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Lawmakers today should study the Energy Security Act of 1980.
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.
Five years ago, China’s longtime leader Xi Jinping shocked and delighted the world by declaring in a video presentation to the United Nations that his country would peak its carbon emissions this decade and achieve carbon neutrality by 2060. He tried to rekindle that magic late last month in another virtual address to the UN, announcing China’s updated pledge under the Paris Agreement.
This time, the reaction was far more tepid. Given the disastrous state of American climate policy under President Donald Trump, some observers declared — as the longtime expert Li Shuo did in The New York Times — that China is “the adult in the room on climate now.” Most others were disappointed, arguing that China had merely “played it safe” and pointing out the new pledge “falls well short” of what’s needed to hit the Paris Agreement’s targets.
Yet China’s dithering is more than just an environmental failure — it is a governing mistake. China’s weak climate pledge isn’t just bad news for the world; it shows an indecisive leadership that is undermining its country’s own competitiveness by sticking with dirty coal rather than transitioning rapidly to a cleaner future.
The new pledge — known in UN jargon as a nationally determined contribution, or NDC — reveals a disconnect between the government’s official position and the optimistic discourse that now surrounds China’s clean energy sector. China today is described as the world’s first electrostate; it stands at the vanguard of the solar and EV revolution, some say, ready to remake the world order against a coalition of petrostate dinosaurs.
The NDC makes it obvious that the Chinese government does not yet view itself in such a fashion. China might look like an adult, but it more closely resembles a gangly teenager who is still getting used to their body after a growth spurt. As the analyst Kingsmill Bond recently put it on Heatmap’s podcast Shift Key, Chinese clean tech manufacturers have unlocked a cleaner and cheaper path to economic development. It isn’t yet clear that China is brave enough to commit to it. If China is the adult in the room, in other words, we’re screwed.
Let’s start by giving credit where due. For a country that had never offered an absolute emissions reduction target before, Xi’s promise — to cut emissions by 7% to 10% by 2035 — is a kind of progress. But observers expected China to go much further. Researchers at the University of Maryland and the Center for Research on Clean Air, for example, each suggested that emissions could decline by roughly 30% by that year. Only a reduction of this magnitude would actually keep the planet on a trajectory sufficiently close to the Paris Agreement’s goal to limit warming to 2 degrees Celsius.
Many inside China’s policy apparatus considered such ambitious cuts to be infeasible; for instance, Teng Fei, deputy director of Tsinghua University’s Institute of Energy, Environment and Economy, described a 30% reduction as “extreme.” Conversations with knowledgeable insiders, however, suggested a headline reduction of up to 15% was viewed as plausible. In that light, the decision to commit a mere 7% to 10% can only be seen as disappointing.
The NDC obviously represents a floor and not a ceiling, and China has historically only made climate promises that it knows it will keep. But even then, China’s leadership has given itself tremendous wiggle room. This can be seen in part by what is not in Xi’s pledge: any firm commitment about when, exactly, China’s emissions will peak. (His previous pledge only said that it would happen in the 2020s.) While it’s quite possible that 2024 or 2025 will end up being the peak, as some expect, the new pledge creates a perverse incentive to delay and pollute more now. The speech also contained little on non-CO2 greenhouse gases such as methane and nitrous oxide — which, given China’s previous commitment to reach net zero on all warming gases by 2060, seems like a significant blind spot.
Other commitments are only impressive until you scratch the surface. Xi pledged that China would install 3,600 gigawatts of solar and wind capacity by 2035. That may sound daunting: The United States, the world’s No. 2 country for renewables capacity, has a combined 400 gigawatts of solar and wind. But China already has about 1,600 gigawatts installed. So China’s promise, in essence, is to add around 200 gigawatts of solar and wind each year until 2035 — and while that would be a huge number for any other country, it actually represents a significant slowdown for China. The country added 360 gigawatts of wind and solar combined last year, and has already installed more than 200 gigawatts of solar alone in the first eight months of this one. In this light, China’s renewables pledge seems ominous.
More distressingly for climate action, it is unclear if this comparatively slower pace of clean electricity addition will actually allow China’s electricity sector to decarbonize. As the electricity analyst David Fishman has noted, China’s overall electricity demand grew faster than its clean electricity generation last year, leaving a roughly 100 terawatt-hour gap — despite all that new solar and wind (and despite 16 gigawatts of new nuclear and hydroelectric power plants, too). Coal filled this gap. Last year, China began construction of almost 100 gigawatts of new coal plants even though its existing coal fleet already operates less than half of the time. These new plants represented more than 90% of the world’s new coal capacity in 2024.
China’s climate strategy — like every other country’s — requires electrifying large swaths of its economy. If new renewables diminish to only 200 gigawatts a year, then it seems implausible that its renewable additions could meet demand growth — let alone eat away substantial amounts of coal-fired generation — unless its economic growth significantly slows.
Yet the news gets worse. Taken alone, the NDC’s weakness may speak of mere caution on China’s part, yet a number of policy changes to China’s electricity markets and industrial policy over the past year suggest its government is now slow-walking the energy transition.
