The Climate Case Against the Permitting Deal

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.”

What’s in the bill

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.

Deal or no deal

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.