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Why America’s environmental institutions should embrace a solutions mindset
If it turns out to be a bubble, billions of dollars of energy assets will be on the line.
The president of the Clean Economy Project calls for a new approach to advocacy — or as she calls it, a “third front.”
One of the world’s leading climate scientists agrees with Gates in spirit, but thinks we can go much further in practice.
The New York mayoral frontrunner has an opportunity to shift the left’s increasingly nonsensical position on a critical carbon-free energy source.
The country’s underwhelming new climate pledge is more than just bad news for the world — it reveals a serious governing mistake.
Harmonizing data across federal agencies will go a long, long way toward simplifying environmental reviews.
Comprehensive permitting reform remains elusive.
In spite of numerous promising attempts — the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023, for instance, which delivered only limited improvements, and the failed Manchin-Barrasso bill of last year — the U.S. has repeatedly failed to overhaul its clogged federal infrastructure approval process. Even now there are draft bills and agreements in principle, but the Trump administration’s animus towards renewable energy has undermined Democratic faith in any deal. Less obvious but no less important, key Republicans are quietly disengaged, hesitant to embrace the federal transmission reform that negotiators see as essential to the package.
Despite this grim prognosis, Congress could still improve implementation of a key permitting barrier, the National Environmental Policy Act, by fixing the federal government’s broken systems for managing and sharing NEPA documentation and data. These opaque and incompatible systems frustrate essential interagency coordination, contributing immeasurably to NEPA’s delays and frustrations. But it’s a problem with clear, available, workable solutions — and at low political cost.
Both of us saw these problems firsthand. Marc helped manage NEPA implementation at the Environmental Protection Agency, observing the federal government’s slow and often flailing attempts to use technology to improve internal agency processes. Elizabeth, meanwhile, spent two years overcoming NEPA’s atomized data ecosystem to create a comprehensive picture of NEPA litigation.
Even so, it’s difficult to illustrate the scope of the problem without experiencing it. Some agencies have bespoke systems to house crucial and unique geographic information on project areas. Other agencies lack ready access to that information, even as they examine project impacts another agency may have already studied. Similarly, there is no central database of scientific studies undertaken in support of environmental reviews. Some agencies maintain repositories for their environmental assessments — arduous but less intense environmental reviews than the environmental impact statements NEPA requires when a federal agency action substantially impacts the environment. But there’s still no unified, cross-agency EA database. This leaves agencies unable to efficiently find and leverage work that could inform their own reviews. Indeed, agencies may be duplicating or re-duplicating tedious, time-consuming efforts.
NEPA implementation also relies on interagency cooperation. There, too, agencies’ divergent ways of classifying and communicating about project data throws up impediments. Agencies rely on arcane data formats and often incompatible platforms. (For the tech-savvy, an agency might have a PDF-only repository while another has XML-based data formats.) With few exceptions, it’s difficult for cooperating agencies to even know the status of a given review. And it produces a comedy of errors for agencies trying to recruit and develop younger, tech-savvy staff. Your workplace might use something like Asana or Trello to guide your workflow, a common language all teams use to communicate. The federal government has a bureaucratic Tower of Babel.
Yet another problem, symptomatic of inadequate transparency, is that we have only limited data on the thousands of NEPA court cases. To close the gap, we sought to understand — using data — just how sprawling and unwieldy post-review NEPA litigation had become. We read every available district and appellate opinion that mentioned NEPA from 2013 to 2022 (over 2,000 cases), screened out those without substantive NEPA claims, and catalogued their key characteristics — plaintiffs, court timelines and outcomes, agencies, project types, and so on. Before we did this work, no national NEPA litigation database provided policymakers with actionable, data-driven insights into court outcomes for America’s most-litigated environmental statute. But even our painstaking efforts couldn’t unearth a full dataset that included, for example, decisions taken by administrative judges within agencies.
We can’t manage what we can’t measure. And every study in this space, including ours, struggles with this type of sample bias. Litigated opinions are neither random nor representative; they skew toward high-stakes disputes with uncertain outcomes and underrepresent cases that settle on clear agency error or are dismissed early for weak claims. Our database illuminates litigation patterns and timelines. But like the rest of the literature, it cannot offer firm conclusions about NEPA’s effectiveness. We need a more reliable universe of all NEPA reviews to have any chance — even a flawed one — at assessing the law’s outcomes.
In the meantime, NEPA policy debates often revolve unproductively around assumptions and anecdotes. For example, Democrats can point to instances when early and robust public engagement appeared essential for bringing projects to completion. But in the absence of hard data to support this view, GOP reformers often prefer to limit public participation in the name of speeding the review process. The rebuttal to that approach is persuasive: Failing to engage potential project opponents on their legitimate concerns merely drives them to interfere with the project outside the NEPA process. Yet this rebuttal relies on assumptions, not evidence. Only transparent data can resolve the dispute.
