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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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Some of the industry’s biggest names are joining forces to keep the momentum moving forward.
Climate tech funding has slowed in the face of federal government pushback — but it has certainly not stopped. As the administration has cranked up its hostilities against everything from electric vehicles to wind turbines, companies and investors are responding by getting strategic, forming new coalitions to map, fund, and shape progress in the absence of public support.
Last month I covered the launch of the Climate Tech Atlas, an interdisciplinary effort that includes venture capitalists, nonprofits, and academics working to map out the most salient climate tech opportunities and help guide external research and funding in the sector. There’s also the All Aboard Coalition, which unites big name investors to help plug the missing middle finance gap. Sector-specific investment vehicles are popping up too, like the Oneworld BEV fund, a partnership between major airlines in the Oneworld Alliance and Breakthrough Energy Ventures to advance the commercialization of sustainable aviation fuels. All three of these new initiatives were announced in September alone.
“We are in a unique moment right now,” Carmichael Roberts, a managing partner at BEV told me via email. “Over the past decade, the climate tech ecosystem has made enormous progress driving innovation across every sector of the economy. That puts us in the position to step back and ask first, what areas are still crying out for urgent innovation?”
This year has also seen a number of climate tech companies struggle at key points in their attempts to scale. Sodium-ion battery company Natron Energy shut down in September, while direct air capture leader Climeworks laid off 22% of its staff in May, citing “current macroeconomic uncertainty” and “shifting policy priorities where climate tech is seeing reduced momentum.” Another direct air capture company, Noya, shuttered this August, while the battery recycling company Li-Cycle filed for bankruptcy in May.
Other startups pursuing emerging technologies — from carbon capture to long-duration battery storage, advanced geothermal, and next-generation nuclear — are looking to avoid the same fate. But while federal funding from places such as the Department of Energy’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations and the Loan Programs Office once provided an avenue for financing capital-intensive demonstration plants, the Trump administration is now retracting funding, going so far as to cancel contracts with projects previously approved under Biden.
The Oneworld fund, announced in mid-September, is BEV’s first to focus on a specific theme and its first to be backed by an industry coalition. Members of the Oneworld Alliance — which include Alaska Airlines, American Airlines, British Airways, and Cathay Pacific — had already committed to using SAF for 10% of their fuel by 2030, while also “playing an active role in the development of SAF at commercial scale.” Now, with alliance members serving as limited partners in the venture fund, they’ll benefit from the technical and commercial expertise of one of the sector’s most influential VC firms.
When I asked the BEV team to what degree the current political and economic uncertainties were making partnerships like this more valuable, Eric Toone, another BEV managing partner, responded with a refrain I’ve become familiar with — that the firm only backs technologies that “can ultimately compete on their own merits.” Yet it’s undeniable that the federal government tore up its decarbonization agenda at a moment when many climate tech firms’ investments are almost ready for deployment, a stage when government support can make all the difference.
“Many promising SAF technologies already exist, but they are stuck between lab success and commercial scale,” Roberts told me. “This is the moment when they most need capital, technical rigor, and committed offtake to bridge that gap.” While the Trump administration did maintain and extend the tax credit for clean fuels, it also reduced the maximum credit amount for SAF from $1.75 per gallon to $1, while private funding for SAF production and distribution infrastructure remains inadequate.
Given this landscape and the urgency airlines face in meeting their clean fuel targets, Toone told me the firm is open to backing companies “that are further along than what a typical BEV fund might pursue.” And while sustainable fuels are the first technology to benefit from this type of thematic focus, Roberts said that BEV is already eyeing other sectors where it plans to apply this same funding model.
As of early September, the firm is also part of the All Aboard Coalition. This elite group of venture firms is aiming to raise a $300 million fund by the end of October that will match investments in later-stage venture rounds, filling a gap known in climate tech circles as the “missing middle.” Assembled by Chris Anderson, an entrepreneur and primary convener of the TED Talks conference — which has featured many inspiring climate visionaries — the group includes 14 members such as Khosla Ventures, Prelude Ventures, DCVC, Gigascale Capital, and Energy Impact Partners.
“One of the consequences of being in the front row seat at TED all these years is you get persuaded of certain things,” he told me. “And I definitely got persuaded that climate is the outstanding, major problem we really have to fix.”
