proposed that the federal government establish new transformer manufacturing investments and create a public stockpiling system that stabilizes demand. That is, a clean energy abundance agenda also requires new industrial policies.
While such clean energy delays call for additional policymaking, “abundance” advocates are correct that other delays call for ending problematic policies. Rising local restrictions on clean energy development, for example, pose a major hurdle. However, the map of those restrictions, as tracked in an authoritative Columbia University report, does not support the notion that they stem primarily from Democrats’ penchant for overregulation. Of the 11 states with more than 10 such restrictions, six are red, three are purple, and two are blue — New York and Texas, Virginia and Kansas, Maine and Indiana, etc. To take on such restrictions, we shouldn’t let concern with progressive wish lists eclipse a focused challenge to old-fashioned, transpartisan NIMBYism.
“Abundance” proponents also focus their ire on permitting processes like those required by the National Environmental Policy Act, which the Supreme Court curtailed last week. Permitting needs mending, but with a chisel, not a Musk-esque chainsaw. The Biden administration produced a chisel last year: a NEPA reform to expedite clean energy projectsand support environmental justice. In February, the Trump administration tossed out that reform and nearly five decades of NEPA rules without offering a replacement — a chainsaw maneuver that has created more, not less, uncertainty for project developers. When the wreckage of this administration ends, we’ll need to fill the void with targeted permitting policies that streamline clean energy while protecting communities.
Finally, a clean energy abundance agenda should also welcome pro-worker, pro-equity incentives like those in the IRA “everything bagel.” Despite claims to the contrary, such policies can help to overcome additional sources of delay and facilitatebuildout.
For example, Community Benefits Agreements, which IRA programs encouraged, offer a distinct, pro-building advantage: a way to avoid the community opposition that has become a top-tier reason for delays and cancellations of wind and solar projects. CBAs give community and labor groups a tool to secure locally-defined economic, health, and environmental benefits from clean energy projects. For clean energy firms, they offer an opportunity to obtain explicit project support from community organizations. Three out of four wind and solar developers agree that increased community engagement reduces project cancellations, and more than 80% see it as at least somewhat “feasible” to offer benefits via CBAs. Indeed, developers and communities are increasingly using CBAs, from a wind farm off the coast of Rhode Island to a solar park in California’s central valley, to deliver tangible benefits and completed projects — the ingredients of abundance.
A similar win-win can come from incentives for clean energy companies to pay construction workers decent wages, which the IRA included. Most peer-reviewed studies find that the impact of such standards on infrastructure construction costs is approximately zero. By contrast, wage standards can help to address a key constraint on clean energy buildout: companies’ struggle to recruit a skilled and stable workforce in a tight labor market. More than 80% of solar firms, for example, report difficulties in finding qualified workers. Wage standards offer a proven solution, helping companies attract and retain the workforce needed for on-time project completion.
In addition to labor standards and support for CBAs, a clean energy abundance agenda also should expand on the IRA’s incentives to invest in low-income communities. Such policies spur clean energy deployment in neighborhoods the market would otherwise deem unprofitable. Indeed, since enactment of the IRA, 75% of announced clean energy investments have been in low-income counties. That buildout is a deliberate outcome of the “everything bagel” approach. If we want clean energy abundance for all, not just the wealthy, we need to wield — not withdraw — such incentives.
Crafting an agenda for clean energy abundance requires precision, not abstraction. We need to add industrial policies that offer a foundation for clean energy growth. We need to end parochial policies that deter buildout on behalf of private interests. And we need to build on labor and equity policies that enable workers and communities to reap material rewards from clean energy expansion. Differentiating between those needs will be essential for Democrats to build a clean energy plan that actually delivers abundance.
On DOE grants, OPEC, and construction costs
Current conditions: Air quality alerts remain in effect for the entire state of Minnesota through Monday evening due to wildfire smoke from Manitoba • An enormous dust storm is blowing off the Sahara Desert and could reach the Gulf Coast this week • Northern lights were visible on camera as far south as Florida on Sunday. You’ll have another chance to see them tonight.
In case you missed it, the Department of Energy canceled nearly $4 billion in funds for industrial and manufacturing projects on Friday. Many of the projects had been planned in rural or conservative areas, including $500 million awarded to ExxonMobil and Calpine’s carbon capture project in Baytown, Texas. A DOE spokesperson said in the announcement that the 24 canceled grants were for projects that “were not economically viable and would not generate a positive return on investment of taxpayer dollars.”
