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A guide to the year’s biggest environmental fight — and some of the most important changes that could result.
Pending catastrophe, the most important environmental policy debate in Washington this year will be about a set of questions that have come to be known as “permitting reform.”
Essentially, the government is poised to change the laws and procedures that govern how it approves new infrastructure, from highways to subways, wind farms to oil pipelines. The outcome of the debate will alter how America fights climate change and builds clean energy — and whether it further embraces fossil fuels.
Some of the oldest ideas in American environmental law are up for grabs. For the first time in decades, both parties want something to change about the country’s permitting process: Republicans want to loosen federal environmental reviews; while Democrats want to simplify and speed up how new electricity transmission is built, which would inherently boost renewables. That should make a deal possible — and indeed, lawmakers have entertained striking a bargain in a deal to raise the debt ceiling.
Yet permitting reform is unusually hard to follow. As of May 2023, at least six different bills are floating around Congress: House Democrats,Senate Democrats,House Republicans, andSenateRepublicans have each proposed a bill (or two), as has Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, a key moderate who leads the Senate’s energy committee. Each of these bills consists of dozens of unique policies and proposals, and their goals range from hastening the end of oil to rejuvenating fossil fuels.
Below we’ve compiled a cheat sheet on some of the biggest questions in the 2023 permitting-reform debate without getting into the weeds of each separate bill. We’ll update it as the process continues.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images
It’s really hard to build new power lines in the United States — especially the kind of long-distance, high-voltage power lines that can move electricity across the country.
Because a shortage of power lines is holding back America’s renewables revolution. With a bigger, more interconnected grid, you can link the country’s windiest, sunniest areas to its power-hungry cities and suburbs, and balance out electricity demand across regions.
If America doesn’t double its rate of power-line construction, then 80% of the carbon benefits from Biden’s climate law will be lost, according to an analysis from Jesse Jenkins, a Princeton engineering professor.
Building a new transmission line requires getting approval from dozens of organizations along a proposed route, including every city, county, and state government. (Building a pipeline is much easier.) And utilities along the route have to agree about how to divide up its costs.
They want to give the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, a bipartisan panel usually called FERC, the authority to decide where new interstate power lines should go and who should pay for them. (FERC already has that power over natural-gas pipelines.)
Democrats also want FERC to require each region to have a baseline amount of transmission with its neighbors, and to open an office that will manage and coordinate new transmission projects.
They haven’t proposed much, although the Senate GOP’s bill would prevent a president from blocking a cross-border pipeline or transmission line — a not-so-veiled attempt to help fossil fuels and avert another Keystone XL debacle.
His proposal would let FERC approve a new power line — but only if a state government has already blocked it for a year or more. He also wants FERC to set rules about who pays for a transmission project.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images
Every new power plant or renewable project has to enter the “interconnection queue” — effectively, a waiting list to get plugged into America’s jammed and overloaded power grid.
Because it keeps the grid from decarbonizing. The longer that new clean-energy projects have to wait in line, the longer that existing, dirty energy sources provide most of our electricity.
It now takes about four years for new projects to clear the interconnection queue, and more than 75% of renewable projects get canceled before they get to the front of the line.
At root, it’s because America doesn’t have enough power lines. But it’s also because in some places where the grid is clogged, utilities will force a wind or solar developer to pay not only for their own grid hookup, but also for crucial upgrades across the power grid — even those hundreds of miles from a project. That’s partially because the interconnect rules were written for companies building big coal and nuclear plants, not smaller renewable farms.
They want FERC to issue some ground rules about who can pay for grid upgrades, so that utilities can’t force renewable developers to foot the entire bill for them.
They haven’t proposed anything.
He hasn’t proposed anything.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images
Before a federal agency can build, approve, or change almost anything — whether it’s authorizing a space port or banning cars from a road in a city park — it must study how that action will impact the environment. It also must seek public comment and publish alternatives to its plan.
These studies, which are required by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), can run thousands of pages long and take years to finish.
It’s not … depending on who you talk to. NEPA doesn’t require that the government actually change anything because of its study; only that it publishes it and seeks public comment. While environmentalists can’t use NEPA to block a polluting project, they can sue the government to get it to add information to an environmental-impact report, which can sometimes delay a project long enough for it to get canceled.
Some environmentalists say that NEPA is an important tool to waylay fossil-fuel development. (It’s how activists delayed the Dakota Access Pipeline for a year or so.) But others say that NEPA is now mostly slowing down the green transition, and that it has given “corporate interests and rich NIMBYs” a veto over rapid climate action.
