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House Republicans’ new plan to transform NEPA, explained
A powerful House Republican committee has proposed shaking up one of the country’s key permitting laws as part of the ongoing process to write President Trump’s tax bill.
A new bill, drafted by the House Natural Resources Committee would transform the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA. Under NEPA as it stands today, the government must study the environmental impact of any “major” federal action. Any time a federal agency adopts a new policy, builds a new project, spends federal dollars, or issues a license or permit, that choice gets a full environmental review.
Crucially, this also means that the federal government must study the environmental impact even of privately developed projects that require some kind of federal sign-off. But the new bill would quicken this process and likely shield it from court review.
The law represents a “big step” for permitting reform, Nicholas Bagley, a University of Michigan law professor, told us. “It’s creative and extremely aggressive.” If it passes, Republicans’ budget measure could speed up the construction of energy projects around the country. But it could also reduce local or environmental groups’ ability to sue to slow down or block development.
The bill would allow companies to pay a fee to access a faster, more streamlined NEPA process that would not be reviewable by the courts, according to the bill. That means environmental groups would likely have a harder time suing the government for failing to account for various environmental maladies in their study.
Under the draft legislation, companies would pay 125% of the cost of preparing the report to get an expedited review. But avoiding a lengthy court fight is so valuable that many companies would likely take advantage of this new process, Bagley told us.
“You can read it as effectively creating a price for a litigation shield — the federal government is allowing developers to buy themselves out of litigation risk with a flat fee,” he said.
It would change the status quo in two important ways.
First, many federal agencies already require project sponsors to pay the full cost of preparing a NEPA report for a private project, such as a solar farm or geothermal well. The House Republican proposal would increase this cost by just 25% on the front end.
Second, under the law today, agencies take more than four years on average to prepare a NEPA report, which can regularly stretch into the hundreds of pages. Congress has periodically tried to impose tighter deadlines and shorter page limits on the NEPA process — including in a 2023 debt ceiling law — but it hasn’t been successful.
That’s because the threat of lawsuits ultimately drives the NEPA process, Bagley said. Civil servants write lengthy, meticulous NEPA reports not because statute requires them to do so, but because they’re afraid of losing their work in a lawsuit, he said.
“The thing driving lengthy timelines is litigation risk,” Bagley told us. “Unless and until you correct for the threat of judicial review, NEPA reform isn’t going to go that far.” This proposal is the first modern NEPA report to offer protection from judicial review.
The proposal could help speed up all types of energy projects.
But it could help some more than others. Certain fossil fuel projects — especially those involving fracking — have already received some form of exemption from the NEPA process. But renewables and clean energy projects broadly don’t have such a carve-out. Neither do some other types of natural gas infrastructure, such as pipelines and export terminals. These projects could benefit from a faster and less court-reviewable NEPA process.
This is the big question. To comply with the strictures of what’s known as the “Byrd Rule,” provisions in reconciliation must be primarily budgetary in nature, i.e. related to taxing and spending.
Provisions that have a budgetary effect but are “merely incidental” to their non-budgetary components can be ruled by the Senate Parliamentarian to be “extraneous” and excluded from the bill.
Parliamentarian rulings helped shape — and narrow — Democratic proposals in 2021 and 2022, including stripping out immigration provisions and minimum wage hikes from various bills that were working their way through the reconciliation process.
So where does overhauling NEPA fit in? The 125% fee makes the provisions of the House language arguably germane to the budgetary purposes of the reconciliation package. Supporters of the language will cite a precedent in the Inflation Reduction Act that waived judicial review for the program’s negotiation of drug prices in Medicare.
One way the parliamentarian will try to answer this question is by asking, “‘Is that big policy change necessary in order to achieve the budgetary impact?’ That’s the place where this could fail,” Thomas Hochman, the director of infrastructure policy at the Foundation of American Innovation, told us.
NEPA isn’t the only law that requires the government to study the environmental or cultural impact of its decisions. A handful of other laws — including the Endangered Species Act, the National Historic Preservation Act, or the Clean Water Act — mandate their own permitting process, which can also be lengthy.
