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It’s not the pipeline. It’s the power lines.
At first glance, the bipartisan deal to raise the debt ceiling seems pretty good for the climate.
Most importantly, it preserves the Inflation Reduction Act, President Joe Biden’s flagship climate law. That alone is a monumental victory, cementing Biden’s legacy (for now) and allowing his administration to continue its experiment with green industrial policy.
When climate advocates have spoken against the deal, they’ve focused their ire on the Mountain Valley Pipeline, a 304-mile conduit that will link West Virginia’s booming natural-gas fields to the rest of the country. The deal essentially approves the pipeline and exempts it from judicial oversight, all but ensuring its eventual completion. Senator Joe Manchin, a West Virginia Democrat, won the White House’s support for the pipeline when he agreed to the IRA last year.
Yet despite the chatter, the pipeline was not, in fact, the most important climate concession exacted in negotiations. The deal also made a number of changes to federal permitting law, especially the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA. These changes have been described as relatively small, common-sense reforms to the federal process — and in some cases they are. But they also represented critical leverage that Democrats just lost.
Democrats might have secured many other objectives in the debt-ceiling talks, including minimal cuts to some federal programs and a potential expansion of food stamps. But the deal’s permitting reforms are an uneven trade in which Democrats gave up much more than they gained and made virtually no progress on one of their biggest goals: making it easier to build long-distance power lines. When Congress revisits permitting reform in the next few months — as Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy has promised – Democrats will find that they have little room to bargain.
The National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, requires that the federal government conduct an environmental study before it does much of anything. It also sets the rules by which the government decides whether to approve large-scale infrastructure. If a state wants to build a new highway with federal funds, it must apply to the government, which then runs a “NEPA process” to determine whether to grant funding. Virtually every major government project — whether a new mass-transit hub or an offshore wind farm — requires a NEPA study and a NEPA process.
Republicans have long wanted to tinker with NEPA. But while NEPA was once widely understood by progressives as a bedrock of federal environmental law, some on the left have recently become more open to reforming it. Fighting climate change will require building a lot of new infrastructure, they have argued, and NEPA could slow down that process. At the same time, virtually all Democrats want to simplify the process of building new long-distance power lines, which will lower electricity prices while ushering more renewables onto the grid. If America doesn’t double its rate of new transmission construction, then 80% of the IRA’s carbon reductions will be squandered, according to Jesse Jenkins, a Princeton engineering professor.
So a trade of sorts took shape: Democrats would open up NEPA, accomplishing a long-sought GOP goal, in exchange for easing the path for new power lines. When Senator Manchin proposed a permitting-reform bill last year, that’s essentially what it did.
The debt-ceiling deal inherits many of the NEPA reforms first contemplated in Manchin’s bill. Today, the strictest type of NEPA review takes 4.5 years to complete, although some studies can take much longer. The deal will impose a one-year deadline for most environmental-review studies and a two-year deadline for the strictest types. If an agency overruns these deadlines, then a project’s sponsor can sue the agency to get an accelerated decision.
The deal also imposes new page limits on NEPA studies. Today, the most stringent NEPA studies run to more than 500 pages on average. The deal would cap most NEPA studies to 150 pages, and the most complicated reviews to 300 pages.
To be sure, these reforms don’t go as far as the GOP wanted. Under one Republican proposal, for instance, the penalty for overrunning a NEPA deadline would have been a project’s immediate and irrevocable approval. But the deal also declines to provide more funding for NEPA agencies to hire staff, which some progressives have argued is the most important driver of NEPA delays.
The deal also narrows some of NEPA’s most important language, reducing the number of federal actions that require the most elaborate kind of environmental-impact study. An agency will now get to determine whether a project requires the highest level of NEPA review. That is “really problematic” because it could let officials do an end-run around the NEPA process, Kym Meyer, the litigation director at the Southern Environmental Law Center, told me.
Some of the deal’s most important consequences may not be visible in the legal text. The deal, for instance, says that projects qualifying for certain federal small-business loans do not need NEPA approval. That could effectively exempt many factory farms from the NEPA process, Meyer said.