None of the awardees responded to my colleague Emily Pontecorvo’s inquiries about whether they plan to pursue legal challenges, but she did note in her analysis one critic of the Trump administration’s move who described it as “dismantling” the clean energy economy and “giving away the future of manufacturing.” Emily also observed a notable absence from the DOE’s list of canceled grants: steelmaking company Cleveland Cliffs, which she reported last month was in the process of renegotiating its award under the Industrial Demonstration Program.
This weekend, the eight members of OPEC+ announced that they would continue to increase oil production in July, the third straight month in a row. The group’s target is an additional 411,000 barrels a day, or more than three times what it had previously planned, AFP reports, though analysts expect the actual production amount will be less.
The increases have followed a period of low production by Saudi Arabia, though The New York Times notes that the Saudis and other OPEC+ members like the United Arab Emirates “had chafed because some members, including Iraq and Kazakhstan, had exceeded their ceilings. The Saudis are now sending a message that they will not restrain output if others don’t.” Though the prices for Brent crude have fallen this year by around 16%, the Times adds that the Saudis, “who have low costs, can still make money at those levels” even as shale drillers in the U.S. have slowed. OPEC produces approximately 40% of the global crude oil supply, with oil and gas operations accounting for around 15% of total energy-related emissions worldwide.
The average energy infrastructure project costs 40% more than expected for construction and takes nearly two years longer to complete than initially planned, according to a new study of 662 such projects in 83 countries by the Boston University Institute for Global Sustainability, published in the journal Energy Research & Social Science. Nuclear power plants were the worst offenders, with construction costing 102.5% more on average, or $1.56 billion more than expected. Hydrogen, carbon capture and storage, and thermal power plants that rely on natural gas were also among higher-risk infrastructure projects, the study found. “I’m particularly struck by our findings on the diseconomies of scale, with projects exceeding 1,561 megawatts in capacity demonstrating significantly higher risk of cost escalation,” Hanee Ryu, one of the researchers, said. “This suggests that we may need to reconsider our approach to large-scale energy infrastructure planning, especially as we commit trillions to global decarbonization efforts.”
Solar energy and transmission projects, on the other hand, had the lowest investment risks for construction and time costs, and are often completed ahead of schedule and for less than expected, the research found. Wind, similarly, “performed favorably in the financial risk assessment.” You can read the full report here.
Airline industry decarbonization goals are “in peril,” according to comments made by the International Air Transport Association’s senior vice president for sustainability, Marie Owens Thomsen, at a trade conference in India on Sunday. While several major aviation groups have set 2050 as the goal for achieving net-zero carbon emissions for air travel, Owens Thomsen specifically cited the Trump administration’s policies as “obviously a setback,” Barron’s reports.
Programs to support the development of sustainable aviation fuels are also in jeopardy. The European Union requires carriers to include 2% lower-emission biofuel in their fuel mix starting this year, but Owens Thomsen said the cheap cost of oil is still diminishing the “sense of urgency that people have.” She expected a $4.7 trillion investment in SAF would be needed to meet the 2050 emission goals. “It is entirely achievable,” she went on, calling the money involved “very comparable to the money that was involved in creating the previous new energy markets, notably, obviously, wind and solar.”
Tesla is no longer the best-selling electric vehicle in Canada. Late last week, GM announced it has officially taken the crown as the “#1 EV seller” in the country, following a surge in sales of 252% in the first three months of the year, led by the Chevy Equinox EV.
Though Tesla’s dethroning is also indicative of the brand’s diminished reputation abroad — Electrek notes Tesla registered just 542 cars in Quebec, the country’s top EV market, in the first quarter of 2025 — the numbers also reflect GM’s successes, with even sales of its GMC Hummer EV Pickup up 232%. Combined Q1 EV sales in Canada were nevertheless still down significantly, to 5,750 from 15,000 EV sales in Q4, Electrek adds, a dip attributable to Quebec’s pause on federal EV incentives between February and April.
NOAA
Happy second day of meteorological summer! It could be a toasty one: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center expects hotter-than-average temperatures across much of the Southwest and Northeast this year.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s decision in the case of Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, Colorado enlists the nation’s highest court in the campaign to reform federal environmental enforcement.
A new chapter opened for one of the country’s most important environmental laws this week.
On Thursday, the Supreme Court transformed the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, an environmental permitting law that affects virtually every decision that the federal government makes. The quasi-unanimous ruling limits the law’s scope and cuts off future avenues for challenging energy and infrastructure projects under the law.
It could reshape the scale of legal challenges that projects could face in the future, giving the Trump administration — and any successive administration — greater leeway to approve energy projects.
Under NEPA, federal agencies must study the environmental impacts of their decisions before they make them. The strictest studies can run into the hundreds of pages, and they can take years to complete.
