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Why the Manchin-Barrasso bill might not be worth it.
Senator Joe Manchin’s new permitting deal is the best shot Congress will get this year to boost transmission and renewables. It may also lock in generations of future fossil fuel production and exports.
To many climate activists, that’s not a trade worth making.
Tomorrow, the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee will vote on a deal Manchin struck with the panel’s top Republican, John Barrasso, that couples faster transmission and renewable energy approvals and restrictions on litigation with much stronger requirements for regular oil, gas, and coal lease sales on federal lands. It would also restrict the Energy Department from continuing its pause on liquified natural gas export terminal approvals (an action that has already been overturned in court) and also, activists note, potentially bar the federal government from having authority over oil and gas drill sites on private lands. Critics say this would take away a tool regulators in Washington can use to require a well — a potential source of methane, the hyper-potent greenhouse gas — be plugged in the event the owner goes bankrupt and abandons the site.
The environmentalist reaction to the bill has been swift and loud, with a broad swath of organizations coming out fiercely against its passage. Even some groups seen as more business-friendly, such as the Environmental Defense Fund, praised the transmission bits while calling out “permitting proposals drafted without meaningful consultation of frontline communities” and proclaiming the fossil fuel language objectionable.
In a development that has quietly befuddled activists, a growing number of climate-friendly Democrats are coming out in favor of the legislation. Senators John Hickenlooper and Martin Heinrich, whose transmission proposals landed in the deal, are likely to vote in favor of the bill in committee this week.
“This legislation is our opportunity to unlock an American-made clean energy future,” Heinrich told Politico’s E&E News in a statement last week. “It will create good-paying jobs, grow our workforce, and help us deliver affordable and reliable electricity to all Americans — all while helping to meet our ambitious and urgent climate goals.”
Fossil fuels produced on federal lands for energy represent a substantial portion of the greenhouse gas emissions produced by the United States, a fact even Biden regulators have acknowledged while allowing more sales.
Whether this legislation can get to a full vote in the Senate is far from certain, and it’s a longshot for passage in this Congress. The bill goes further in favor of fossil fuels than the 2022 Manchin permitting deal, which was blocked by a confluence of opposition from environmentalists and far-right legislators that wanted an even more aggressive approach to overhauling environmental laws.
The same sort of coalition could stall this bill. But it would not surprise me if many more Democrats added their voices and votes in support. Over my years of reporting in Congress, I found a growing sense of frustration in Democratic circles at the lack of shovel-ready projects funded by the Inflation Reduction Act. They blame the National Environmental Policy Act, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and pencil-pushing government officials. They’re tired of being asked “will they or won’t they” questions by Hill reporters about an ever-elusive permitting deal. So they may take any leap of faith to see those visual victories come to fruition faster — and help shore up political support for keeping the landmark climate law in place.
But that’s not how climate activists want them to see the bill. At all.
“Honestly, the amount of fossil fuels that can be deployed out of this far outweighs to me the gains we would get in transmission,” Johanna Bozuwa, executive director of the Climate and Community Project, told me. “I can understand the ‘for’ side of this. People are frustrated and they are sick of transmission not being deployed. Whereas the people who are against this bill are like, you need to think about the ramifications right now. Because what is being built into this bill is not next year’s emissions. It’s thirty years of emissions.”
Under Manchin-Barrasso, it would be much harder for the federal government to reduce how much land and sea it sells to fossil fuel companies every year.
The federal government regularly offers land for oil and gas companies to purchase for drilling sites. Deciding what land to sell and how much acreage to offer is normally a process decided at the bureaucratic level in tandem with industry input and environmental analyses. Under the Trump administration, lease sales were plentiful, though some had to be canceled because of inadequate climate and species reviews. Biden’s gone the opposite direction, but in order to win Manchin’s crucial vote, the IRA also complicated efforts to wind down fossil fuel auctions. One of Manchin’s non-negotiables for passing the bill was tying renewables leasing to millions of acres in mandatory oil and gas lease sales. In other words, to sell land for renewables, the government must now sell fossil fuels too.
Specifically, the IRA required the government to sell either millions of acres or the acreage that industry expresses interest in. So far, the Interior Department has found wiggle room by saying the acres they sell do not need to align precisely with properties requested by developers. Some in the oil and gas industry have accused the Biden administration of deliberately offering land the industry doesn’t want.
