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A personal account of the final act in the fight to pass the United States’ first comprehensive climate law
One year ago, the Inflation Reduction Act became law, throwing the full financial might of the federal government behind the clean energy transition and forever changing the fight against climate change.
Recent polling finds that too few recognize the historical significance of the hundreds of billions of dollars the law invests to make clean energy cheaper for American households, businesses, and industries.
Even fewer people appreciate just how close we came to losing it all.
This is a personal account of the final days of the fight to pass the nation’s first comprehensive climate law, and of how the Inflation Reduction Act remarkably arose from the ashes of near-defeat.
On July 14, 2022, just over a month before eventually becoming law, the budget bill that would eventually become known as the Inflation Reduction Act died. Again.
That evening, Senator Joe Manchin, the coal-state Democrat from West Virginia, called Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to tell him he was done with the long-simmering inter-party negotiations striving to craft a budget bill that could unite all 50 Democratic senators and pass the evenly divided Senate. The stubborn hold-out had already dashed progressive dreams multiple times in the year and a half since the 117th Congress gaveled into session, including dealing the killing blow to the House-passed Build Back Better Act in December 2021.
The news was a shock. Less than two weeks earlier, over the Fourth of July weekend, I was told by Senate staffers party to the budget negotiations that a deal was imminent. They told me to prepare the REPEAT Project, a Princeton University team that I lead and that assesses the impacts of federal energy and climate policies as they are debated, to stand by to run the numbers on a new bill.
But in July 2022, inflation was running at nearly 9% and gasoline prices were over $5 per gallon in many parts of the U.S. Then we got one bad report on the rate of inflation after another, prompting Manchin to say he could no longer support any additional government spending that might further fuel inflation.
Manchin called Schumer on July 14 to say he could no longer continue negotiations, and that he would not support legislation that included any clean energy or climate spending — leaving only a slimmed-down bill focused on health care left in play.
"DEVASTATING... utterly SENSELESS!" I tweeted at the time, using REPEAT Project modeling to illustrate the massive climate gap we would have faced, had that been the end of the story.
Courtesy of the REPEAT Project at Princeton University's Zero Lab
And it really did seem like the end.
The tone I heard from Senate staffers that day was very different from the several prior ‘false demises’ of the budget negotiations we had all endured. They were despondent. “I feel like I just wasted the last six years of my life,” one staffer texted me on July 14. So did I.
The next day, Manchin issued an ultimatum: Either Democrats could quickly pass a “skinny” budget bill focused only on health care or they could wait a few weeks to see if inflation improved and try negotiating a larger package in August.
The problem: Basically no one thought inflation would meaningfully cool that quickly, and there was only a few weeks left to pass a law before the August recess, after which Congress would go into full campaign season and nothing would pass.
The game clock was winding down.
Then President Biden threw in the towel. He issued an official statement vowing to keep the climate fight up via executive action but urged the Senate to quickly pass a bill focused only on health care.
Schumer appeared poised to do just that, and a caucus meeting for Senate Democrats was set for the following Tuesday to discuss how to move forward. Since Congress only gets one shot at a budget reconciliation law per fiscal year, if they ended up passing a bill without any climate package, it was game over.
I had been working to advance federal climate policy since 2008. I lived through the demise of the last serious effort to pass a federal climate law in 2009 and 2010. I knew how rare these windows of opportunity to pass meaningful legislation are. And we’d just blown a once-in-a-decade chance. Would we have to wait until the 2030s for our next shot? Could we even survive another decade with the United States standing on the sidelines of the global climate fight?
By July 16, I had apparently had enough time to go through the various stages of grief, arriving at bargaining (or perhaps denial). “It’s just not okay to end like this, with Manchin walking away from the deal and the rest of the caucus just quietly accepting that!” I wrote in a text to a key Senate staffer. “There’s got to be at least a dozen [Senate] members who are furious and could be unwilling to accept that in the end, right?”
“Working on it 😄,” the staffer replied.
And just like that, while many gave up and others fumed, staff from just a handful of Senate offices and a rag-tag group of allied individuals and advocacy groups got back to what we’d been doing since the start: doggedly working the problem to find some way to passage.