Many of these laws impose substantive obligations on government decisions. The NHPA, for instance, requires the government to study whether any decisions will affect Native American cultural sites and to reach an agreement about how to mitigate that impact. These decisions can then be reviewed by the courts — NHPA was at the heart of the Dakota Access pipeline and SunZia cases.
Under the law today, the government often satisfies its duties under these laws as part of a broader “NEPA process,” with one agency essentially handling the paperwork for all the federal permitting laws that matter to a project together.
The House Republican proposal wouldn’t weaken or affect any of these laws, Hochman and Bagley told us. The government would still need to satisfy its obligations under all other federal permitting laws, and the courts could still review those decisions. It’s unclear how those laws would fit into the new streamlined NEPA process.
Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia led two efforts during the Biden years to pass permitting reform legislation through the conventional lawmaking process. The bills tended to combine policy asks from Republicans and Democrats — that is, oil and gas interests as well as green energy and transmission developers — in an effort to build a broad consensus in favor of policy change.
What that looked like in practice was specific carveouts designed to facilitate the building of long-range transmission lines alongside, say, changes in schedules for leases for extracting fossil fuels on public lands.
This time, Republicans alone are driving the permitting reform process, because the reconciliation bill is expected to be approved (or not) on party lines.
The reconciliation language says nothing specific about transmission, for example, but it includes specific provisions favored by the oil and gas industry like mandating lease sales on a quarterly basis. The American Petroleum Institute praised the bill, and the Sierra Club said that “the only way it could be friendlier to Big Oil CEOs would be if they wrote it themselves.”
But the reform to how NEPA is — and isn’t — litigated is a genuine breakthrough in years of drawing up failed permitting reform plans.
“We haven’t yet seen one bipartisan bill on permitting that broadly amends judicial review,” Xan Fishman, senior managing director of the energy program at the Bipartisan Policy Center, told us.
“One of the difficulties in doing permitting reform is that there isn’t just one problem that needs solving. There are a bunch of things that all add up to a really difficult process that takes a long time and has massive degrees of uncertainty,” Fishman said.
To the extent clean energy projects face sometimes fatal delays due to the specific rigors of the NEPA process, the bill would remove a barrier to their development.
NEPA has proven to be a significant barrier to solar development. About two thirds of solar projects that were assessed under NEPA between 2010 and 2018 faced litigation, as well as almost one third of pipelines and 38% of wind projects, according to Stanford researchers Michael Bennon and Devon Wilson.
Even when agencies win court cases — which can be filed up to six years after a federal agency decision — “litigation overwhelmingly functions as a form of delay,” according to Breakthrough Institute research.
It’s unclear whether the House Republican proposal will ultimately speed up federal energy project approvals, or whether litigants will shift to opposing projects under other permitting laws, such as the Endangered Species Act or NHPA. But permitting reform advocates agree that the proposal nonetheless represents a big step.
“It would be a pretty good shield for persnickety criticisms of [environmental reviews] that are now de rigueur, but it might not provide complete protection from the full run of environmental objections waged against a project,” Bagley said.
“I am firmly convinced that NEPA is a big problem for helping to create and reinforce defensiveness on the part of agency officials. But it’s part of a big web of accountability run maybe too amok,” he said. “One answer is to start clipping parts of the web — it doesn’t fix the whole problem, but it might help you see what else becomes salient.”
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Wind and solar are out. Clean, firm power is in.
The Senate Finance committee published its highly anticipated tax proposal for Trump’s One Big, Beautiful Bill on Monday night, including a new plan to revise the nation’s clean energy tax credits.
Senate Republicans widened the aperture slightly compared to the House version of the bill, extending tax credits for geothermal energy, batteries, and hydropower, and preserving “transferability” — a crucial rule that allows companies to sell their tax credits for cash — for years to come.
But the text would still slash many of the signature programs of the Inflation Reduction Act. It would be particularly damaging for Republicans’ goals of creating a domestic mining industry, because it kills incentives for refining critical minerals while yanking away subsidies for the electric cars and wind turbines that might use those minerals.
Consumer tax credits for energy efficiency upgrades, including heat pumps, would still be terminated, as would credits for homeowners to lease or purchase rooftop solar. The Senate bill also cuts a tax deduction for energy efficiency upgrades in commercial buildings one year after the bill’s passage, which was not in the House version.