Some of the necessary repair work is already underway at the Council on Environmental Quality, the White House entity that coordinates and guides agencies’ NEPA implementation. In May, CEQ published a “NEPA and Permitting Data and Technology Standard” so that agencies could voluntarily align on how to communicate NEPA information with each other. Then in June, after years using a lumbering Excel file containing agencies’ categorical exclusions — the types of projects that don’t need NEPA review, as determined by law or regulation — CEQ unveiled a searchable database called the Categorical Exclusion Explorer. The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory’s PermitAI has leveraged the EPA’s repository of environmental impact statements and, more recently, environmental review documents from other agencies to create an AI-powered queryable database. The FAST-41 Dashboard has brought transparency and accountability to a limited number of EISs.
But across all these efforts, huge gaps in data, resources, and enforcement authority remain. President Trump has issued directives to agencies to speed environmental reviews, evincing an interest in filling the gaps. But those directives don’t and can’t compel the full scope of necessary technological changes.
Some members of Congress are tuned in and trying to do something about this. Representatives Scott Peters, a Democrat from California, and Dusty Johnson, Republican of South Dakota, deserve credit for introducing the bipartisan ePermit Act to address all of these challenges. They’ve identified key levers to improve interagency communication, track litigation, and create a common and publicly accessible storehouse of NEPA data. Crucially, they recognize the make-or-break role of agency Chief Information Officers who are accountable for information security. Our own attempts to upgrade agency technology taught us that the best way to do so is by working with — not around — CIOs who have a statutory mandate.
The ePermit Act would also lay the groundwork for more extensive and innovative deployment of artificial intelligence in NEPA processes. Despite AI’s continuing challenges around information accuracy and traceability, large language models may eventually be able to draft the majority of an EIS on their own, with humans involved to oversee.
AI can also address hidden pain points in the NEPA process. It can hasten the laborious summarization and incorporation of public comment, reducing the legal and practical risk that agencies miss crucial public feedback. It can also help determine whether sponsor applications are complete, frequently a point of friction between sponsors and agencies. AI can also assess whether projects could be adapted to a categorical exclusion, entirely removing unnecessary reviews. And finally, AI tools are a concession to the rapid turnover of NEPA personnel and depleted institutional knowledge — an acute problem of late.
Comprehensive, multi-agency legislation like the ePermit Act will take time to implement — Congress may want or even need to reform NEPA before we get the full benefit of technology improvements. But that does not diminish the urgency or value of this effort. Even Representative Jared Huffman of California, a key Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee with impeccable environmental credentials, offered words of support for the ePermit Act, while opposing other NEPA reforms.
Regardless of what NEPA looks like in coming years, this work must begin at some point. Under every flavor of NEPA reform, agencies will need to share data, coordinate across platforms, and process information. That remains true even as court-driven legal reforms and Trump administration regulatory changes wreak havoc with NEPA’s substance and implementation. Indeed, whether or not courts, Congress, or the administration reduce NEPA’s reach, even truncated reviews would still be handicapped by broken systems. Fixing the technology infrastructure now is a way to future-proof NEPA.
The solution won’t be as simple as getting agencies to use Microsoft products. It’s long past time to give agencies the tools they need — an interoperable, government-wide platform for NEPA data and project management, supported by large language models. This is no simple task. To reap the full benefits of these solutions will require an act of Congress that both provides funding for multi-agency software and requires all agencies to act in concert. This mandate is necessary to induce movement from actors within agencies who are slow to respond to non-binding CEQ directives that take time away from statutorily required work, or those who resist discretionary changes to agency software as cybersecurity risks, no matter how benign those changes may be. Without appropriated money or congressional edict, the government’s efforts in this area will lack the resources and enforcement levers to ensure reforms take hold.
Technology improvements won’t cure everything that ails NEPA. This bill won’t fix the deep uncertainty unleashed by the legal chaos of the last year. But addressing these issues is a no-regrets move with bipartisan and potentially even White House support. Let it be done.
Climate policy strategist Justin Guay has a populist pitch for our warming world.
There’s a famous saying in management circles: Culture eats strategy for breakfast.
In a warming world marked by populist politics, the climate equivalent might be: Culture eats climate policy for breakfast.
As air conditioning becomes the latest front in the culture wars, climate hawks would be wise to avoid the culture war trap being set. Instead we should meet the world where it is with a simple, culturally relevant, and popular approach that keeps people cool on a warming planet — a heat pump populism for the masses.
As the climate warms, increasing numbers of cities, regions, and countries are being faced with an uncomfortable new reality — their built environments weren’t built for this environment. Heat waves like the “once in a millennium” Pacific Northwest heat dome of 2021 or this year’s “warmest summer on record” for the UK — which has kept track of such things since 1884 — are driving the need for air conditioning in places it hasn’t historically been required.
The new air conditioning units installed in response to these heat waves drive up already significant electricity consumption — and greenhouse gas emissions in the process. Air conditioning emissions alone account for 3% of global emissions, and are projected to grow significantly as AC unit sales triple by 2050. In China, which also saw heat records fall this summer, air conditioner sales doubled from June to July.
The climate community has responded with concern about the climate doom loop this represents. The impacts of climate change — most pertinently in this case, increased temperatures — unleash more air conditioning usage, which only exacerbates the underlying problem of climate change, itself.