Even then, I had very little faith our efforts would succeed. I just knew that the game clock had a few seconds left on it, time enough to run a couple more Hail Mary plays, and I wanted to be able to look my kids in the eye some day and say, “We failed, but we truly tried everything we could.”
So we got back to work.
So how did we get Manchin back to the negotiating table?
From my limited perspective, three things worked.
First, the concern that climate spending would stoke inflation was bogus. The budget deal under negotiation was doubly paid for, raising twice as much new revenue as it spent. What’s more, the spending plan was estimated to be in the ballpark to $30 to $50 billion per year spread over a decade, or less than 1% of our roughly six trillion dollar federal budget.
The climate spending was peanuts, and any honest macroeconomist would say that the budget deal would have a mild, fiscally contractionary effect at best or no effect on inflation at worst. Plus, the proposals specifically took aim at two key drivers of inflation: health care costs and energy costs.
Either Manchin was honest in his inflation fears but misappreciating the issues, or he was trying to give himself cover to scuttle the bill.
Our so-called “Never Give Up Caucus” took him at face value. To address his inflation concerns, allies succeeded in getting inflation-hawk-in-chief Larry Summers, the conservative leaning Penn-Wharton Budget Model team, and the deficit hawkish head of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget to tell Manchin (and the press) that the deal would cut the deficit and not raise prices.
Second, the many vested interests that stood to gain from the clean energy package were mobilized and pushed Manchin hard not to leave them high and dry.
This was always a key part of the political strategy of the clean energy package: rather than focus on pricing carbon emissions and making fossil energy more expensive (as Congress had attempted in 2009), the budget bill would instead provide a wide-ranging set of direct subsidies — tax credits, grants, loan programs — to make climate-friendly technologies cheaper and help build up manufacturing of clean energy components in the U.S. Concentrated beneficiaries create organized power to back the bill. That was the theory, and it was time to put it to the test.
The pressure campaign to get Manchin back to the table was “across the board,” according to National Wildlife Federation CEO Collin O’Mara, who was one of the most dogged and effective organizers during those pivotal final days.
Executives from renewable energy companies reminded Manchin that billions of dollars of investment were at stake.
The United Mine Workers of America pushed Manchin not to walk away from his promise to create a permanent trust fund for miners suffering from black lung disease, which the budget bill would do.
In my personal estimation, the most effective voices were probably from those sectors Manchin had styled himself as personally championing as chairman of the Senate Energy Committee: carbon capture, nuclear power, hydrogen, and advanced manufacturing.
A senior executive with a utility operating in Appalachia reportedly told Manchin: “We know coal plants are ultimately going to close. What is going to replace them? What are the jobs? What are we transitioning to? In this case, we are going to explore hydrogen, new nuclear and get manufacturing in the state.”
Manchin received incoming pressure to pass a bill from the Carbon Capture Coalition, oil companies like BP with big plans to invest in hydrogen, and Nucor, the nation’s largest steel maker, which planned new investments in West Virginia in part to supply growing demand for steel for burgeoning renewable energy industries.
Utilities like Constellation and Duke reminded Manchin that this law was our best shot at preserving the nation’s existing nuclear fleet, which provides about a fifth of our electricity without contributing to air pollution or climate change.
Bill Gates, who has invested in nuclear and energy storage startups, called Manchin personally. And executives at a Gates-backed battery company with plans for a West Virginia manufacturing hub explained to Manchin’s staff how the bill’s incentives would accelerate their growth trajectory.
Third, a few key senators that Manchin personally trusted or respected, including John Hickenlooper of Colorado, Chris Coons of Delaware, Tina Smith of Minnesota, Mark Warner of Virginia, and Ron Wyden of Oregon, reportedly pressed him with direct personal appeals.
I imagine their pitches either made the political case — did Manchin really want to send his party into the midterms having utterly failed on their domestic policy agenda? — or a personal one, emphasizing the opportunity to secure his legacy and the admiration of his grandchildren.
I don’t think we should discount the importance of these personal appeals. At the end of the day, senators are humans too. They crave the respect of their colleagues (at least those they admire). And everyone wants to be the hero of their own story, not the villain.
Which of these (or other parallel efforts I don't know about) pushed Manchin back to the table? Who knows what went through his mind in the end. But somehow, against virtually all expectations, it worked.