The bulk of the capital for the coalition will come from outside investors, though some members will contribute as well, Anderson told me. The goal is to incentivize these hotshots to co-invest with each other, providing a one-to-one funding match if they do so.
“First-of-a-kind rounds seem out of reach for a lot of people in the chain,” Anderson explained, referring to the network of investors that must come together to help a company fund expensive new infrastructure. At this stage, its tech has progressed beyond the capital-light, early-stage rounds but is still considered too risky for traditional infrastructure investors to take on. Companies might be seeking $100 million or more from venture firms that are used to writing checks for orders of magnitude less. “Really the purpose of the fund is to create a collective belief that there is a pathway to getting these companies funded. If you have that collective belief, then it’s much easier for a lead investor to step forward and to pull a few other people in.”
Anderson acknowledged that a $300 million fund will not go “nearly far enough.”
“It’s a starter fund. It’s a proof of concept,” he told me. “The world needs to make a couple hundred of these bets at some point.”
Other coalitions, such as the Climate Tech Atlas, are working to steer the sector towards the best bets. This group — which also includes Breakthrough Energy Ventures, alongside others such as the nonprofit investment platform Elemental Impact, the consulting firm McKinsey, and Stanford University’s Doerr School of Sustainability — has mapped out the technological milestones it sees as the clearest pathways to decarbonization. The aim is to help investors, founders, policymakers and academics alike direct their energies towards the most relevant and investable opportunities, regardless of political headwinds.
“The scale at which the government participates in the development of these new technologies — or puts a thumb on the scale for technologies in particular — will vary,” Sonia Aggarwal, CEO of the policy firm Energy Innovation, which is also a member of the alliance, told me. “But certainly that has no real bearing on the fundamental fact that innovators are out there right now thinking about these grand challenges, and there are exciting new ideas for technologies that can get to that commercial scale in the coming years.”
And indeed, sometimes the most promising ideas can take shape in moments of deep uncertainty. Some of the biggest success stories of recent tech history — Uber, Airbnb, WhatsApp, and Square — all got their start during the 2008 financial crisis or its aftermath. “Some of the strongest companies and founders are building in uncertain times,” Dawn Lippert, founder and CEO of Elemental Impact, told me. “That’s very much what we see right now.”
These groups are far from the only private-sector actors coming together to help navigate industry headwinds. When the Environmental Protection Agency withdrew support for the most widely used U.S.-based carbon accounting model for estimating scope 3 emissions, leading emissions accounting platform Watershed partnered with Stanford University’s Sustainable Solutions Lab to launch an initiative that ensures continued access. And recognizing the difficulty that early stage climate tech startups face in securing insurance, the nonprofit GreenRE Coalition and the philanthropic funder Trellis Climate partnered to create a new type of bond tailored to the needs of climate tech startups.
Whether it will all be enough to accelerate or even sustain much-needed momentum in climate tech funding is impossible to predict. But at least the private sector seems to agree that, in this moment, good old teamwork is worth one heck of a try.
His administration has zeroed in on $18 billion of projects that just so happen to be in Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries’ hometown.
The shutdown punishment has begun, and it’s aimed at New York City.
Russ Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget announced Wednesday on X that “roughly $18 billion in New York City infrastructure projects have been put on hold to ensure funding is not flowing based on unconstitutional DEI principles.” That includes funding for the Second Avenue Subway extension and the Gateway Program, a proposed rail tunnel connecting New York City and New Jersey.
While Vought did not refer to the government shutdown specifically in his announcement, the timing is, shall we say, noteworthy, not least because the Democrats’ two top congressional negotiators — Representative Hakeem Jeffries and Senator Chuck Schumer — are both from New York. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy later made the link explicit, clarifying in a statement that the real issue with the two projects was a recently released rule — as in, published on Tuesday — “barring race- and sex-based contracting requirements from federal grants.”
There would be a review of the two projects “to determine whether any unconstitutional practices are occurring,” Duffy said, and “until USDOT’s quick administrative review is complete, project reimbursements cannot be processed.” Those reviews “will take more time” thanks to the shutdown, he wrote, reaching his denouement, as “without a budget, the Department has been forced to furlough the civil rights staff responsible for conducting this review.”
The politics behind this gambit are obvious. President Trump has consistently threatened to withhold funding from states, cities, and institutions controlled by or connected to his political opponents.
