This week’s conversation is with Rep. Sean Casten, co-chair of the House Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition – a group of climate hawkish Democratic lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives. Casten and another lawmaker, Rep. Mike Levin, recently released the coalition’s priority permitting reform package known as the Cheap Energy Act, which stands in stark contrast to many of the permitting ideas gaining Republican support in Congress today. I reached out to talk about the state of play on permitting, where renewables projects fit on Democrats’ priority list in bipartisan talks, and whether lawmakers will ever address the major barrier we talk about every week here in The Fight: local control. Our chat wound up immensely informative and this is maybe my favorite Q&A I’ve had the liberty to write so far in this newsletter’s history.
The following conversation was lightly edited for clarity.
Okay, so to start, how does the Cheap Energy Act fit into the bipartisan permitting talks?
There are two separate theories about how Congress is supposed to work, and neither of these theories is universally true but I think they inform two different approaches: do you believe the purpose of Congress is to craft good policy and then put together political consensus to put that policy forward or do you think the purpose of Congress is to find where political compromise exists and then advance the policy that can proceed along that constraint?
Depending on the situation you take Door 1 or you take Door 2.
What Mike Levin and I have tried to do with our Cheap Energy Act is to say, let’s identify the barriers to deploying cheap energy in the United States, let’s try to find the policy that’ll help consumers first and then try to get that policy done. That approach – because of the way our politics is geographically sorted out in our country – implies a wealth transfer from energy producers to energy consumers. And energy producers in this country tend to be dominant in Republican areas. That’s where coal mining is, oil and gas, logging. And energy consumers are where the population is, which skews Democratic. So on a bipartisan basis you really can’t put consumers first because that is detrimental to producers.
I think that’s why you have these two different approaches going on. I guess I have a bias towards our approach but I think we have to be very candid that the other approach does not remove the barriers to cheap energy. It removes the barriers to dirty energy.
To an overwhelming degree, and I’m slightly exaggerating, but there really aren’t permitting barriers to clean energy. There are a lot of permitting barriers to dirty energy. Which is not to say you can’t weaponize the permitting system to stop clean energy from going forward. But if you’re building a solar farm and it has to have a wire that connects it to a load, your environmental footprint is very small.
Now we’ve done some things in our bill to pre-identify corridors where there is minimal species disruptions, minimal disruption of historical artifacts, and say these are corridors where you can build things fast without guessing. Let’s not kid ourselves here: the Antiquities Act exists for a reason, the Endangered Species Act exists for a reason, and the Clean Water Act exists for a reason. But the footprint of those projects environmentally is just much, much smaller than an oil rig and a pipeline and a refinery because all of those things have the potential to leak nasty chemicals that permanently defile the air, land, and water in the vicinity.
The challenge that manifests through permitting is that if I want to lower your cost of energy, that means by definition I am undercutting your current energy provider. For the most part, that provider has undue power over whether or not you get a permit. And they have an incentive to start pamphleting the neighbors around a new transmission line, for example, to say a line is going to lower people’s property values. That’s because it is an economic threat. The reason I know that’s not an issue is you never see utilities struggle to get a new wire.
I previously reported on how the biggest sticking point in bipartisan permitting talks underway today is whether Republicans will go for tying Trump’s hands in his pursuit to stop federal renewable energy permits. Do you think any GOP lawmakers will actually do that?
Ignore whatever politics someone might have. If you’re representing a district that had a ton of wind power, not a lot of load, and you live 200 miles from a major urban center that was paying a lot for electricity, you would probably be very supportive of making it easier to build the wire to access that market and making it easier for the wind turbines to go up.
I have just described the entire Iowa congressional delegation.
Let’s say in the next election, we flip some of those Iowa seats and now what was Republican is now a Democrat, that wouldn’t change the interests of the Iowa delegation. It would just change the party. So there’s reasons why [Iowa Republican] Randy Feenstra and I have led letters on trying to build SOO Green, this high voltage transmission line that would solve exactly the problem I described there. That’s not because he’s a Republican – it’s because it is in the interests of his community.