We didn’t know it until later, but by as early as Tuesday, July 19, Manchin and Schumer, with just a couple key aids each, began meeting in secret somewhere in the Senate offices and got back to work.
No one else had any idea this was happening.
Like others working to save the bill, I spent the next week continuing to talk to press, allies, congressional staff, etc., marshaling talking points and data, mobilizing various interests to pressure Manchin, and doing everything we could to convince the stubborn senator to make a deal that would get a climate package into law. Little did we know, he was already back at it.
In fact, a little over a week later, on Wednesday, July 27, Manchin issued a statement that shocked everyone: He and Leader Schumer had reached a deal after all and were unveiling a full-fledged bill to be called “The Inflation Reduction Act.”
“The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 addresses our nation’s energy and climate crisis by adopting commonsense solutions through strategic and historic investments that allow us to decarbonize while ensuring American energy is affordable, reliable, clean and secure,” Manchin wrote.
The full text of the bill dropped later that evening, and we were blown away to see how much of the original climate package from the ill-fated Build Back Better Act was retained by this new legislation.
The deal contained roughly $370 billion in estimated climate and clean energy spending, an historic package. All the key tax incentives were still in the proposal, including credits for clean electricity, electric vehicles, and heat pumps. Major grant programs were funded at similar levels. Even a new fee on methane pollution from the oil and gas sector had survived. In fact, a tax credit for U.S. clean energy manufacturing had even been expanded, apparently at Manchin’s request, to support production of batteries and their components and the mining and processing of critical minerals.
Rather than lose it all, we were poised to win nearly everything we’d hoped for.
“Holy shit. Stunned, but in a good way,” wrote Senator Tina Smith, a tireless advocate for the climate package, on Twitter. “$370B for climate and energy … BFD.”
It took us a couple weeks to run the numbers, but once we did, REPEAT Project estimated on August 4 that the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA (pronounce it like your friendly Uncle Ira!), would cut emissions by about one billion metric tons per year in 2030 and retained about 80% of the cumulative emissions reductions of the larger Build Back Better package.
Courtesy of the REPEAT Project at Princeton University's Zero Lab
IRA could get the United States to about 42% below our peak historical emissions by 2030, we estimated at the time. (REPEAT Project’s latest updated analysis published last month revises 2030 emissions under IRA to 37-41% below peak.) That was still short of the target of 50% below peak levels that President Biden had committed the country to on the world stage, but the proposed legislation was a true game changer that gave us a fighting chance to hit that goal.
After the Manchin-Schumer deal dropped, we were off to the races.
Manchin shifted from the package’s chief obstacle to its chief spokesperson, stumping for the bill on Fox and haranguing senators on the floor alongside Schumer to get IRA passed during an exhausting, overnight “vote-a-rama.” After a 16-hour process where Republicans proposed amendment after amendment to be shot down one by one by a united Democratic caucus — plus a little last minute drama wherein Kyrsten Sinema nearly killed the bill to save private equity firms billions in taxes — the Inflation Reduction Act passed the Senate at 3:17 PM on August 7, 51-50, with Vice President Harris casting the deciding vote.
The House passed IRA in turn on August 14, and President Biden signed it into law two days later. The rest, as they say, is history.
We’re still writing that history, but it’ll be forever changed by passage of the landmark law. And we almost lost it all.
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On the Senate’s climate whip, green cement deals, and a U.S. uranium revival.
Current conditions: Flash flooding strikes the Southeastern U.S. • Monsoon rains unleash landslides in southern China • A heat dome is bringing temperatures of up to 107 degrees Fahrenheit to France, Italy, and the Balkans.
An August 5 chart showing last month's record electricity demand peaks.EIA
The United States’ demand for electricity broke records twice last month. Air conditioners cranking on hot days, combined with surging demand from data centers, pushed the peak in the Lower 48 states to a high of 758,053 megawatts on July 28, between 6 p.m. and 7 p.m. EST, data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s Hourly Electric Grid Monitor shows. The following day, peak demand set another record, hitting 759,180 megawatts. That’s nearly 2% above the previous record set on July 15, 2024.