It takes 4.5 years on average to finish an environmental-impact statement, the most stringent kind of NEPA review — but that’s an average. The NEPA review of renovations to Washington, D.C.’s main public-transit hub has taken eight years and counting.
When NEPA was first passed in 1969, supporters believed that it would give Americans an expansive new right to a healthy environment. Liberal lawyers hoped that NEPA might reorient all of federal policy in a greener direction, like the Civil Rights Act did for race and gender discrimination a few years earlier.
That didn’t happen. By the mid-1970s, the court system had hemmed in NEPA, turning it into a paperwork mandate, not a substantive right. That means NEPA lawsuits — of which there are more than 100 every year — feature a lot of bickering over procedural details.
Senate Democrats would impose a one-year deadline for light NEPA reviews and a two-year deadline for the most stringent reviews — but those deadlines would only apply to projects that fight or adapt to climate change, and there would be no penalty for missing them. The House bill asks the White House to write new rules for NEPA studies.
The GOP would require one- and two-year deadlines for NEPA studies, but for all types of projects, not just those related to climate change. If an agency missed those deadlines, then under the Senate GOP bill, the project being studied would immediately and irrevocably get approved. (The House GOP, meanwhile, would charge the offending agency a fine.)
Republicans would also impose a 300-page limit on NEPA studies for complex projects and a 150-page limit on most projects. Today, the average NEPA study is more than 500 pages long.
He’s proposed the same page limits and deadlines as Republicans, but with weaker penalties and no automatic approval.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images
Technically, NEPA doesn’t require that agencies look into whether a proposed federal project would worsen climate change. The Biden administration has required agencies to take it into account, but that could be reversed by a future administration.
It’s a little silly that the government would write a 500-page report about a project’s environmental impact — but not say anything about its carbon emissions.
Because every administration — and every agency — implements NEPA in a different way. The courts also set some ground rules about what a NEPA study must include, but the extremely conservative Supreme Court is unlikely to require NEPA studies to include climate effects anytime soon.
They want to require agencies to consider a project’s impact on the climate, including whether not doing the project would raise emissions.
House Republicans want to block agencies from considering climate change — or any negative environmental impacts more than 10 years in the future — when preparing a NEPA study.
Senate Republicans would also forbid FERC from considering whether any project would raise or lower emissions.
He hasn’t proposed anything.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images
NEPA fights never end. Americans generally have up to six years to sue the government over a NEPA study, and the ensuing court battles can take years to resolve.
Depends on who you ask. The lack of a deadline can create an aura of uncertainty around public projects: Years after a federal agency approves an infrastructure project (including a clean-energy project), that project can still be challenged and blocked in court — even if construction on it has already started.
For some progressives, that doesn’t seem so bad, because it lets environmental lawyers drag fossil-fuel companies into lengthy NEPA lawsuits over proposed pipelines or refineries. But other progressives argue that most new energy projects will be zero carbon anyway, so NEPA fights allow conservatives and NIMBYs to veto clean energy.
Because Congress didn’t envision the modern permitting process when it first passed NEPA, and the law doesn’t contain a statute of limitations.
Senate Democrats want to impose a three-year limit on bringing a NEPA lawsuit, and they’d immediately elevate a NEPA suit to the local federal appeals court. House Democrats haven’t proposed anything.
Republicans in both chambers want to add a three- or four-month statute of limitations to NEPA. Senate Republicans would go further and require the courts to rule on any NEPA case within six months. These litigation deadlines could sharply limit environmentalists’ ability to fight fossil-fuel infrastructure.
His bill would add a five-month statute of limitations to NEPA.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images
The federal offices that handle most of the NEPA-related paperwork don’t have enough employees and suffer high staff turnover, which slows down their ability to quickly finish the easiest studies.
According to some progressives, a lack of funding for the agencies that implement NEPA is the biggest driver of permitting-related slowdowns. They argue that the most common kind of NEPA studies are completed in a year or so, and that only the most stringent NEPA studies regularly drag on. (Plenty of federal actions, such as building a new train station or transmission line, require a stringent NEPA study.)
When legal scholars at the University of Utah looked at 41,000 NEPA decisions of all kinds made by the U.S. Forest Service, they found that most delays were caused by agency understaffing, turnover, or delays in getting information from applicants. They also blamed unstable budgets, inadequate technology, and conflicting guidance from other laws, such as those governing historical preservation.
A decade of federal cost-cutting, among other reasons. The Department of the Interior lost 6% of its staff during the Trump administration and has only gained 2% since. FERC has also struggled to hire qualified workers.
Senate Democrats would make every agency identify its NEPA workforce needs annually and then give it the power to hire accordingly. House Democrats would let FERC pay people more than normal federal law allows.