There was no mercy for the IRA’s tax credit to produce clean hydrogen, despite a last-minute appeal from more than 250 organizations in early June. That policy would still be terminated this year.
Here’s a rundown of the rest of the major changes.
Like the House bill, the Senate’s proposal would terminate tax credits for new, used, and leased electric vehicles. But while the House had extended the program by one year for automakers that had yet to sell 200,000 eligible vehicles, the Senate version would simply end the program in 180 days — or roughly six months — after the bill’s passage.
Depending on when the bill is passed, the Senate version could work out better for some experienced EV automakers, such as Tesla and General Motors. These automakers are set to lose their eligibility for tax credits on December 31 under the House text. But the Senate bill’s 180-day period could allow them to eke out another month or so of eligibility — especially if congressional negotiations over the One Big, Beautiful Bill Act go late into the summer.
Newer EV automakers, such as Rivian or Lucid, come out worse under the Senate text as compared to the House bill since they haven’t sold as many vehicles.
Homeowners interested in electric vehicle chargers would get a longer runway than the House had proposed — but a much shorter one than is on the books right now. Under current law, homeowners can claim the charger tax credit through 2032. The Senate version would terminate the 30% tax credit for installing a home charger one year after the bill is enacted.
The Inflation Reduction Act achieved massive greenhouse gas reductions by including a set of new “technology-neutral” tax credits that subsidized any new power plant as long as it didn’t emit carbon dioxide. Under current law, these new tax credits will remain effective and on the books for decades to come — expiring only when emissions from the country’s power sector fall about 95% below their all-time high.
The Republican reconciliation bills have dismantled these provisions. The House text proposed immediately winding down tax credits for all clean energy sources — except nuclear — and allowed just a 60-day “grace period” for new projects to start construction to claim the credits. Even then, new power plants would have to enter service by 2028 to qualify.
Senate Republicans have countered with a plan that is designed to maintain support for every electricity source that isn’t wind and solar. The GOP Senate caucus favors technologies that can provide power on demand around the clock — such as geothermal, nuclear, hydropower, and batteries — but technically the Senate text allows any zero-carbon, non-solar, non-wind source to qualify for the clean electricity tax credits for the next decade.
The Senate draft erases the provision in the Inflation Reduction Act that would have kept these tax credits in place until the entire United States power sector reduces its emissions. Instead, it adopts the IRA’s alternate phase-out period, with the tax credits beginning to wind down for projects that start construction in 2034.
Tax credits for wind and solar, however, would begin to phase down for projects that start construction next year, and terminate after 2027, with one big exception.
An odd addendum to the wind and solar phase-out would exempt projects that are at least 1 gigawatt, are at least partially on federal land, and have already received a “right-of-way grant or lease” from the Bureau of Land Management as of June 16. It’s unclear which, if any, projects would be helped by this provision. According to the BLM website, it has not granted a right-of-way to any projects that are 1 gigawatt or larger except for the Lava Ridge wind farm, which has been canceled. If the Senate changes the date, however, the Esmeralda 7 solar farm in Nevada may benefit, as the project is more than 6 gigawatts, and is in the final stages of its environmental review.
The Senate text would not do anything to change the eligibility timeline for existing nuclear plants to claim a tax credit, called 45U, designed to keep them solvent. It would keep the schedule written into the Inflation Reduction Act, which has the credit terminating at the end of 2031. It would, however, impose new foreign sourcing restrictions on nuclear fuel, forbidding existing power plants from claiming the tax credit if their fuel comes from Russia, China, Iran, or North Korea. (It makes an exception for power companies that signed a long-term contract to buy foreign fuel before 2023.) The United States formally banned the import of nuclear fuel from Russia last year.
The Inflation Reduction Act subsidized the production of certain clean energy equipment — including solar panels, wind turbines, inverters, and batteries — as well as some of their subcomponents. Under current law, those tax credits will begin to phase out by 25% increments in 2030, so companies can claim 75% of the credit in 2030, 50% in 2031, and zero in 2033.
The IRA also created a new permanent tax credit that covered 10% of the cost of refining or recycling critical minerals.