The EIA predicted demand to grow by more than 2% per year between 2025 and 2026. Forecasts are even higher in areas with large data centers and factories underway, such as Texas and northern Virginia. The milestone comes as the Trump administration cracks down on solar and wind energy, two of the fastest-growing and quicker-to-build sources of new generation. On Tuesday, The New York Times reported that the Environmental Protection Agency is moving to eliminate $7 billion in spending on grants for solar energy, though when Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo asked the agency, it said only that, “With the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill, EPA is working to ensure Congressional intent is fully implemented in accordance with the law.”
Senator Brian Schatz, a Democrat from Hawaii, locked down enough votes on Tuesday to replace Illinois Senator Dick Durbin as the Democrats’ whip in the chamber. Durbin, who is retiring next year, has served in the Senate Democrats’ No. 2 position since 2005. In his endorsement on Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York called Schatz “a close friend and one of my most valued allies.”
Schatz crusaded for the Inflation Reduction Act and told Heatmap he supported last year’s failed bipartisan permitting reform deal, even as progressive greens campaigned against its giveaways to fossil fuels. In a Shift Key podcast interview with my colleague Robinson Meyer and his co-host, Princeton professor Jesse Jenkins, in February, Schatz pitched a big tent for climate action. “We all have to hang together. It’s the American Clean Power Association. It’s the energy company that does both clean and fossil energy. It’s the transmission and distribution companies. It’s the manufacturers. It’s labor. It’s Wall Street. It’s K Street. Everyone has to hang together and say, not only is this good for business, but there’s something that is foundationally worse for business than any individual policy decision.”
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The Trump administration may be clawing back funding for cleaning up heavy industry, but Big Tech is still inking deals. On Monday, Amazon agreed to buy low-carbon cement from the startup Brimstone. Then on Tuesday, the data center developer STACK Infrastructure announced the completion of “a pilot pour” of green cement from rival startup Sublime. The moves highlight the growing demand for cleaner industrial materials amid increased scrutiny of the energy and pollution linked to server farms.
America’s uranium enrichment went out of business in the early 2000s after the Clinton-era megatons-to-megawatts program essentially ceded the industry to cheap Russian imports made from disassembled atomic weapons. Since banning imports from Russia last year, the U.S. has been ramping up funding for nuclear fuel again, especially as the industry looks to build new types of reactors that rely on fuel other than the low-enriched uranium that virtually all the country’s operating 94 commercial reactors use. On Monday, the Department of Energy announced its first pilot project for advanced nuclear fuels, giving the startup Standard Nuclear the first federal deal. On Tuesday, the agency signed a $1.5 billion deal to restore the so-called Atomic City on the 100-acre parcel of federal land at the former Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plan in Kentucky.
The Trump administration gave permission to the National Weather Service to hire up to 450 meteorologists, hydrologists, and radar technicians after sweeping cuts from the Department of Government Efficiency, CNN’s Andrew Freedman reported. The agency, which was partly blamed for its warnings going unheeded ahead of the deadly Texas floods last month, also received an exemption from the federal hiring freeze.
The move came the same day as a federal judge blocked the administration from diverting billions of dollars in Federal Emergency Management Agency funding for disaster resilience and flood mitigation. The injunction warned FEMA against spending the money on anything else.
Beyond Meat is finally getting beyond meat. The company plans to shed the flesh reference in its name this week as it launches its new Beyond Ground product that promises more protein than ground beef. “With this launch,” Fast Company’s Clint Rainey reported, “Beyond Meat is becoming merely Beyond and turning its focus away from only mimicking animal proteins to letting plant-based proteins speak for themselves. The radical move is cultural, agricultural, and financial.”
Rob and Jesse talk through the proposed overturning of the EPA’s “endangerment finding” on greenhouse gases with Harvard Law School’s Jody Freeman.
The Trump administration has formally declared that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are not dangerous pollutants. If the president gets his way, then the Environmental Protection Agency may soon surrender any ability to regulate heat-trapping pollution from cars and trucks, power plants, and factories — in ways that a future Democratic president potentially could not reverse.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, we discuss whether Trump’s EPA gambit will work, the arguments that the administration is using, and what it could mean for the future of U.S. climate and energy policy. We’re joined by Jody Freeman, the Archibald Cox Professor of Law at Harvard and the director of Harvard’s environmental and energy law program. She was an architect of the Obama administration’s landmark deal with automakers to accept carbon dioxide regulations.