But there’s another, far more sinister doom loop climate hawks should fear — a doom loop that undermines the political resilience necessary to respond to climate change at all.
This doom loop begins with climate impacts that directly harm average people, generating resentment towards existing institutions — notably the ruling government — that anti-climate populist politicians seize on to aid their rise to power. That in turn leads to anticlimate policymaking that exacerbates the underlying problem, climate change, unleashing yet more impacts. And on and on the cycle goes.
Take for example what happened following the historic flooding in Spain’s Valencia region last fall. Rather than looking to address the underlying causes of the catastrophe, including climate change, populist anti-climate parties seized on the perceived inability of mainstream politics to deal with the situation. They instead sought to sow distrust and climate denial by painting the government as inept and incapable of helping people in their time of need, thereby bolstering their case to overthrow the powers that be.
That appears to be a page from the same playbook populists all over Europe are now using after heat waves gripped a region where air conditioning use is projected to grow by 40% by 2050, compared to the historical average from the last decade. From France to the UK, anti-climate populists are seeking to paint the political left — particularly climate-minded parties — as out of touch radicals bent on denying the sweaty masses their relief. As Nicolas Bouzou, the French liberal economist and essayist, put it recently: “The left is against air conditioners, and the right is in favor.”
In other words, the anti-climate right is actively laying a climate doom loop trap — and it appears that at least some members of the climate community are walking right into it. In the UK, 58% of Green Party voters support discouraging AC installation to cope with heat waves. Meanwhile, in France, the head of the French Green party reportedly “scoffed” at Marine Le Pen’s proposal to deploy air conditioners as part of her policy platform, instead, he offered more energy-efficient buildings as a solution. France’s left-wing daily Liberation called AC “an environmental aberration that must be overcome.”
But what if climate hawks attempted some political jiu jitsu instead? What if we decided to make some lemonade out of these lemons? What if, and hear me out, we decided to scold a little less and push abundance a little more? What if, in a hotter world, we stood for something cool?
May I present: the humble heat pump, otherwise known as a two-way AC, i.e. just the opportunity climate advocates should be looking for. The heat pump is essentially an AC unit that can heat as well as cool. Most AC companies don’t unlock the heating capability because it adds to their manufacturing costs — generally $200 to $500 — to do so. If that modest cost were not an issue, AC manufacturers could not only help deploy desperately needed relief from extreme temperatures and rising costs, they could also deploy cheaper, clean and fossil fuel-free heating at the same time.
That’s the argument Nate Adams and the team at the Collaborative Labeling and Appliance Standards Program — otherwise known as Clasp, a nonprofit organization focused on improving the efficiency of everyday appliances and equipment — made when they called for a supply-side intervention to make heat pumps affordable and universally available. Rather than subsidizing heat pump purchases and hoping homeowners take advantage, we should incentivize AC manufacturers and distributors to exclusively sell two-way air conditioners moving forward — no more one-way AC.
Under such a policy, participating manufacturers or distributors would receive a few-hundred-dollar incentive for every two-way AC (i.e. heat pump) sold. That subsidy would decline over time as manufacturers convert production lines and costs come down. Crucially, any participating company would have to commit to stop producing one-way ACs. In addition, governments and participating manufacturers would be wise to invest in training and education programs for HVAC contractors to speed deployment and support consumer education.
The Clasp team calculates that a program like this would cost somewhere between $3 billion to $12 billion in the United States and result in 45 million new two-way ACs deployed, which would save citizens $27 billion in direct energy costs and $80 billion in indirect societal benefits — such as, yes, mitigating climate change.
As I’ve argued previously alongside Nate, the shift in policy focus from consumers to manufacturers and suppliers is really, really important. Most AC replacement purchases are driven by existing equipment breaking down — and now by historic heat waves setting in — which causes panic-buying. That almost always leads people to buy the first replacement they can find, and that’s almost never a heat pump.
If we instead incentivize manufacturers to ensure that heat pumps and only heat pumps are on hardware and home goods store shelves and make it easy for average people to buy and install them by educating HVAC installers around their benefits then we solve this problem. Heat pumps become the default.
Now map that policy onto the political landscape. Imagine that instead of climate-oriented politicians being perceived as out of touch radicals who want to ban air conditioning, we have political leaders using the next inevitable heat wave to announce a new policy of abundant air conditioning for all. That alone won’t win the culture war — it will still require savvy salesmanship to make the pitch land with voters, not to mention digital acumen of a sort the left seems woefully behind in developing. But the ingredients are there, if only our leaders are willing and able to seize on them.
Ironically, as wildfires now ravage Spain, the country’s center-left prime minister is now calling for a national climate pact. His call is a beacon of hope that the climate doom loop can indeed be broken by forward-looking politicians who realize that we must address the underlying cause of these impacts before it’s too late.
It’s time others follow his lead and use these moments of visceral climate impact to drive climate policy forward with an unabashedly populist policy agenda. That’s how we take the bite out of the air conditioning culture war before it even begins. And maybe, just maybe, it’s how we begin to reclaim our politics.