House Republicans would require the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and the U.S. Forest Service to prepare an outreach plan for hiring new permitting employees.
He’s proposed allowing FERC to exceed the federal payscale, too.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images
New geothermal plants could generate a huge amount of zero-carbon electricity. Yet securing a permit to install a geothermal plant on federal lands — where the richest geothermal resources exist — can take years.
Because it’s comparatively easy to drill for oil and natural gas on federal land: Oil and gas drilling is categorically exempt from parts of NEPA, and a special office in the Bureau of Land Management handles fossil-fuel permits. So even though geothermal firms use the same equipment as oil and gas companies — but don’t create the same carbon emissions — it is much harder to drill for geothermal energy, and therefore much more expensive.
About 90% of “viable geothermal resources” — places where it makes sense to drill for Earth’s heat — are located on federal lands in the West. This isn’t parkland, to be clear, but government-owned land now used for ranching, hunting, mining, or recreation.
Because geothermal is a new industry. Until recent improvements in drilling, geothermal only made sense in a few parts of the country. Now it could be used more widely.
Senate Democrats want the Interior Department to make sure geothermal drilling permits are handled in the same way that oil-and-gas drilling permits are.
House Republicans would exempt some geothermal projects from having to get permits at all. And Senate Republicans would tell the Interior Department to defer to state law when granting new geothermal permits.
While supportive of geothermal power, he hasn’t proposed anything on this issue.
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Rob and Jesse go deep on the electricity machine.
Last week, more than 50 million people across mainland Spain and Portugal suffered a blackout that lasted more than 10 hours and shuttered stores, halted trains, and dealt more than $1 billion in economic damage. At least eight deaths have been attributed to the power outage.
Almost immediately, some commentators blamed the blackout on the large share of renewables on the Iberian peninsula’s power grid. Are they right? How does the number of big, heavy, spinning objects on the grid affect grid operators’ ability to keep the lights on?
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Jesse and Rob dive into what may have caused the Iberian blackout — as well as how grid operators manage supply and demand, voltage and frequency, and renewables and thermal resources, and operate the continent-spanning machine that is the power grid. Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, 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: So a number of people started saying, oh, this was actually caused because there wasn’t enough inertia on the grid — that Spain kind of flew too close to the sun, let’s say, and had too many instantaneous resources that are metered by inverters and not by these large mechanical generators attached to its grid. Some issue happened and it wasn’t able to maintain the frequency of its grid as needed. How likely do you think that is?
Jesse Jenkins: So I don’t think it’s plausible as the precipitating event, the initial thing that started to drive the grid towards collapse. I would say it did contribute once the Iberian grid disconnected from France.
So let me break that down: When Spain and Portugal are connected to the rest of the continental European grid, there’s an enormous amount of inertia in that system because it doesn’t actually matter what’s going on just in Spain. They’re connected to this continen- scale grid, and so as the frequency drops there, it drops a little bit in France, and it drops a little bit in Latvia and all the generators across Europe are contributing to that balance. So there was a surplus of inertia across Europe at the time.
Once the system in Iberia disconnected from France, though, now it’s operating on its own as an actual island, and there it has very little inertia because the system operator only scheduled a couple thousand megawatts of conventional thermal units of gas power plants and nuclear. And so it had a very high penetration on the peninsula of non-inertia-based resources like solar and wind. And so whatever is happening up to that point, once the grid disconnected, it certainly lacked enough inertia to recover at that point from the kind of cascading events. But it doesn’t seem like a lack of inertia contributed to the initial precipitating event.
Something — we don’t know what yet — caused two generators to simultaneously disconnect. And we know that we’ve observed oscillation in the frequency, meaning something happened to disturb the frequency in Spain before all this happened. And we don’t know exactly what that disturbance was.
There could have been a lot of different things. It could have been a sudden surge of wind or solar generation. That’s possible. It could have been something going wrong with the control system that manages the automatic response to changes in frequency — they were measuring the wrong thing, and they started to speed up or slow down, or something went wrong. That happened in the past, in the case of a generator in Florida that turned on and tried to synchronize with the grid and got its controls wrong, and that causes caused oscillations of the frequency that propagated all through the Eastern Interconnection — as far away as North Dakota, which is like 2,000 miles away, you know? So these things happen. Sometimes thermal generators screw up.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
Then again, there are reasons why he’d want to focus on existing generation.
Just how big is the data center boom, really? How much is electricity demand going to expand over the coming decades? Business plans, government policy, and alarming environmental forecasts are all based on the idea that we’re on an unrelenting ride upwards in terms of electricity use, especially from data centers used to power artificial intelligence.