Shift Key is hosted by Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University, and Robinson Meyer, Heatmap’s executive editor.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: I just want to make a related question, which is, you can actually say some of the sentences in the DOE report — you can believe tornadoes don’t show any influence from climate change and still believe heatwaves do, and still believe extreme rainfall events do. In fact, you could believe the cost of heat waves getting worse could justify the entire regulatory edifice.
Jody Freeman: What I love about you, Rob, right now, is you’re kind of incensed about little points that might individually sort of be right, maybe each one separately, but none of it adds up to even a chink in the armor. Right? And what’ll have to happen is the scientific community writ large, en masse, is going to have to come back and say, even if one or two or three of these sentences could possibly, plausibly be actually accurate, it does nothing to change the overwhelming —
Jesse Jenkins: It doesn’t matter.
Freeman: Right. What I think is happening is we’re all getting poked and distracted and tweaked into outrage over science, when in fact, the first argument they’re making is the one where they could actually attract some judges and justices to say, Oh wait, maybe you have a little more discretion here to set a threshold level. You know, Maybe it matters that you’re saying nothing we do here in the U.S. will make a difference in the end to global warming, and maybe that is a reason you don’t want to regulate. Hmm, maybe we’ll accept that reason. And that’s what we need, I think, to be more concerned about.
Jenkins: You’re saying, don’t get distracted by the fight over the climate science. That fight is very clear. It’s this legal argument that this isn’t an air pollutant because it’s not a local air pollutant, it mixes globally with all the other CO2, and we can’t, you know, each class of cars is a tiny contributor to that, and so we shouldn’t worry about it —
Freeman: And much of this is a replay, or a rehash of arguments that the George W. Bush administration lost in Massachusetts vs. EPA. So a lot of this is like, let’s take another run at the Supreme Court.
Mentioned:
The EPA Says Carbon Pollution Isn’t Dangerous. What Comes Next?
The EPA on its reconsideration of the endangerment finding
Jody’s story on the change: Trump’s EPA proposes to end the U.S. fight against climate change
Jesse’s upshift (and accompanying video); Rob’s sort of upshift.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
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Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
Since July 4, the federal government has escalated its assault on wind development to previously unimaginable heights.
The Trump administration is widening its efforts to restrict wind power, proposing new nationwide land use restrictions and laying what some say is the groundwork for targeting wind facilities under construction or even operation.
Since Trump re-entered the White House, his administration has halted wind energy leasing, stopped approving wind projects on federal land or in federal waters, and blocked wind developers from getting permits for interactions with protected birds, putting operators that harm a bald eagle or endangered hawk at risk of steep federal fines or jail time.
For the most part, however, projects either under construction or already operating have been spared. With a handful of exceptions — the Lava Ridge wind farm in Idaho, the Atlantic Shores development off the coast of New Jersey and the Empire Wind project in the New York Bight — most projects with advanced timelines appeared to be safe.
But that was then. In the past week, a series of Trump administration actions has presented fresh threats to wind developers seeking everyday sign-offs for things that have never before presented a potential problem. Renewables developers and their supporters say the rush of actions is intended to further curtail investment in wind after Congress earlier this summer drastically curtailed tax breaks for wind and solar.
“I don’t think they even care if it’ll stand judicial review,” Erik Schlenker-Goodrich, executive director of the Western Environmental Law Center, told me. “It’s just going to chill anyone with limited capital from going to [an] agency.”
First up: The Transportation Department last Tuesday declared that it would now call for a national 1.2-mile property setback — that is, a mandatory distance requirement — for all wind facilities near railroads and highways.
When it announced the move, the DOT claimed it had “recently discovered” that the Biden administration had “overruled a safety recommendation for dozens of wind energy projects” related to radio frequencies near transportation corridors, suggesting the federal government would soon be stepping in to rectify the purported situation. To try and support this claim, the agency released a pair of Biden-era letters from a DOT spectrum policy office related to Prairie Heritage, a Pattern Energy wind project in Illinois, one recommending action due to radio issues and a subsequent analysis that no longer raised concerns.
Citing these, the DOT stated that political officials had overruled the concerns of safety experts and called on Congress to investigate. It also suggested that “33 projects have been uncovered where the original safety recommendation was rescinded.” DOT couldn’t be reached for comment in time for publication. Pattern Energy declined to comment.