The new Senate text changes these phase-out deadlines, often for the worse. First, as in the House bill, wind turbines and their subcomponents would no longer qualify for the tax credit starting in 2028. Second, the tax credit for critical minerals would start phasing out in 2031. Under the new calendar, companies would be able to claim 75% of this credit in 2031, 50% in 2032, and zero in 2034.
In practice, this means that the Senate GOP text would end the IRA’s permanent tax credit for producing many critical minerals, which would damage the financial projects of many mineral processing and refining projects. Other types of equipment remain on the Inflation Reduction Act’s original phase-out schedule.
The new Senate text also slightly expands the type of battery components that qualify for the credit. And — in a potentially significant change for some companies — it forbids companies from stacking tax credits for their vertically integrated production process starting in 2027.
While the House did not touch the tax credit for carbon sequestration, the Senate has put forward a key change favored by many proponents of the technology. Under current law, project operators get the highest-value credit if they simply inject captured carbon underground for no other purpose than to keep it out of the atmosphere. Smaller amounts are available for projects that use captured CO2 to nudge more oil out of the ground, also known as “enhanced oil recovery,” or if they use the CO2 in products like cement.
Under the Senate proposal, all carbon sequestration projects, no matter the nature of the carbon storage, would qualify for the same amount.
The biggest clean energy killer in the House-passed bill was a strict sourcing rule for the tax credits that would disqualify projects that use any component, subcomponent or mineral from China. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin wrote last week, the rules appeared “unworkable” to many companies because they seemingly disqualified projects even if they used a relatively small amount of an otherwise irrelevant Chinese-sourced material — such as a spare bolt or a gram of steel.
Under the House bill, manufacturers would also not be allowed to license a Chinese company’s technology. This measure appeared to directly target Ford, which has proposed manufacturing electric vehicle batteries using technology licensed from the Chinese firm CATL, one of the world’s best producers of EV batteries.
The Senate proposal changes the House provision by adding a complicated new set of definitions about what might qualify as a federal entity of concern. It also introduces a new “safe harbor” formula describing the amount of Chinese-sourced material that can keep a project from receiving a tax credit. We’re still figuring out how these new rules work together, and we’ll update this article as we understand them better.
The House bill also would have severely curtailed a crucial component of the tax credit program called transferability, which allowed developers that couldn’t take full advantage of the subsidies to sell their credits for cash to other companies. The text stripped this option from the tax credits for clean manufacturing (45X), carbon sequestration (45Q), and clean fuels (45Z) beginning in 2028. Without transferability, most carbon sequestration projects will struggle to pencil out, my colleague Katie Brigham reported.
The Senate proposal would restore transferability for the duration of all remaining tax credits.
But it throws another wrench in plans to scale up nuclear, geothermal, and other large capital-intensive projects, because it restricts zero-carbon power plants’ ability to use modified accelerated cost recovery to fund their projects.
Trump just quasi-nationalized U.S. Steel. That could help climate policy later.
The government is getting into the steel business. The deal between Japan’s Nippon Steel and U.S. Steel, long held off by the Biden administration due to national security and economic concerns, may finally happen, and the government will have a seat at the table. And some progressives are smarting over the fact that a Republican did it first.
On Friday, Nippon Steel and U.S. Steel announced “that President Trump has approved the Companies’ historic partnership,” which would include $11 billion in new investments and “a Golden Share to be issued to the U.S. Government” as well as “commitments” that include “domestic production” and “trade matters.”
The New York Times reported that this “Golden Share” would give the president, including Trump’s successors, the ability to appoint or veto some of the company’s directors, and require the government to sign off on a wide range of corporate decisions, like moving production overseas or idling or closing plants or the procurement of raw materials.
The Trump administration will likely use its oversight to encourage domestic production of steel, in tandem with its tariffs on steel imports. The unique arrangement “will massively expand access to domestically produced steel,” Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick wrote on X.
While neither the administration nor the two companies involved in the deal have mentioned decarbonizing steel — and in fact existing steel decarbonization programs have floundered in the first months of the Trump’s second term — it is this government oversight of steel production that could, with a different administration, help steer the steel industry into greener pastures.
A future president could wield a golden share to encourage or require the significant capital investments necessary to decarbonize some of U.S. Steel’s production, investments that the Biden administration had trouble catalyzing even with direct government financial support.