But in what was essentially an 8-0 decision, the Court ruled that federal agencies almost never need to analyze the second-order environmental effects of their decisions. In other words, an agency need only study the environmental impact of a project itself — be it a pipeline, a solar farm, or, in the case at issue, a railroad — and not its metaphorically downstream consequences. That remains the case even if a given project might indirectly make it much easier to do something with a big environmental footprint, such as drilling for oil or natural gas.
That is the clearest effect of the ruling. But Justice Brett Kavanaugh, writing for the court’s conservative majority, went much further than that summary alone suggests. In a broad and forceful ruling, he told lower courts that they should stop nitpicking the environmental studies that federal agencies must publish under NEPA to justify their own decision-making. Courts should, instead, defer to federal agencies as much as is reasonable when reviewing a NEPA study. “The goal of the law,” he writes, “is to inform agency decision-making, not to paralyze it.” (Justice Neil Gorsuch recused himself from the case because of his connection to an oil magnate who could have benefited from the ruling.)
That suggests a significant change is coming to how the court system interprets NEPA, a law that is little known to the general public but that plays a defining role in how federal agencies make decisions or approve infrastructure projects. NEPA creates a procedural requirement that federal agencies study the environmental impact of any “major decision,” but that category is so broad that it affects virtually everything the federal government does — spend money, write a new regulation, or approve a new project on federal land. The law and the yearslong lawsuits that it spawns have been blamed for delays in building solar farms and transmission lines, but also oil refineries and gas pipelines.
Kavanaugh’s ruling is “pretty striking for just how strident it is, and how assertively it tries to shut the door on further NEPA litigation,” Nicholas Bagley, a University of Michigan law professor who studies the permitting system, told me. Kavanaugh’s message to lower courts is, in essence, “We keep telling you to knock it off. You keep not listening. So knock it the fuck off,” Bagley said.
At the very least, the ruling suggests that a new phase in the effort to reform the country’s permitting laws has arrived. Now that movement has, in essence, been blessed by the Supreme Court.
The case in question — Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, Colorado — concerns an 88-mile railroad proposed to connect the Uinta Basin in eastern Utah to the national freight rail network. In 2021, the Surface Transportation Board, a federal agency that regulates railroads, approved the project after completing a roughly 3,600-page study of the railroad’s potential environmental impact.
Almost immediately, environmental groups argued that the board’s study did not go far enough. The ground beneath the Uinta Basin is rich in a waxy and particularly carbon-intensive crude oil; right now, very little of that oil is extracted because the only way to get it out is by truck, along windy mountain roads. The railroad, if built, would allow for much larger volumes of crude to be transported out of the basin and sent to Gulf Coast refineries. Building the railroad, in other words, would indirectly increase local oil extraction, and thereby raise global greenhouse gas emissions.
The board argued that its NEPA study did not need to consider these downstream effects because the board itself does not regulate oil extraction — that is, it regulates the building of railroads, not what gets moved on them.
The eight justices agreed that the board was right: It didn’t have to consider the effects of second-order oil drilling when it approved the railroad. (The railroad remains on hold for other reasons, Sambhav Sankar, a senior vice president at Earthjustice, told me.) But by going further in his ruling, Kavanaugh entered into a running debate about the role of NEPA and other permitting laws in the American economy.
NEPA was never meant to play the commanding role that it does today, Kavanaugh writes. When it was first signed into law in 1970, NEPA was meant to act as a “purely procedural” check on federal decision-making. Agencies were supposed to conduct environmental studies, make their decisions, then move on. But in a famous 1971 ruling concerning a proposed nuclear power plant in Maryland, Judge Skelly Wright of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals transformed the law. He found that agencies had to carry out NEPA’s procedural requirements “to the fullest extent possible,” and crucially that courts could reject agencies’ analysis for lack of completeness.
Over the years, as hundreds of cases following Wright’s have added up, NEPA has turned into a “fearsome project killer,” Bagley said. Agencies spend decades of person-power and hundreds of thousands of dollars to prepare fastidious environmental reviews of their decisions. Any new infrastructure project or new policy change — even New York City’s congestion charge — requires some form of NEPA study.
Many conservatives have long opposed the modern NEPA process. But in recent years, some liberals have joined them, arguing that the law primarily slows down clean energy infrastructure and encourages NIMBYism. In practice, they say, NEPA acts as more of hindrance to the clean economy than the old fossil fuel economy: Because of a 2005 law, most oil and gas drilling has been exempt from the NEPA process, while wind farms, solar plants, and other forms of zero-carbon energy infrastructure still have to face it. Environmental groups rebut that the law is a useful tool to slow down fossil fuel pipelines, which do not generally get a NEPA exemption.