Buried in this announcement was another reveal: DOT said that it would instruct the Federal Aviation Administration to “thoroughly evaluate proposed wind turbines to ensure they do not pose a danger to aviation” — a signal that a once-routine FAA height clearance required for almost every wind turbine could now become a hurdle for the entire sector.
At the same time, the Department of the Interior unveiled a twin set of secretarial orders that went beyond even its edict of just the week before, requiring that all permits for wind and solar go through high-level political screening.
First, also on Tuesday, the department released a mega-order claiming the Biden administration “chose to misapply” the law in approving offshore wind projects and calling on nearly every branch of the agency to review “any regulations, guidance, policies, and practices” related to a host of actions that occur before and after a project receives its final record of decision, including right-of-way authorizations, land use plan amendments and revisions, and environmental and wildlife permit and analyses. Among its many directives, the order instructed Interior staff to prepare a report on fully-approved offshore wind projects that may have impacts on “military readiness.” It also directed the agency’s top lawyer to review all “pending litigation” against a wind or solar project approval and identify cases where the agency could withdraw or rescind it.
Then came Friday. As I scooped for Heatmap, Interior will no longer permit a wind project on federal land if it would produce less energy per acre than a coal, gas, or nuclear facility at the same site. This happens to be a metric where wind typically performs worse than its more conventional counterparts; that being the case, this order could amount to a targeted and de facto ban on wind on federal property.
Taken in sum, it’s difficult not to read this series of orders as a message to the entire wind industry: Avoid the federal government at all costs, if you can help it.
What does the future of wind development look like in the U.S. if you have to work around the feds at every turn? “It’s a good question,” John Hensley, senior vice president for markets and policy analysis at the American Clean Power Association, told me this afternoon. The challenge is that “as we see more and more of these crop up, it becomes more and more difficult to move these projects forward — and, somewhat equally important, it becomes difficult to find the financing to develop these projects.”
“If the financing community is unwilling to take on that risk then the money dries up and these projects have a lower likelihood of happening,” Hensley said, adding: “We haven’t reached the threshold where all activity has ground to a stop, but it certainly has pushed companies to re-evaluate their portfolios and think about where they do have this regulatory risk, and it pushes the financing community to do the same. It’s just putting more barriers in place to move these projects forward.”
Anti-wind activists, meanwhile, see these orders as a map to the anti-renewables Holy Grail: forcibly decommissioning projects that are already in service.
On the same day as the mega-order, the coastal vacation town of Nantucket, Massachusetts, threatened legal action against Vineyard Wind, the offshore wind project that experienced a construction catastrophe during the middle of last year’s high tourist season, sending part of a turbine blade and shards of fiberglass into the waters just offshore. The facility is still partially under construction, but is already sending electrons to the grid. Less than 24 hours later, the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative legal group tied to other lawsuits against offshore wind projects, filed a petition to the Interior Department requesting that it reconsider prior permits for Vineyard Wind and halt operations.
David Stevenson, a former Trump adviser who now works with the offshore wind opponent Caesar Rodney Institute, told me he thinks the Interior order laid out a pathway to reconsider approvals. “Many of us who have been plaintiffs in various lawsuits have suggested to the Secretary of the Interior that there are flaws, and the flaws are spelled out in the lawsuits to the permit process.”
Nick Krakoff, a senior attorney with the pro-climate action Conservation Law Foundation, had an identical view to Stevenson’s. “I’m certainly not aware of this ever being done before,” he told me, noting that the Biden administration paused new oil and gas leases but didn’t do a “systematic review” of a sector to find “ways to potentially undo prior permitting decisions.”
Democrats in Congress have finally started speaking up about this. Last week four Democrats — led by Martin Heinrich, the top Democrat on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee — sent a letter to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum arguing that the secretarial orders would delay any decision related to renewable energy in general, “no matter how routine.” A Democratic staffer on the committee, who requested anonymity to speak candidly about the letter, told me privately that “fear is where this is headed.”
“They’re just building a record that will ultimately allow them to not approve future projects, and potentially deny projects that have already been approved,” the staffer said. ”They have all these new hoops they have to go through, and if they’re saying these things aren’t in the public interest, it’s not hard to see where they are going.”