“I think they very much understand the political dynamics of trying to make an example of New York. They understand where Chuck Schumer lives,” Jackson Moore-Otto, transportation fellow at the Center for Public Enterprise, told me.
The White House wasn’t exactly running away from the political implications of the denial of funding on Wednesday.Vice President J.D. Vance arched a metaphorical eyebrow during a press conference, saying that “I'm sure that Russ is heartbroken about the fact that he is unable to give certain things to certain constituencies.”
Trump has also specifically threatened federal funding for New York City if Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani wins the upcoming mayoral election.
Duffy himself could not have been any more obvious about what he is trying to achieve by slowing down this funding. “This is another unfortunate casualty of radical Democrats’ reckless decision to hold the federal government hostage to give illegal immigrants benefits,” his statement said, while also specifically calling out the two Democratic congressional leaders, saying that the delayed review was “thanks to the Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jefferies [sic] shutdown.”
The legality of this — and its legitimate connection to the shutdown — is not so clear.
“It’s pure political maneuvering if you read the statement closely,” David Super, a law professor at Georgetown, told me. “They’re trying to blame the shutdown for slowing their review, but they’re also effectively saying that they’re considering New York in violation of their standards.”
Super also flagged several constitutional and legal issues with the action.
“The funding allocated through laborious means to the Hudson tunnel and Second Avenue Subway is a property right that entities in New York have,” he told me. “The idea that that can be interfered with because someone wants to do an investigation is a blatant violation of due process.”
While it is possible that purported civil rights violations could lead to funding being blocked, “that would have to be established through procedure, not suspicions that they’re doing something wrong,” Super said.
The new rule Duffy referenced addresses a specific set of programs established under the Small Business Act that are designed to give organizations controlled by “socially and economically disadvantaged individuals,” i.e. “women and members of certain racial and ethnic groups,” a shot at winning government contracts.
The DOT argues that under these programs, “two similarly situated small business owners may face different standards for entering the program, based solely on their race, ethnicity, or sex,” and that the rules and legislation defining them violate equal protection as set out in recent federal court decisions and Trump executive orders.
The rule that Duffy cites as justification for his actions is itself constitutionally suspect, Super said. “The Administrative Procedure Act requires public comment on new rules, subject to limited exceptions,” which this did not have.
The slapdash way the rule has been rolled out could open up the DOT to lawsuits, whether from the Metropolitan Transit Authority, which oversees the New York City subway, or another entity involved with the Hudson tunnel project.
“Courts throughout history have insisted public comment is important,” Super said. The DOT is “violating procedures for issuing this policy and violating due process in the way they apply it.”
Moore-Otto also pointed out that the DOT release makes no specific claim that these projects are violating the rule.
“What they’re saying, it appears to me, is, New York might be doing this thing that we’ve just decided is illegal and we’re going to cut off your funding and it’s going to take longer because our lawyers aren’t being paid,” he said.
And there are broader issues around infrastructure policy at play beyond the obvious political gamesmanship, Moore-Otto pointed out. Duffy’s announcement links the supposedly unconstitutional women and minority contracting practices to the high costs that plague American infrastructure projects, saying they’re a “waste of taxpayer resources.”
But, Moore-Otto argued, what really ails U.S. infrastructure projects are extensive administrative reviews and the start-stop nature of project development.
“I think people would broadly agree the U.S. takes too much time and money to deliver infrastructure projects, and they are trying to invoke this as a pretext,” Moore-Otto said. “What strikes me as noteworthy is that when we look at why the U.S. does, in fact, take so long and use so much money building, while the rest of the world builds faster and cheaper, is that there’s a lot of stopping and starting of these infrastructure projects.”
“Assuming it’s a prolonged delay, it’s going to probably drive up costs — even though they’re saying it is a cost saving measure,” Moore-Otto added. “I think that should not be lost on anybody.”
On a potential deregulatory slowdown, community solar’s dimming, and Pope Leo on climate
Current conditions: Tropical Storm Imelda is set to gain intensity this week and whip the southeastern U.S. with soaking rain and storm surge • Frigid night air is forecast across northern New England • Typhoon Bualoi is flooding broad swaths of Vietnam, Thailand, and Laos.