The deal repeatedly inserts the words “reasonable” in NEPA, at one point limiting the types of environmental impacts that agencies must study only to those that are “reasonably foreseeable.” That may all sound, well, reasonable, and it could ultimately work out alright for environmentalists. But the courts — and the sharply conservative Supreme Court — will get to decide exactly where the lines of that reasonableness fall. “One thing we know for sure is that we’re gonna see a lot of litigation out of this,” Meyer said.
Which is not to say that Democrats failed to win concessions. Every NEPA study must now consider the environmental consequences of a project not happening — a new tool against NIMBYs who fight clean-energy projects. And energy-storage facilities, such as big batteries that store renewable electricity on the power grid, now qualify for an accelerated approval process.
The bill enacts a lot of what has been “circling around as a bipartisan set of permitting ideas for a couple of years now,” Xan Fishman, the director of energy policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a moderate think tank, told me. “It’s a lot of stuff that people on both sides of the aisle have called for, a lot of common-sense stuff. But there’s still a lot of stuff to do.”
The problem is that the bill makes all these changes without altering transmission policy at all. It funds a study on whether the United States should expand its long-distance transmission — ironic given that building new power lines already requires too many studies — but makes no substantive changes.
I’m sympathetic to the case for permitting reform, and I would describe the law’s changes to NEPA as aggressive but acceptable under the right circumstances. There’s some good stuff, some bad stuff, and much in between. But looking at the package in the context of this deal, I am more worried. By acceding to these changes, Democrats have surrendered their greatest leverage in future permitting-reform talks. Achieving transmission reform will now require much more profound changes to NEPA than many progressives may be willing to accept.
“They took care of the low-hanging fruit and there may not be a ladder high enough to get to the rest,” Rob Gramlich, a political consultant and one of the nation’s foremost transmission experts, told me.
That’s because Republicans want three major changes to federal environmental law, all of which could empower fossil fuels. First, lawmakers want to ease the way for international oil and natural-gas pipelines, limiting a president’s ability to block them under federal law. Second, Republicans want to revise the Clean Water Act so states can’t use it to block pipelines for climate-related reasons.
Finally, Republicans want to impose even stricter time limits on NEPA, adding a statute of limitations and a deadline for how long a NEPA-related lawsuit can drag on. This would require the biggest gamble of all: By time-delimiting NEPA fights, Democrats would keep NIMBYs from fighting clean-energy and mass-transit infrastructure, allowing a rapid low-carbon buildout. (As Ezra Klein has argued, NEPA hobbles the government’s power to build big public projects more than it limits private companies’.) But in doing so, Democrats would deprive environmental litigators of the time-sapping tactics that they use to slow down fossil-fuel projects.
Democrats, meanwhile, have more modest goals in any future permitting fight: They want long-distance power lines to be as easy to build as natural-gas pipelines. Right now, an interstate power line must win approval from dozens of state and local governments before it can be built, while a natural-gas pipeline only needs to be approved by a single federal agency. Democrats want to give that agency authority over transmission. Pending that, Democrats would require the grid in each region of the country to connect with its neighbors, guaranteeing a minimum amount of transmission capacity nationwide.
Suffice it to say that these are not equal goals. Republicans now want much deeper changes to NEPA than Democrats seek for transmission law. This is going to make any dealmaking much harder. It would have been a fair trade, once, to link transmission reforms to some of the permitting changes in the debt-ceiling deal. It would have been a savvy trade to package the deal’s modest reforms with some of the more aggressive proposals from each party, so as to make the ultimate “winner” of the negotiations more obscure. With those easy trades off the table, only hard choices remain.
So Democrats will soon have to make a much weightier gamble: Should they accept Republicans’ significant changes to NEPA in exchange for transmission reform?