And considering that steel makes up for some 7% of global emissions, decarbonization is a necessary — if costly — step to substantially reducing global emissions.
“It’s honestly embarrassing that Republicans beat us to actually implementing a golden share or something like it,” Alex Jacquez, who worked on industrial policy for the National Economic Council in the Biden White House, told me.
When the steel giant Cleveland Cliffs first hinted that it would not go forward with $500 million worth of federal grants to help build a hydrogen-powered mill, it cited “fears that there won’t be buyers for the lower-carbon product,” thanks to a 40% price gap with traditional steel, Ilmi Granoff wrote for Heatmap., This tracked what steel producers and buyers were telling the Biden administration as it tried to convene the industry to see what it needed to go green.
“The largest issue by far in advancing green steel production in the U.S. is demand. It’s still not price competitive and not worth capital investment upgrades, given where the market is right now and without stable demand from customers who are going to pay a premium for the product,” Jacquez said. “There’s no case to make to shareholders for why you’re investing.”
When the Roosevelt Institute looked at barriers to transition to clean steel, specifically a Cleveland-Cliffs project, among familiar community concerns like what it would mean for steel employment, there was “corporate inertia and focus on short-term shareholder value over long-term public value and competitiveness.”
While the Trump administration sees shareholder demands leading to insufficient domestic production of any steel, a future administration could be a counterweight to investors not wanting to make green steel investments.
Shareholder reticence is a “huge obstacle,” one of the report’s authors Isabel Estevez, co-executive director of the industrial policy think tank I3T, told me.
“Of course investors are not going to green light investments that don’t produce the same returns as doing nothing or doing something else would do,” Jacquez said.
And when green steel projects have gotten canceled, in the U.S. and abroad, it’s been dismal shareholder returns that are often the explicit or implicit justification, as well as the high cost of producing green hydrogen necessary to fuel green steel operations. “We are not only pushing the boundaries of what is technologically feasible with this project. We are also currently pushing the boundaries of economic viability. Or, as it stands today: beyond it,” the chief executive of ThyssenKrupp told the North Rhine-Westphalia parliament, according to Hydrogen Insight.
And the resulting Trump administration retrenchment from the Biden administration’s climate policy has made the environment even less friendly for green steel.
Earlier this month Cleveland-Cliffs scrapped the hydrogen-fuel steel project and said instead it would try to extend its existing coal-fueled blast furnace. And the Swedish company SSAB earlier this year withdrew from a prospective project in Mississippi.
Would these outcomes be any different with a “golden share”? When the Roosevelt Institute looked at steel decarbonization even full-on nationalization was considered as one of the “sticks” that could push along decarbonization (many steel companies globally are either state-owned or have some state investment). The golden share, at least as reported, will seem to put the government in the driver’s seat of a major player of the steel industry, while still maintaining its private ownership structure.
“Assuming the nature of the golden share allows the public sector to make certain requirements about the way that profits are used, it could be very valuable for encouraging U.S. Steel to use their profits to make important investments,” Estevez told me.
On Israel and Iran, G7, and clean-energy jobs
Current conditions: Fairbanks will “cool” to 85 degrees Fahrenheit on Monday after NOAA issued the first heat advisory in Alaska’s history over the weekend • Nashville’s total rainfall for the year is 33.25 inches, making it the city’s wettest since 1979 • It could hit 124 degrees Fahrenheit in Ar Rabiyah, Kuwait, today, potentially setting a new hottest temperature of June so far.
An Israeli strike on the Shahran oil depot in Tehran.Stringer/Getty Images
Oil analysts and investors are bracing for further escalation after Israel and Iran’s attacks on each other’s energy infrastructure this weekend. On Saturday, Iran reported that Israel had struck its natural gas processing facility near the South Pars field, as well the main fuel depot in Tehran — targets that “suggest Israel is attempting to weaken and disrupt Iran’s domestic gas and fuel supply chains to cause shortages, rather than pursuing the country’s oil and gas production or exports, which would rock the markets,” the Financial Times writes. Iran responded on Saturday by hitting an Israeli refinery and damaging pipelines north of Tel Aviv. Israel preemptively cut off the natural-gas flow from its oil fields in case those pipelines become additional targets, with Egypt and Jordan reporting they’ve already seen disruptions to their supplies as a result, The Wall Street Journal reports.