What Manchin-Barrasso would do, activists say, is essentially tie the hands of the government on this requirement. One provision would insert the phrase “for which expressions of interest have been submitted” into the mandatory onshore oil and gas leasing totals in the IRA, in effect putting industry’s desired land for leasing into statute as a requirement.
The bill would also require the government to hold annual offshore oil and gas lease sales at a time when the Biden administration is non-committal about auctioning in certain future years before environmental analyses are conducted.
There’s also the part about drilling on private land. A provision in Manchin-Barrasso appears to ban the federal government from requesting applications for permits to drill on private lands in circumstances when the government owns only the minerals beneath the surface but not above. These applications, known as APDs, are a key opportunity for federal regulators to require project developers post a bond on oil and gas wells as well as provide at least some level of info on environmental mitigation measures. Advocates emphasize this input also comes with an opportunity to intervene when an operator goes bankrupt and leaves a well unplugged, puking methane into the atmosphere. Manchin-Barrasso would instead cede that authority entirely to the states.
The bill would also require the government to process applications for coal leasing when the Biden administration is trying, essentially, to stop such leasing altogether.
Plus there’s the LNG export language which, well, explains itself.
For the energy transition, the bill would: create timetables for permitting renewables on federal rights-of-way; allow minimal environmental reviews of “low-disturbance” renewables construction projects; set a national goal of 50 gigawatts of renewables on federal land by 2030; ease geothermal permitting; provide easier environmental reviews to certain transmission activities within recently approved rights-of-way; grant FERC more authority to greenlight transmission projects that are considered to be in the “national interest;” and give hydropower projects more lenience on license extensions.
To some, that might be a worthwhile compromise — in the world of the possible, the deal may be the biggest opportunity for real gains on transmission and renewables this Congress. Should the November elections swing in the GOP’s direction, Democrats seeking a less fossil-friendly permitting deal would have essentially no chance because they could lose the House, the Senate and the White House, making this the only game in town, potentially for a long time. This bill would also achieve the elusive dream of a bipartisan compromise, where both sides get some but not all of what they want to achieve incremental progress on something viewed in D.C. as a long bemoaned problem.
“It is a really good bipartisan deal,” Xan Fishman of the Bipartisan Policy Center told me last week. “Not everyone is going to be happy.”
That argument isn’t convincing Rep. Jared Huffman, a top Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, who has emerged as a vocal critic of the Senate legislation. Huffman told me he wants to see transmission boosted “without massive giveaways to the fossil fuel industry.” When asked if he’s comfortable with accusations he’s holding up a bipartisan compromise, he simply said, “Whatever.”
“This is a bad deal. It just goes way too far in the direction of oil, gas and coal,” he told me. “We’ve got to stop dignifying this notion that to take one step forward on clean energy, we’ve got to take two steps backward on fossil fuel production.”
Brett Hartl, government affairs director for the Center for Biological Diversity, noted to me that when the Inflation Reduction Act was passed into law, Democrats had analyses showing the potential decarbonization benefits of the legislation — oil and gas warts and all. It ultimately showed net wins on climate, no matter how hard the other stuff may have been to swallow.
“Where’s the math that proves this is good?” he asked of the Manchin-Barrasso bill.
The truth is, we don’t know the climate impacts of this legislation yet, though experts are at work poring over the details. Meanwhile, some climate advocates are trying to get their own math out there. At the start of the week, I attended a small roundtable discussion with Jeremy Symons, a longtime environmental advocate who once worked on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, as well as representatives of Public Citizen and Earthjustice and other reporters from Politico and S&P Global. At that roundtable, Symons presented an analysis declaring the legislation’s impact on LNG exports reviews alone would be equivalent to that from 165 coal-fired power plants and that it would take roughly 50 large renewable electricity-powered transmission lines to make up the negative climate impacts of the provision.
“Lawmakers should do some deep dive reevaluation and reach out to other outside experts to make sure that they fully understand [this bill],” Tyson Slocum of Public Citizen said at the roundtable.
Manchin’s office did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
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A battle ostensibly over endangered shrimp in Kentucky
A national park is fighting a large-scale solar farm over potential impacts to an endangered shrimp – what appears to be the first real instance of a federal entity fighting a solar project under the Trump administration.