It’s one reason why the new Trump administration declared in the first days of its return to power that the country was in an “energy emergency,” and hasbeen used as a justification for its attempted revival of the coal industry.
But one mildly dissenting voice came from a perhaps-unexpected corner: the power industry.
Constellation Energy’s Chief Executive Officer Joseph Dominguez spent a portion of the company’s quarterly earnings call Tuesday throwing lukewarm water on the most aggressive load growth projections, even as the company looks to profit from increased demand for the power that its over 30,000-megawatt, largely nuclear fleet serves.
Dominguez told his audience of investors and analysts that utilities and their power customers have been telling Constellation that “the same data center need is being considered in multiple jurisdictions across the United States at the same time, just like fishing. If you’re a fisherman, you put a bunch of lines in the water to try to catch fish, and the data center developers are doing exactly the same thing.”
This means that different electricity markets or utility territories could report the same future data center demand, when ultimately the developer will pick just one site.
Tallying the demand growth projections from a few large power markets — namely MISO, which largely serves the Midwest; PJM, which largely serves the East Coast; and ERCOT, the Texas energy market — which together “account for less than half” of U.S. power demand, Dominguez said, Constellation finds that they project “notably higher” demand growth than many third-party consultants and analysts foresee for the country as a whole.
“It’s hard not to conclude that the headlines are inflated,” Dominguez said. He further claimed that Constellation had “done the math,” and that “if Nvidia were able to double its output and every single chip went to ERCOT, it still wouldn’t be enough chips to support some of the load forecasts.”
He argued that utilities tend to overstate load growth — an observation backed up by research from the Rocky Mountain Institute. “We get it,” he said. “Utilities have to plan to ensure that the system is reliable.” That frequently means erring on the side of having more generation and transmission to serve future demand as opposed to being caught short.
Dominguez is hardly the first voice to call into question load growth forecasts. Energy industry consultant Jonathan Koomey told Heatmap more than a year ago that “everyone needs to calm the heck down” about AI-driven load growth. Data center developers, chipmakers, and AI companies would likely find efficiencies to get more computing power out of less electric power, he predicted, similar to how the original data center buildout avoided catastrophic predictions of imminent power shortages and spiking electricity prices in the early 2000s.
Since then, demand growth projections have done nothing but rise. But even just a few weeks ago, Peter Freed, Meta’s former director of energy strategy, told Heatmap’s Shift Key podcast, “It is simultaneously true that I think this is going to be a really large demand driver and that we have bubble-like characteristics in terms of the amount of stuff that people are trying to get done.”
Now, to be clear, Dominguez has a reason to talk down expectations of future demand growth — and with it the expectation that there needs to be massive investment in new power plants. Constellation owns and operates a fleet of nuclear power plants, and is bringing on a gas-heavy fleet with its planned acquisition of Calpine.
Dominguez also said that new natural gas and renewables were likely to prove expensive to build.
“The cost of new entry, whether that be for combined cycle machines or solar with storage, has gone up substantially, as has the time to build and site these assets,” Dominguez said. “Now, at the end of the day, in a tightening market, we compete with the cost of new entry.”
This is halfway consistent with what other big players in the energy industry have been saying. John Ketchum, the chief executive of NextEra, which has a large renewables development business,has been telling anyone who will listen that the way to meet urgent load growth is with renewables and batteries, as they can be built cheaper and faster than natural gas, let alone nuclear.
Dominguez’s take, however, is that it’s all quite expensive and lengthy considering the likely level of need.
“When I listen to some of the comments on these calls, I just have to tell you, folks, I think the load is being overstated. We need to pump the brakes here.”
On defending wind, Russian gas, and NREL layoffs
Current conditions: A state of emergency is in effect in Manitoba, Canada, due to multiple wildfires • 17 million people in the south-central U.S. are at risk of severe storms on Tuesday • The Interior Department has reportedly suspended air quality monitoring for National Parks, including California’s Joshua Tree, where the AQI today is moderate.
Attorneys general from 17 Democratic states and Washington, D.C., filed a lawsuit on Monday challenging President Trump’s executive order pausing approvals, permits, and loans for onshore and offshore wind projects. The lawsuit argues that Trump exceeds his authority with the indefinite pause, which threatens “thousands of good-paying jobs and billions in investments, and … is delaying our transition away from the fossil fuels that harm our health and our planet,” in the words of New York Attorney General Letitia James, who is leading the coalition.