But then why do we see so few Republicans standing up to the president in his fight specifically against renewable energy, at least in the permitting talks?
We have a huge problem with the White House that they’ve been entirely captured by the interests of energy producers and they have a rooted interest in making the price of energy expensive. The reason why they’re blocking wind permits, and the reason why they’re accelerating oil and gas exports, is because they’re completely captured by people who want the price of oil and gas to be high and they lose money when the price is low.
But that’s a completely separate series of problems.
Within the House, the leadership of the Democratic Party represents concentrated areas that would like the price of energy to be cheap. The leadership of the Republican Party represents oil and gas extractive areas that would like the price of energy to be high. So a rank and file member of the Democratic Party has no particular problem advocating for energy consumers because they’re not crossing leadership. A rank and file member of the Republican Party has no particular problem advocating for the interests of producers because they’re not crossing leadership.
I think where there’s a slight distinction is you can identify any number of Democrats from the oil and gas patch who will regularly vote with the interests of oil and gas producers, and leadership will understand why they are doing that. But it is much harder to identify members of the Republican Party who are advocating for the interests of consumers and get a pass from leadership to do that.
Mmm. So to close the loop on this, how much of a priority is it for Democrats that whatever bipartisan permitting deal is made won’t be used to speed things up for fossil while Trump continues to put the brakes on every little thing a renewable energy permit requires?
Look, I’ve seen nothing out of the House or Senate that wouldn’t do exactly what you just said. Everything would make the price of energy more expensive and make it harder to do reasonable and thoughtful environmental review. In the House and Senate as currently constituted, we are not going to get a good bill that comes through.
I think within the House you have a growing awareness that energy prices are a problem. Certainly the recent elections in New Jersey and Virginia have made that clear. You need to have a strategy to bring energy costs down. That does create an opportunity prior to next November where folks say, can I do something to help my community?
We’ll see when this bill ultimately gets out whether we get much support. I’ll say we’ve privately found Republican support for pieces of it. The way we fix this problem is by doing what the Republican Party used to be known for, which is competition. There’s no reason why we couldn’t incentivize utilities to make money by saving their consumers money. Or incentivize various pieces of the energy industry to better interconnect their markets so you could always choose the lowest cost option because Adam Smith is a god. Those arguments play much better with Republicans in states that have heavily deregulated. There are individual pieces where we’ve found Republican support. And if you think good policy and economics wins, let’s make good policy and economics wins and build support for it.
Last thing – you said there aren’t permitting barriers to clean energy. But in my reporting, I’m constantly covering local communities opposing renewable energy projects, transmission siting, battery storage. It’s a major barrier to development.
What role do you think the federal government and Congress has in dealing with the issue of local control?
It’s an old saw: depending on the issue, I’ll tell you that I’m supportive of states rights.
There are huge chunks of our energy system that should be federalized but aren’t. As an example, it makes no sense that if you want to build a gas pipeline across multiple states in the U.S., you go to FERC and they are the sole permitting authority and they decide whether or not you get a permit. If you go to the same corridor and build an electric transmission line that has less to worry about because there’s no chance of leaks, you have a different permitting body every time you cross a state line. That’s only because of laws going back to the 1930s that gave FERC sole authority on gas but not on the electric side. Our bill would fix that.
We’ve had this legacy of local control that has – not intentionally – had the practical effect of making it much easier for communities to block electric generation and distribution than natural gas distribution. This necessarily means that we have made natural gas producers more politically powerful and electricity consumers less politically powerful. Whether it was an intentional choice or not, it was a choice.
There are ways consistent with energy policy and congressional law where we can rationalize and have more parity across the energy system to make sure we make the right decision every time.
I also think at the end of the day, markets win. West Virginia one hundred years ago was the place to site your energy-intensive manufacturer because they had a ton of hydro and a ton of coal. They’ve tapped out the hydro, the coal is no longer cheap, and the economy is not good anymore. Then shift to Texas which has built more wind and solar than any state in the country and unusually for a red state has been much more pro-competition in how they regulate their energy markets, that has given them more dynamic electricity costs. Those are two different red states and sets of policy choices.