Iran has the second-largest natural gas reserves and the fourth-largest crude oil reserves in the world, and is the third-largest producer in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries. The country has also threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz, a major transit route for a third of the world’s oil, although many analysts are skeptical of such a threat, given that it would also cut off Iran’s own export route to its biggest customer, China, Bloomberg reports. While some analysts expect President Trump to call on OPEC+ to increase its production capacity if the global oil supply is disrupted, “it’s unclear whether the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries could offset a severe and prolonged outage in Iran, which pumps around 3.4 million barrels a day,” Bloomberg adds. Brent crude rose 5.5% to $78.32 a barrel at the start of trading on Monday morning, after gaining 7% on Friday — the most in three years.
The Group of Seven summit begins today in western Alberta, but in a break with precedent, climate policy will not be on the agenda. Canada, France, Italy, Japan, Germany, and Britain will reportedly take pains to avoid “riling” President Trump at the meeting in Kananaskis, The Washington Post reports, while Bloomberg notes that “other G7 leaders won’t even try for a statement of unity on matters such as Ukraine or climate change.” Since 1975, the group has “dedicated an average of 5% of its declarations to climate change at each summit,” The Global Governance Project reports, and it has made “496 climate commitments, taking 6% of the total on all subjects.” But despite the hesitancy to contradict the U.S., certain climate policies will be “integrated into the agenda, a senior government official told a briefing this week, pointing to an effort to improve the international joint response to the growing global forest fire threat,” per the BBC.
The Republican budget bill could potentially threaten 2 million jobs, a new report by BlueGreen Alliance found. In addition to 300,000 direct manufacturing jobs that may be lost if the GOP follows through on eliminating the corresponding tax credits, the report also found that a million indirect jobs (like “supply chain jobs, providing parts for auto or clean energy manufacturing”) and 643,000 induced jobs (like “restaurant workers, store clerks, and the other types of jobs you’d see when an area increases in population or has more money to spend”) are also at risk of evaporating, Electrek notes. Georgia alone could lose 258,000 jobs. “Every bit of data shows clearly that repealing these credits will hurt working Americans,” Ted Fertik, the vice president of manufacturing and industrial policy at BlueGreen Alliance, said in a statement. “We hope the Senate will see reason and reverse these damaging provisions.”
The European Commission, which is set to propose a cut-off date for the European Union’s imports of Russian gas, will not propose similar limits on the nation’s nuclear fuel, Reuters reported Monday. Russia currently supplies the bloc with 38% of its enriched uranium and 23% of its raw uranium, and five EU countries use Russian-designed reactors intended to run on Russian fuel. “The question about nuclear is, of course, complicated, because we need to be very sure that we are not putting countries in a situation where they do not have the security of supply,” EU energy commissioner Dan Jorgensen said. Though the announcement was a reversal from the Commission’s statement in June that it would target Russian enriched uranium, Jorgensen added that “we’re working as fast as we can to also make that a part of the proposal.”
In case you missed it, late last week Meta announced a deal with XGS Energy to add 150 megawatts of geothermal electricity in New Mexico to help the company power its local expansion into artificial intelligence. XGS specifically uses a closed-loop system to prevent water from escaping as it extracts geothermal energy from the rock, which is “especially crucial in a drought-prone state like New Mexico,” The Verge writes. The goal is for the facility to be operational by 2030.
Though the deal between Meta and XGS is no larger than a separate geothermal deal the tech company struck with Sage Geosystems last year, the proposal would still “represent about 4% of total U.S. geothermal production,” Reuters reports. Meta also announced a nuclear agreement with Constellation Energy earlier this month. My colleague Matthew Zeitlin has more on the tech clean-power buying spree, which you can read about here.
The world’s biggest sand battery is now operating in the small municipality of Pornainen, Finland. The nearly 50-foot wide, 43-foot-tall tank is filled with sand that is capable of storing 1 megawatt of thermal power from excess solar and wind electricity, and which can be used to meet one month of Pornainen’s heat demands in the summer or a week of its demands in the winter, per its owner, Polar Night Energy.