Data supports the idea that NEPA holds back clean energy projects, but that is partly because it holds back so many kinds of projects. The R Street Institute, a center-right think tank, has found that 42% of projects stalled by NEPA involved green infrastructure or conservation. Another analysis from the Center for Growth and Opportunity at Utah State University found that it takes more than two years on average for federal agencies to complete environmental reviews of solar and wind projects. Reviews for new hydroelectric or nuclear power plants take even longer.
Kavanaugh, in essence, rejects all of this. NEPA was never supposed to block or hinder large-scale energy or infrastructure projects, he writes; it was meant to “inform agency decision-making, not to paralyze it.”
“A 1970 legislative acorn has grown over the years into a judicial oak that has hindered infrastructure development ‘under the guise’ of just a little more process,” he says. When federal agencies write environmental studies under NEPA, courts should broadly defer to the decisions that they make. And even if an agency gets something wrong in its study or omits something important, that does not mean the entire study — and the decision that it justifies — should be thrown out. (There’s some irony to Kavanaugh’s call for deference to agencies here, given that the Supreme Court rejected the idea that agency regulations deserve deference last year.)
“What’s notable for me is that they didn’t just rule on the case,” Sankar, the Earthjustice lawyer told me. (Earthjustice participated in the case.) “They decided to take a broad swipe at NEPA itself, really unnecessarily.”
Alexander Mechanick, a senior policy analyst at the Niskanen Center and former White House regulatory official, agreed with Sankar about the scope of the ruling. The court’s decision “does communicate over and over again, with a heavy hand, a real desire to get lower courts out of the business of fly specking the environmental impact assessments,” he told me.
It’s this forthrightness that seems to announce a new era of NEPA jurisprudence — one where the courts will accept a level of environmental review that they may have once rejected. In a way, Kavanaugh’s ruling is a fitting sequel to Wright’s 1971 decision in that both set the tone and capture the overarching environmental concerns of their respective eras, Bagley said.
Half a century ago, Judge Wright wanted to make sure that the American public could slow the wave of infrastructure that threatened to overwhelm the country’s landscape. NEPA represented “the commitment of the government to control, at long last, the destructive engine of material ‘progress,’” he wrote, asserting that judges must make sure the law’s goals are not “lost or misdirected in the vast hallways of the federal bureaucracy.”
Now, Kavanaugh seems to fear that progress itself has been held up. He writes that the modern NEPA process, with its cycles of “speculation and consultation and estimation and litigation,” has slowed down infrastructure projects and driven up their cost. He can sound more like an op-ed writer than a legal scholar as he lays out the law’s consequences in the ruling:
Fewer projects make it to the finish line. Indeed, fewer projects make it to the starting line. Those that survive often end up costing much more than is anticipated or necessary, both for the agency preparing the EIS and for the builder of the project. And that in turn means fewer and more expensive railroads, airports, wind turbines, transmission lines, dams, housing developments, highways, bridges, subways, stadiums, arenas, data centers, and the like. And that also means fewer jobs, as new projects become difficult to finance and build in a timely fashion.
In this declaration, Kavanaugh seems to put himself on the side of a growing and tenuously bipartisan movement to reform NEPA. A 2023 debt ceiling bill, signed by President Biden, included modest reforms to the NEPA process, imposing page limits and deadlines on the strictest forms of environmental studies. A more sweeping bipartisan effort to change the law failed last year. Now, House Republicans are taking their own crack at revising NEPA, creating an optional and more expensive permitting “fast track” for developers in the reconciliation bill.
Sankar, whose organization has championed NEPA, argues that the ruling’s practical upshot will be to allow the Trump administration greater leeway to build fossil fuel infrastructure. Kavanaugh’s ruling exhibits “a shocking disregard for the realpolitik of what's going on with this administration in particular,” he said.
“As we’ve been saying all along, NEPA gets demonized as the problem,” Sankar said. With the law’s role reduced, “I think people will see that there are a lot of other things that are the problem here, and taking federal agency expertise out of the equation is not going to hurry things up.” He added that state and local governments often rely on federal NEPA reports for their own analyses, and now those reviews may be less trustworthy.
Bagley, who has generally supported permitting reform efforts, agreed that NEPA is just one of several laws holding back clean energy projects nationwide. But it is an important one, he said, and reducing its scope will likely allow more projects to happen. He added that by changing it, advocates will learn of additional bottlenecks that are holding back construction — including laws that nobody has noticed yet because they were previously less important than NEPA. Advocates can also now focus their attention on state and local barriers to building.
“If you want to look at the permitting burdens across the United States, probably 80% to 90% of them are state and local. This [ruling] isn’t going to inaugurate a new era of American dynamism,” Bagley said. “It’s a small step in the right direction.”