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“On a more level playing field, clean energy will prove its superiority.”
Many climate advocates are revolting against Senator Joe Manchin’s permitting deal over its oil and gas industry giveaways. But not all of them. Among the climate wonk set, there’s a growing chorus that supports the bill and says the fossil fuel language is a pill worth swallowing.
The almost-retired West Virginia senator’s bill — which was voted out of committee yesterday with a bipartisan 15-4 vote — would grease the skids for approving new transmission and renewables projects in plenty of ways. It would also strengthen fossil fuel leasing mandates and, in the activists’ view, hinder efforts to wind down permitting for liquified natural gas export terminals.
Little analysis of this specific bill’s climate impacts has been made public, and any modeling would be highly variable. Yet clearly lawmakers have seen at least some research: During the hearing on the permitting bill, Democratic Senator Martin Heinrich claimed the oil and gas provisions would “likely increase emissions on a scale of less than” 160 million tons of CO2, while other parts of the bill would reduce emissions by 2 to 3 billion tons of CO2, he said.
Academics and consultants I spoke with agree with Heinrich’s take: The positive climate impacts of the pieces hastening permits crucial to the energy transition may easily outweigh the carbon dioxide and methane emissions impacts of the fossil fuel language. As I began to unpack the various points of view and the disparity between climate wonks and the many activists opposed to the bill, it became clear to me that the fissures between these two camps speak to a broad challenge facing the energy transition. Bipartisan compromise on climate change through the U.S. government’s system almost by necessity requires capitulation to fossil fuels, which violates the principles of many grassroots activists.
“Truth is, the U.S. is not ready to talk about seriously scaling down oil and gas production,” Noah Gordon, acting co-director for sustainability, climate, and geopolitics at the Carnegie Endowment for World Peace, told me via email. (Gordon said he “supports the bill despite reservations.”)
“The only way to make that conversation possible is to massively boost clean energy and change the balance of political power,” Gordon said. “In 2024, this is feasible only through all-energy-is-welcome bills like Manchin-Barrasso. On a more level playing field, clean energy will prove its superiority.”
Take the language on LNG. Yes, it would alter the course of an effort led by youth climate campaigners under the Biden administration to curtail approvals for pending LNG export terminals, which could have clear downsides for the communities surrounding these projects. But on a global scale, as my colleague Matthew Zeitlin has written, the climate impacts of American LNG really depend on where it’s going and what it’s used for. To make matters slightly more opaque, some environmentalists who claim the climate impacts of LNG exports would be catastrophic are referencing science that has yet to be peer-reviewed and is still disputed, as Zeitlin noted.
Or take the bill’s language on coal. If enacted, the legislation would require the government to adhere to strict deadlines on processing applications to lease coal — but it wouldn’t force the government to decide one way or the other on those applications. According to Jenny Harbine, an attorney for Earthjustice (which is opposed to the permitting bill), this language would not impact the Biden administration’s efforts to wind down coal leasing in the Powder River Basin, the nation’s most active coal mining region.
“This bill doesn’t appear to change that decision,” Harbine told me yesterday. “It appears to leave largely discretion in the hands of the Secretary to not lease.”
All of this is not to say that the climate wonks who support the bill enjoy the fossil fuel language — they’re quite sympathetic to the opposition’s rationale. But they also don’t think it’ll be the end of the world; meanwhile, the current permitting regime is just not cutting it. Sources pointed me to a study from the consultancy Evolved Energy Research, which found that about half the potential emissions reductions from the Inflation Reduction Act are essentially dependent on faster deployment and siting of renewables and interregional transmission.
“In terms of overall leverage on climate, the growth of domestic clean sources enabled by transmission really outweighs everything else,” Rob Gramlich, president of Grid Strategies LLC, told me. “All of it is additional, whereas the fossil supply here is displacing fossil supply elsewhere, so a one-for-one deal … is a net carbon benefit because of that dynamic.”
Princeton professor and energy systems expert Jesse Jenkins (who is also a co-host of Heatmap’s Shift Key podcast) told me the same. Curbing oil and gas leasing on federal land would also not necessarily lower supply, as such drilling may just move to non-federal lands or other countries. Without addressing demand, there’s always the risk that leasing restrictions fail to substantially lower CO2 emissions. Jenkins nodded to a Resources for the Future study that quantified emissions from oil and gas leasing and found even a ban on new oil and gas leasing “would not on its own achieve net-zero emissions from oil and gas on federal lands by 2040,” stating much more action would be necessary — such as carbon sequestration, modifications to existing leases, and other measures.