In 2024, for instance, China started making capacity payments to coal-fired power plants. These payments were ostensibly designed to lubricate a plant’s economics as it shifted from 24/7 operation to a supporting role backing up wind and solar. Yet only coal plants — and not, for instance, batteries — were offered these funds, even though batteries can play a similar role more cheaply and China already makes them in scads. Even more striking, coal plants have been pocketing these funds without changing their behavior or even producing less electricity
At the same time, China’s central leadership has cut the revenues that new solar and wind farms receive from generating power. New solar and wind plants are now scheduled to receive less than the same benchmark price that coal receives — although the details of that discount vary by province and remain uncertain in most of them. Observers hope that this lower price, along with a more market-based dispatch scheme, will eventually allow renewables-heavy electricity systems to charge lower rates to consumers and displace more expensive coal power. However, there’s little clarity on if and when that will happen, and in the meantime, new renewables installations are plummeting as developers wait for more information to emerge.
Chinese industrial policy is exacerbating these trends. The world has long talked about Chinese overcapacity. Now even conversation in the Western media has progressed to discussing “involution” — a broader term that centers on the intensive competition that characterizes Chinese capitalism (and society). It suggests that Chinese firms are competing themselves out of business.
The market-leader BYD, for instance, has become synonymous with the Chinese battery-powered auto renaissance, but there are fears that even this seeming titan might have corrupted itself on the way. The company has larded an incredible amount of debt onto its books to fuel its race to the top of the sales charts; now, murmurs abound that the firm might be “the Evergrande of EVs” — a reference to the housing developer that collapsed into bankruptcy earlier this decade with hundreds of billions of dollars in debt. In recent months, BYD’s engine seems to be sputtering, with sales dropping in September 2025 compared with last year.
As such, the government has come in to try to negotiate new terms of competition so that firms do not end up doing irreparable harm to themselves and their future prospects. It is doing so in other sectors as well: In solar, it has tried to create a cartel of polysilicon manufacturers, a solar OPEC of sorts, to make sure that the pricing of that key input to the photovoltaic supply chain is at a level where the producers can survive.
This may all seem positive — and there is certainly an argument that the government could play a role in helping these new sectors negotiate the difficult waters that they find themselves in. But I interpret these efforts as further slow-walking of the energy transition. A slight reframing can help to understand why.
What is literally happening in these meetings? The government is bringing private actors into the same room to bang their heads together and deal with the reality that the current economic system is not working, largely because of intense competition — a problem likely best solved by forcing some of the firms and production capacity to shrink. Firms are unprofitable because exuberant supply has zoomed past current demand, and the country’s markets and politics are not prepared to navigate the potentially needed bankruptcies or their fallout. So the government is intervening, designing actions to generate the outcomes it desires.
Yet there is something contradictory about the government’s approach. A decarbonized world, after all, will be a world without significant numbers of internal combustion vehicles, so traditional automakers will eventually need to shut down or shift into EVs — yet their executives aren’t being dragged in for the same scolding. Likewise, a decarbonized world will be a world without as many coal mines and coal-fired power plants. Firms in the power sector should be scolded for continuing coal production at scale.
These are problems of the mid-transition, as the scholars Emily Grubert and Sara Hastings-Simon have described decarbonization’s current era. But China is further along in this transition than other states, and it could lead in the management and planning required for the transition as well.
China is stuck. For four decades, China’s growth rested on moving abundant cheap labor from low-productivity agriculture to higher productivity sectors, often in urban areas. The physical construction of China’s cities underpinned this development and became its own distorting bubble, launching a cycle of real-estate speculation. The government pricked this bubble in 2020, but since then, Chinese macroeconomic strength has failed to return.
Despite the glimmering nature of its most modern cities, China remains decidedly middle income, with a GDP per capita equivalent to Serbia. Many countries that have grown out of poverty have reached this middle income territory — but then become mired there rather than continuing to develop. This pattern, described as “the middle income trap,” has worried Chinese policymakers for years.
The country is obviously hoping that its new clean industries can offer a substitute motor to power China out of its middle-income status. Its leadership’s apparent decision to slow walk the energy transition, however, looks like a classic example of this “trap.” The leadership seems unwilling to jettison older industries in favor of the higher-value added industries of the future. The fact that the government has previously subsidized these industries just shows the complexity of the political economy challenges facing the regime.
The NDC’s announcement could be seen as an easy win given Trump’s climate backwardness. Clearly that’s what Xi was counting on. But China is too important to be understood only in contrast to the United States — and we should not applaud something that not only fails to recognize global climate targets, but also underplays China’s own development strategy. The country is nearing the release of its next five-year plan. Perhaps that document will incorporate more ambitious targets for the energy transition and decarbonization.
This summer, I visited Ordos in Inner Mongolia, a coal mining region that is now also home to some of China’s huge renewable energy megabases and a zero-carbon industrial park. Tens of thousands still labor in Ordos’ mines and coal-hungry factories, yet they seem like a relic of an earlier age when compared to the scale and precision of the new green industrial facilities. The dirty coal mines may still have history and profits on their side, but it is clear that the future will see their decline and replacement with green technology. I hope that Xi Jinping and the rest of the Chinese political elite come to the same conclusion, and fast.
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.