At issue is Geenex Solar’s 100-megawatt Wood Duck solar project in Barren County, Kentucky, which would be sited in the watershed of Mammoth Cave National Park. In a letter sent to Kentucky power regulators in April, park superintendent Barclay Trimble claimed the National Park Service is opposing the project because Geenex did not sufficiently answer questions about “irreversible harm” it could potentially pose to an endangered shrimp that lives in “cave streams fed by surface water from this solar project.”
Trimble wrote these frustrations boiled after “multiple attempts to have a dialogue” with Geenex “over the past several months” about whether battery storage would exist at the site, what sorts of batteries would be used, and to what extent leak prevention would be considered in development of the Wood Duck project.
“The NPS is choosing to speak out in opposition of this project and requesting the board to consider environmental protection of these endangered species when debating the merits of this project,” stated the letter. “We look forward to working with the Board to ensure clean water in our national park for the safety of protection of endangered species.”
On first blush, this letter looks like normal government environmental stewardship. It’s true the cave shrimp’s population decline is likely the result of pollution into these streams, according to NPS data. And it was written by career officials at the National Park Service, not political personnel.
But there’s a few things that are odd about this situation and there’s reason to believe this may be the start of a shift in federal policy direction towards a more critical view of solar energy’s environmental impacts.
First off, Geenex has told local media that batteries are not part of the project and that “several voicemails have been exchanged” between the company and representatives of the national park, a sign that the company and the park have not directly spoken on this matter. That’s nothing like the sort of communication breakdown described in the letter. Then there’s a few things about this letter that ring strange, including the fact Fish and Wildlife Service – not the Park Service – ordinarily weighs in on endangered species impacts, and there’s a contradiction in referencing the Endangered Species Act at a time when the Trump administration is trying to significantly pare back application of the statute in the name of a faster permitting process. All of this reminds me of the Trump administration’s attempts to supposedly protect endangered whales by stopping offshore wind projects.
I don’t know whether this solar farm’s construction will indeed impact wildlife in the surrounding area. Perhaps it may. But the letter strikes me as fascinating regardless, given the myriad other ways federal agencies – including the Park Service – are standing down from stringent environmental protection enforcement under Trump 2.0.
Notably, I reviewed the other public comments filed against the project and they cite a litany of other reasons – but also state that because the county itself has no local zoning ordinance, there’s no way for local residents or municipalities opposed to the project to really stop it. Heatmap Pro predicts that local residents would be particularly sensitive to projects taking up farmland and — you guessed it — harming wildlife.
Barren County is in the process of developing a restrictive ordinance in the wake of this project, but it won’t apply to Wood Duck. So opponents’ best shot at stopping this project – which will otherwise be online as soon as next year – might be relying on the Park Service to intervene.
And more on the week’s most important conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Dukes County, Massachusetts – The Supreme Court for the second time declined to take up a legal challenge to the Vineyard Wind offshore project, indicating that anti-wind activists' efforts to go directly to the high court have run aground.
2. Brooklyn/Staten Island, New York – The battery backlash in the NYC boroughs is getting louder – and stranger – by the day.
3. Baltimore County, Maryland – It’s Ben Carson vs. the farmer near Baltimore, as a solar project proposed on the former Housing and Urban Development secretary’s land is coming under fire from his neighbors.
4. Mecklenburg County, Virginia – Landowners in this part of Virginia have reportedly received fake “good neighbor agreement” letters claiming to be from solar developer Longroad Energy, offering large sums of cash to people neighboring the potential project.
5. York County, South Carolina – Silfab Solar is now in a bitter public brawl with researchers at the University of South Carolina after they released a report claiming that a proposed solar manufacturing plant poses a significant public risk in the event of a chemical emissions release.
6. Jefferson Davis County, Mississippi – Apex Clean Energy’s Bluestone Solar project was just approved by the Mississippi Public Service Commission with no objections against the project.
7. Plaquemine Parish, Louisiana – NextEra’s Coastal Prairie solar project got an earful from locals in this parish that sits within the Baton Rouge metro area, indicating little has changed since the project was first proposed two years ago.