“We can’t choke off the world’s supply for fossil fuels, but we can beat it with cheaper, better clean energy technologies,” he said.
Ultimately, the Manchin permitting deal — which may or may not become law any time soon — could reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions over time, if the studies and charts are to be believed. That would be a great thing for the planet. But that’s not really why so many climate activists are against the bill. These people see the end of the petroleum sector as the paramount goal and refuse to settle for legislation that enshrines future fossil fuel production into law, even if the benefits to renewable energy deployment may be greater.
There are key differences between the kind of deal renewable energy developers and decarbonization-focused academics would enjoy and legislation that activists will accept, Tony Dutzik, associate director and senior policy analyst with the think tank Frontier Group, explained to me. Dutzik told me he works with environmental non-profits who are against the bill. “I’ve known so many people over the years, and the thing they wanted to do is to be on the front end of the clean energy transition, and dedicate their lives to that for very good reasons … But if you are a trade group or developer that is working on clean energy, that piece of the puzzle is your focus.”
Dutzik compared the IRA and the permitting legislation to longstanding environmental statutes like the Clean Air Act, which acted as a boundary on the market to reduce pollution. “Capitalism mobilizes an incredible amount of resources and can move incredibly quickly when it is given the incentives to do so,” he said, “but the thing that it hasn’t done is to set that boundary or that standard.”
It’s clear to me from my conversations with climate activists that there’s a lingering frustration about the American pro-market approach to climate. The IRA, for example, did very little to penalize fossil fuel production or greenhouse gas emissions at all — it took an all-carrot, no-stick approach to industrial policy. Something resembling a carbon tax is nowhere close to happening, unless you count the nascent bid to enact a carbon border adjustment mechanism. And regulatory efforts to clamp down on greenhouse gasses are getting stymied by courts.
“Essentially, what you wind up with — and this will be the core of the disagreement,” Dutzik said, “is you wind up with more of everything. And if you wind up with more of everything, that may get you more clean energy, but it doesn’t necessarily solve the climate problem, and it certainly doesn’t solve the problems that are experienced by people who live near fossil fuel production, transportation and consumption. And it doesn’t necessarily get at the relationship between fossil fuels and the natural world.”
Jenkins noted similar divisions occurred with the IRA, which had its own capitulations to fossil fuel.
“There’s a chunk of the climate campaigning groups [who believes] we win by raising the cost of permitting and transactions, and legal suits, and choking off supplies of fossil fuels. There’s another group of people — the people who helped get the IRA passed — who believe we win by displacing fossil fuels.”
In Jenkins’ view, the old way of curtailing fossil energy by choking off supplies may not really apply to a post-IRA world. Before the IRA, it made more sense to invest in “dirty energy” than clean energy, when now “the opposite is true.” This “tips the calculus of how you view this process from a climate perspective.” And it may be better to compromise and quicken new renewable energy deployment in the hopes it further diminishes interest in fossil fuel leasing.
“This is at the heart of it. I don’t think there’s any way we can create a legal regime that doesn’t apply something like parity across [all] different kinds of energy infrastructure,” Jenkins said. “You’re not going to get that in a bipartisan bill.”
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Congressional Democrats will have to trust the administration to allow renewables projects through. That may be too big an ask.
How do you do a bipartisan permitting deal if the Republicans running the government don’t want to permit anything Democrats like?
The typical model for a run at permitting reform is that a handful of Republicans and Democrats come together and draw up a plan that would benefit renewable developers, transmission developers, and the fossil fuel industry by placing some kind of limit on the scope and extent of federally-mandated environmental reviews. Last year’s Energy Permitting Reform Act, for instance, co-sponsored by Republican John Barrasso and Independent Joe Manchin, included time limits on environmental reviews, mandatory oil and gas lease sales, siting authority for interstate transmission, and legal clarity for mining projects. That passed through the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee but got no further.
During a House hearing in July, California Representative Scott Peters, a Democrat, bragged that a bill he’d introduced with Republican Dusty Johnson to help digitize permitting had won support from both the Natural Resources Defense Council and the American Petroleum Institute — two advocacy groups not typically speaking in harmony. (He’s not the only one taking a crack at permitting reform, though: Another bipartisan House effort sponsored by House Natural Resources Committee chairman Bruce Westerman and moderate Maine Democrat Jared Golden would limit when National Environmental Policy Act-mandated reviews happen, install time limits for making claims, and restrict judicial oversight of the NEPA process.)