The federal government is closed.Kent Nishimura/Getty Images
The federal government shut down at 12:01 a.m. this morning after President Donald Trump and Republicans failed to reach a deal with Democrats in Congress on a bill to keep its funding flowing. That could slow the Environmental Protection Agency’s deregulatory effort, E&E News reported Tuesday. “The political crisis that threatens to shutter much of the federal bureaucracy at midnight comes as Administrator Lee Zeldin is racing to unravel high-profile rules on things like climate science, vehicle pollution, power plants, oil and gas wells, and carbon emissions reporting,” reporter Jean Chemnick wrote. An abrupt halt to the agency’s activities would at the very least set back Zeldin’s reform effort, including an agency reorganization set to begin this month.
The Department of the Interior, meanwhile, sent employees an email Tuesday warning that the agency “has contingency plans in place for executing an orderly shutdown of activities that would be affected by any lapse in appropriations forced by Congressional Democrats.” Neither Interior nor the EPA had published updated shutdown plans taking into account staff reductions under the current Trump administration as of Tuesday.
When the Department of Defense bought a 15% stake in MP Materials, the continent’s only active rare earths mine, The Economist called it the most significant entry by the federal government into a private market since the railroads were nationalized in World War I. (Biden administration officials were admittedly jealous, as Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin reported.) Now the Trump administration has taken another share of a major mineral project. The Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office said Tuesday that it had renegotiated a multi-billion-dollar loan to back construction of Lithium Americas’ Thacker Pass lithium mine in Nevada. The project, on track to become the Western Hemisphere’s largest lithium producer by 2028, will transform a remote stretch of high Nevada desert into a lithium clay mine, harvesting from one of the world’s richest known deposits.
Under the new deal, the federal government will take a 5% equity stake in Lithium Americas and an additional 5% ownership of the company’s joint venture with General Motors. The Energy Department called its stakes “part of the overall collateral package on a loan, helping to reduce repayment risk for taxpayers.” But the announcement said the “revised agreement” includes “robust loan amendments,” notably “more than $100 million of new equity.”
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Community solar installations are plunging. After a record-breaking 2024, installations of new panels in small-scale cooperative or community solar projects dropped 36% in the first half of this year compared to the same period last year. The passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act slashed the cumulative five-year outlook for community solar by 8% compared to the outlook before the legislation repealed vast chunks of the Inflation Reduction Act. That’s according to a new analysis from Wood Mackenzie.
Yet Jeff Cramer, the chief executive of the Coalition for Community Solar Access, said states are stepping up “with historic expansions like New Jersey’s 3,000 megawatts and Massachusetts’ 900 megawatts.” He added: “These bright spots show what’s possible when policymakers work to unlock capacity. At the same time, this report makes clear the challenges ahead — from federal uncertainty to interconnection delays and program caps — that must be addressed to realize the full potential of community solar and deliver the resilient, affordable power communities are asking for.”
Most Americans say that rising electricity prices have at least “a decent amount” of impact on household finances. “Still, for about 40% of the country, those high prices are more a pinch than a pain,” Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer wrote. That’s the finding of a new Heatmap Pro poll on rising rates. The results had some predictable outcomes, including that more than 70% of voters with household incomes below $50,000 said rising bills were a problem with “a lot of" impact on spending. Upward of 62% of voters earning less than $100,000 described similar issues, as did 59% of white voters without a college degree.
It’s been difficult for “Vatican-watchers” to pin down Pope Leo XIV’s views on most issues. But “on climate change,” The New York Times wrote on Tuesday, “it is clear that he is moved by the topic, and particularly its disproportionate harm to poor and vulnerable people.” The world is about to get a lot more clarity on his views. On Wednesday, the Pontiff is scheduled to give his first address on climate change at a conference taking place at the Papal Palace of Castel Gandolfo.
The remarks come on the 10th anniversary of Laudato Si, a groundbreaking papal document written by the late Pope Francis that overhauled the Catholic Church’s teachings on climate change. The 2015 encyclical was widely credited with pushing forward carbon-cutting negotiations at the global climate summit in Paris that year.
Africa's biggest petrostate is having a solar boom. Nigeria became Africa’s second-largest importer of solar panels over the past year by overtaking Egypt. The imports total 1.7 gigawatts. “It is a response to a problem … You can’t rely on a 24/7 grid in most parts of Nigeria at the moment,” Ashvin Dayal, senior vice-president of power at Rockefeller Foundation, which backed the mini-grid project, told the Financial Times. “Demand is booming for reliable, affordable electricity both for inside the home, but also to run small businesses, to run agricultural appliances, to increase productivity and incomes.”