8. Huntington County, Indiana – Well it turns out Heatmap’s Most At-Risk Projects of the Energy Transition has been right again: the Paddlefish solar project has now been indefinitely blocked by this county under a new moratorium on the project area in tandem with a new restrictive land use ordinance on solar development overall.
9. Albany County, Wyoming – The Rail Tie wind farm is back in the news again, as county regulators say landowners feel misled by Repsol, the project’s developer.
10. Klickitat County, Washington – Cypress Creek Renewables is on a lucky streak with a solar project near Goldendale, Washington, getting to bypass local opposition from the nearby Yakama Nation.
11. Pinal County, Arizona – A large utility-scale NextEra solar farm has been rejected by this county’s Board of Supervisors.
A conservation with George Povall of All Our Energy
Today’s chat is with George Povall, director of the All Our Energy pro-offshore wind environmental group. Povall – who told me he was inspired to be an environmentalist by the film Avatar – has for more than a decade been a key organizer on the ground in the Long Island area for supporting offshore wind development. But these days he spends a lot more time fighting renewables disinformation, going so far as to travel the community trying to re-educate people about this technology in light of the loud activism against it.
After the news dropped that states are suing to undo the Trump executive order against offshore wind, I wanted to chat with Povell about what environmentalists should do to combat the anti-renewables movement and whether there’s still any path forward for the industry he’s spent nearly a decade working to build as an activist.
The following conversation transcript was lightly edited for clarity.
Okay so first of all, what made you become a pro-wind environmental activist?
This all goes back to maybe 15 years ago. I’ve always been environmentally minded. I’m 55 years old and not from the nonprofit sector. I like everybody else was living my normal life and maybe with some naivete thought that if things were good and economical and made sense and worked better than what we were doing in the past, we’d move on from that. But time kept creeping along and we went through the 1990s and 2000s and then I began to become more aware. I just thought people who knew more than I did would do something about this.
Surprisingly I look back and a movie that really motivated me to do what I’m doing is Avatar. They’re destroying the planet for the materials – exactly what we’re seeing now. We’re seeing it more than ever, with someone who is almost like a comic book villain now wanting to strip-mine the sea bed. I wonder what the anti-offshore wind people have to say about that.
It’s been surprising to me. We had always known there was going to be opposition to offshore wind, and disinformation coming. We had always tried to get out ahead of it but we were always unsuccessful in getting funding to deal with that.
Did the developers get ahead of it?
No. I think the developers got a lot of bad advice from the public relations firms they were using.
We kept telling them, please just tell the people what’s going on. I can see how they got into that position because people were asking questions about things that weren’t decided yet. But instead of saying they didn’t know and it wasn’t decided yet, they refused to admit they didn’t know something, even if that was the case. It engendered a lot of distrust in the communities that opponents were able to seize on quite easily.
I know from someone who has done campaigns of community organizing before, you just tell people what it is and what you know. It engenders trust. Unfortunately it didn’t go that way and I think a big part of that is they should’ve been more ready for people who were not willing to accept any answer as acceptable.
It feels to me like offshore wind has now become a wedge issue. A culture war issue. And they got people who frankly should’ve known better to listen to some of the least reliable people in the community throwing out claims that were ridiculous. And they overwhelmed a lot of people with half truths, misinformation. People couldn’t keep up.
What is the environmental movement actually doing now to address what is not just a policy problem but a cultural problem?
Well, that’s a great question and we have been trying to turn it around for a while. Though we have some resources, it is really hard to deprogram people. It’s very hard. I have spoken to people who came to me and said, I haven’t made up my mind. I am just looking for the right information. And when I gave it to them, they told me I was a “climate cult zealot.” That’s what everybody in the environmental movement is to them.
We need to really just bring in the people who support this stuff. It’s a basic concept but unfortunately we’ve never had the capacity to do that kind of thing. It’s something bigger organizations were doing, but they don’t have capacity for it now either. So it’s on us to just find the things that aren’t being done and do them. It’s about building coalitions.
It’s about starting from zero. Having offshore wind 101 information sessions and getting other organizations involved and getting their people educated. It can’t be a single process doing that. If the general public knew how a wind turbine works, if the average person on the street knew how it works, they’d laugh at people when they throw disinformation at them – but they don’t know it’s nonsense yet.