But unless Democrats trust the Trump administration to actually allow renewables projects to go forward, his proposal could be dead on arrival. Since the signing of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act on July 4, the executive branch has been on the warpath against renewables, especially wind. With the Trump administration’s blessing, OBBBA restricted tax credits for renewable projects, both by accelerating the phaseout timeline for the credits (projects have until July of next year to start construction, or until the end of 2027 to be placed in service) and by imposing harsh new restrictions on developers’ business relationships with China or Chinese companies. Mere days after he signed the final bill into law, Trump directed the Internal Revenue Service to write tougher guidance governing what it means to start construction, potentially narrowing the window to qualify still further.
“I think all of this fuzz coming out of the Trump administration makes trust among Democrats a lot harder to achieve,” Peters told me this week.
In recent weeks, Trump’s Department of the Interior has issued memos calling for political reviews of effectively all new renewables permits and instituting strict new land use requirements that will be all but impossible for wind developments to meet. His Department of Transportation, meanwhile, insinuated that the department under the previous administration had ignored safety concerns related to radio frequencies while instituting onerous new setback requirements for renewables development near roadways.
Peters acknowledged that bipartisan permitting reform may be a heavy lift for his fellow Democrats — “a lot of Democrats didn’t come to Congress to make permitting oil and gas easier,” he told me — but that considering the high proportion of planned projects that are non-emitting, it would still be worth it to make all projects move faster.
That said, he conceded that his argument “loses a lot of force” if none of those planned non-emitting projects that happen to be solar or wind can get their federal permits approved. “How can I even make a deal on energy unless I get some assurance that will be honored by the President?” Peters told me.
Other energy and climate experts broadly supportive of investment-led approaches to combatting climate change still think that Democrats should push on with a permitting deal.
“All of this raises the importance of a bipartisan Congressional permitting reform bill that contains executive branch discretion to deny routine permits for American energy resources,” Princeton professor and Heatmap contributor Jesse Jenkins posted on X. “Seems like there's a lot of reasons for both sides to ensure America's approach to siting energy resources doesn't keep ping-ponging back and forth every four years.”
But permitting reform supporters are aware of the awkward situation the president’s unilateral actions against renewables puts the whole enterprise in.
“The administration’s recent measures are suboptimal policy and no doubt worsen the odds of enacting a technology-neutral permitting reform deal,” Pavan Venkatakrishnan, an infrastructure fellow at the Institute for Progress, told me.
At the same time, he argued that Democrats should still try to seek a deal, pointing to the high demand for electrons of any type. Not even the Trump administration can entirely choke off demand for renewables, so permitting reform could still be worth doing to ensure that as much as can evade the administration’s booby traps can eventually get built.
“Projects remain at the mercy of a burdensome regulatory regime,” Venkatakrishnan said. “Democrats should remain committed to an ambitious permitting deal — the best way to reduce deployment timelines and costs for all technologies, including solar-and-storage.”
Venkatakrishnan also suggested that Democrats could, in a bipartisan deal, seek to roll back some of the executive branch actions, including the Interior memo subjecting wind and solar to heightened review or the executive order on the definition of “begin construction.” There would be a precedent for such an action — the 2024 Manchin-Barrasso permitting reform bill attempted to scrap the pause on liquified natural gas approvals that the Biden administration had implemented. But then of course, that didn’t ever become law. (Manchin and congressional Republicans were able to clear the way to permitting a specific project, the Mountain Valley Pipeline in a larger bipartisan deal.)
What could unlock a deal, Yogin Kothari, a former congressional staffer and the chief strategy officer of the SEMA Coalition, a domestic solar manufacturing group, told me, would be the Trump administration getting actively involved. “The administration is probably going to have to lead,” Kothari said. “It’s going to be up to folks in the administration to go to the Hill and say, We do need this, and this is what it’s going to mean, and we’re going to implement this in good faith.”
This would require a delicate balancing act — the Trump administration would have to think there’s enough in a deal for their favored energy and infrastructure projects to make it worth perhaps rolling back some of their anti-renewables campaign.
“The administration is going to have to convince Democrats that it’s not permitting reform just for a subset of industries,” i.e. oil, gas, and coal, “but it is really technology neutral permanent reform,” Kothari said. “On the Senate side, it comes down to whether seven Senate Democrats feel like they can trust the admin to actually implement things in a way that is helpful across the board for energy dominance.”