In a response to the lawsuit, a White House spokesperson told The Associated Press that “the American people voted for the president to restore America’s energy dominance, and Americans in blue states should not have to pay the price of the Democrats’ radical climate agenda.” As my colleague Emily Pontecorvo has written, however, state climate goals “become nearly impossible if no additional [wind] projects are able to get through the permitting process until at least 2029,” with New York state’s especially in jeopardy after the administration ordered the halt of construction on the fully permitted Empire Wind project south of Long Island.
The European Union plans to announce on Tuesday a 2027 deadline for companies to end any remaining energy contracts with Russia, the Financial Times reported Monday. Though the EU’s use of Russian oil and coal virtually ended with sanctions after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Europe still bought 49.5 billion cubic meters of Russian gas through pipelines in 2024, and another 24.2 billion transported on ships as liquified natural gas, per Rystad Energy (though some of that LNG was resold). Another way of looking at it: “The EU purchased a total of [$26 billion] in Russian energy in 2024, exceeding its military assistance to Ukraine last year,” Bloomberg writes, with imports accounting for about 19% of the bloc’s total gas purchases.
The proposed measures will need to be approved by a majority of EU member states and the European Parliament before they can be adopted, according to FT. Without Russian LNG, Europe is expected to turn to the U.S. to meet its energy needs.
Share of European Union gas demand met by Russian supply, 2001-2024
IEA
More than 100 employees at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory lost their jobs in a round of layoffs on Monday, Mother Jones reports. The cuts included non-probationary employees, or those who’ve worked at the Department of Energy division for over two years.
Though NREL has more than 3,000 employees on staff, sources who spoke with Mother Jones described the cuts as “rather haphazard and unorganized,” while others stressed that “if I am suddenly the only person on my team, I can’t handle that work.” The layoffs also notably come after President Trump’s “skinny” budget proposed $15 billion in cuts to Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act funding. The White House Office of Management and Budget has said that the budget aims to reorient the Department of Energy’s funding away from “unreliable renewable energy” and “toward research and development of technologies that could produce an abundance of domestic fossil energy and critical minerals, innovative concepts for nuclear reactors and advanced nuclear fuels, and technologies that promote firm baseload power.”
The Federal Emergency Management Agency plans to end door-to-door survivor outreach in disaster areas for the upcoming hurricane and wildfire seasons, Wired reported Monday, based on a FEMA memo dated May 2. Previously, the agency would canvass disaster survivors to inform them about how to register for federal aid, a policy that one emergency management coordinator told Wired was critical given how many survivors don’t get adequate information about recovery resources otherwise. Instead, FEMA’s memo said the agency will “focus survivor outreach and assistance registration capabilities in more targeted venues.”
Last year, Republicans on the Oversight Committee singled out FEMA’s outreach program over alleged “widespread discrimination against individuals displaying Trump campaign signs on their property” in the wake of Hurricane Milton. The White House’s budget has also cited FEMA for supposedly “skipping over homes when providing aid.” But the Trump administration has also sought to pare back the agency aggressively: Earlier this year, it denied a request for federal aid from Arkansas’ Republican Governor and former White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders after severe tornadoes that left more than 40 people in the region dead, arguing the disaster was not “beyond the capabilities of the state, affected local governments, and voluntary agencies” to address.
Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images
The Los Angeles Dodgers have faced calls from activists and fans to end their sponsorship deal with Phillips 66’s 76 gas station brand — but the partnership might face a natural end due to the Olympics coming to L.A. in 2028, Legal Planet reports. Dodger Stadium will be an official Olympic venue during the summer games, and its 76 gas ads will violate the Olympic Charter prohibiting “commercial installations and advertising signs … in the stadia, venues or other sports grounds.”
The Dodgers are under mounting pressure to drop the Phillips 66 partnership even earlier. There are 76 gasoline ads “plastered throughout the ballpark, from the visiting team’s bullpen to the ribbon board screens lining the stands … Even the on-deck circles on the field, where batters prepare to hit, are orange-and-blue 76 logos,” the Los Angeles Times’ Sammy Roth wrote last year in a column calling for the team to break up with the oil company. As of November, the Houston-based energy company was facing six counts of violating the U.S. Clean Water Act by illegally discharging 790,000 gallons of wastewater from its Carson refinery into the L.A. County sewer system. “The lead up to the 2028 Olympic games period would seem to be a natural time for the Dodgers to reset a marquee sponsor for years to come — and to do so on their own terms — or else be forced to by Olympic rules,” Legal Planet writes.
“C’mon Ford, c’mon GM, c’mon Chrysler, let’s roll again/Build something useful that people need, build us a safe way for us to be/Build us something that won’t kill our kids, that runs real clean, that runs real clean.” —Lyrics to Neil Young’s new single “Let’s Roll Again.”