One reason the administration itself may have to make commitments is because Congressional Democrats may not trust Republicans to stand behind legislation they support and vote for, Peters told me.
“Obviously we’d have to get some face-to-face understanding that if we make a deal, they’re going to live by the deal,” he said.
Peters pointed to the handful of Republicans who successfully negotiated for a longer runway for renewable tax credits, only to see Trump move almost immediately to tighten up eligibility for those tax credits as reason enough for skepticism. He also cited the cuts to previously agreed-upon spending that the Trump administration pushed through Congress on a party line vote as evidence that existing law and deals aren’t necessarily stable in Trump’s Washington.
“If we do a deal — Republicans and Democrats in Congress, the House and Senate, get together and make an agreement — we have to have assurance that the President will back us,” Peters told me.
No bipartisan deal is ever easy to come by, but then historically, “everybody lives by it,” he said. “I think that may be changing under this administration, and I think it makes everything tougher.”
And more of the week’s most important conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Sussex County, Delaware – The Trump administration has confirmed it will revisit permitting decisions for the MarWin offshore wind project off the coast of Maryland, potentially putting the proposal in jeopardy unless blue states and the courts intervene.
2. Northwest Iowa – Locals fighting a wind project spanning multiple counties in northern Iowa are opposing legislation that purports to make renewable development easier in the state.
3. Pima County, Arizona – Down goes another solar-powered data center, this time in Arizona.
4. San Diego County, California – A battery storage developer has withdrawn plans to build in the southern California city of La Mesa amidst a broadening post-Moss Landing backlash over fire concerns.
5. Logan and McIntosh Counties, North Dakota – These days, it’s worth noting when a wind project even gets approved.
6. Hamilton County, Indiana – This county is now denying an Aypa battery storage facility north of Indianapolis despite growing power concerns in the region.
They don’t have much to lose, Heiko Burow, an attorney at Baker & Mackenzie, tells me.
This week, since this edition of The Fight was so heavy, I tried something a little different: I interviewed one of my readers, Heiko Burow, an attorney with Baker & Mackenzie based in Dallas, Texas. Burow doesn’t work in energy specifically – he’s an intellectual property lawyer – but he’s read many of my scoops over the past few weeks about attacks on renewable energy and had legitimate criticism! Namely, as a lawyer who is passionate about the rule of law, he wanted to send a message to any developers and energy wonks reading me to use the legal system more often as a tool against attacks on their field.
The following conversation has been abridged for clarity. Let’s dive in.
So Heiko, you reached out to me after my latest scoop about how the Trump administration is now trying to create national land use restrictions on wind projects through the Department of Transportation. In your email, you said the Trump administration “cannot invent a setback requirement by executive fiat.” What does this mean?
Something you need to understand from my point of view is, there’s all these things coming out of the White House, the executive. Like the setback requirement: If the law says they have the right to do that, then okay. But the viewpoints of the administration do not replace the law.
There’s no requirement in the law that the Secretary of Transportation can require a setback. He can’t just come in and say here’s a required setback. The government can only do what the law allows a government to do.
For example, a CEO can’t come into a company and say all the contracts are null and void. The president, in the same way, can’t say everything that’s legally binding is no longer legally binding. There are two ways that creates a problem: one is that it is a breach of contract, and the courts will say there’s a different remedy for that. But there’s also a constitutional problem with that.
Why did you reach out to me about this story, in particular?
I’m just concerned about the environment, and our country, and our democracy.
As someone who works with corporations navigating the legal system under Trump, why do you think companies – like renewable developers – aren’t suing left and right in this moment?
I think they’re timid.
It’s not just companies – it’s stakeholders in general. In 2017, there was pushback on Trump. That is missing. Look at the tech industry – and a lot of investments in renewable energy come from the tech area – and how they lined up with Trump on Inauguration Day.
That is fear. I’d say other stakeholders too are now ruled by fear.
As someone who advises companies in other areas of law, what posture do you think renewable energy companies should take?
Band together. Renewable energy companies, you don’t have much to lose. He’s persecuting you.
I know people stay under the radar, like community solar entities that he could have forgotten about. But he didn’t forget about them. So they need to band together and fight.
Everybody’s just lying low and being afraid. But how much more can renewable energy companies lose? Right now they’re still surviving, because the business case for renewable energy works and states are supporting it. But they’re quiet about it on the national level.
If people start believing what Trump says is the force of law, then it’ll just be that way. And I don’t see a coordinated response to that.