That might feel like trading “a Taylor Swift ticket for a high-school baseball ticket,” Gramlich told me. If Democrats accept it, they will be making a world-historic bet: that decarbonization is all but assured, and that no amount of preferential treatment for pipelines or fossil fuels could change the market’s embrace of a low-carbon future. They might decide that weakening NEPA’s judicial reforms would enable a green buildout, not a gray one, allowing new IRA-subsidized infrastructure to flourish across the country. Or more darkly, they might decide that only a massive transmission mandate can secure the IRA’s carbon-reduction benefits, and that such a prize is worth a few new pipelines.
But I’ll be honest that I don’t see it happening. The party does not seem ready to make such a cosmic gamble on the future of the American energy system. Climate advocates couldn’t accept the Mountain Valley Pipeline by itself; how could they accept making it easier to build any pipeline going forward? A miracle could happen, of course, but for now, the hope of transmission reform seems dead.
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What he wants them to do is one thing. What they’ll actually do is far less certain.
Donald Trump believes that tariffs have almost magical power to bring prosperity; as he said last month, “To me, the world’s most beautiful word in the dictionary is tariffs. It’s my favorite word.” In case anyone doubted his sincerity, before Thanksgiving he announced his intention to impose 25% tariffs on everything coming from Canada and Mexico, and an additional 10% tariff on all Chinese goods.
This is just the beginning. If the trade war he launched in his first term was haphazard and accomplished very little except costing Americans money, in his second term he plans to go much further. And the effects of these on clean energy and climate change will be anything but straightforward.
The theory behind tariffs is that by raising the price of an imported good, they give a stronger footing in the market; eventually, the domestic producer may no longer need the tariff to be competitive. Imposing a tariff means we’ve decided that a particular industry is important enough that it needs this kind of support — or as some might call it, protection — even if it means higher prices for a while.
The problem with across-the-board tariffs of the kind Trump proposes is that they create higher prices even for goods that are not being produced domestically and probably never will be. If tariffs raise the price of a six-pack of tube socks at Target from $9.99 to $14.99, it won’t mean we’ll start making tube socks in America again. It just means you’ll pay more. The same is often true for domestic industries that use foreign parts in their manufacturing: If no one is producing those parts domestically, their costs will unavoidably rise.
The U.S. imported over $3 trillion worth of goods in 2023, and $426 billion from China alone, so Trump’s proposed tariffs would represent hundreds of billions of dollars of increased costs. That’s before we account for the inevitable retaliatory tariffs, which is what we saw in Trump’s first term: He imposed tariffs on China, which responded by choking off its imports of American agricultural goods. In the end, the revenue collected from Trump’s tariffs went almost entirely to bailing out farmers whose export income disappeared.
The past almost-four years under Joe Biden have seen a series of back-and-forth moves in which new tariffs were announced, other tariffs were increased, exemptions were removed and reinstated. For instance, this May Biden increased the tariff on Chinese electric vehicles to over 100% while adding tariffs on certain EV batteries. But some of the provisions didn’t take effect right away, and only certain products were affected, so the net economic impact was minimal. And there’s been nothing like an across-the-board tariff.
It’s reasonable to criticize Biden’s tariff policies related to climate. But his administration was trying to navigate a dilemma, serving two goals at once: reducing emissions and promoting the development of domestic clean energy technology. Those goals are not always in alignment, at least in the short run, which we can see in the conflict within the solar industry. Companies that sell and install solar equipment benefit from cheap Chinese imports and therefore oppose tariffs, while domestic manufacturers want the tariffs to continue so they can be more competitive. The administration has attempted to accommodate both interests with a combination of subsidies to manufacturers and tariffs on certain kinds of imports — with exemptions peppered here and there. It’s been a difficult balancing act.
Then there are electric vehicles. The world’s largest EV manufacturer is Chinese company BYD, but if you haven’t seen any of their cars on the road, it’s because existing tariffs make it virtually impossible to import Chinese EVs to the United States. That will continue to be the case under Trump, and it would have been the case if Kamala Harris had been elected.
On one hand, it’s important for America to have the strongest possible green industries to insulate us from future supply shocks and create as many jobs-of-the-future as possible. On the other hand, that isn’t necessarily the fastest route to emissions reductions. In a world where we’ve eliminated all tariffs on EVs, the U.S. market would be flooded with inexpensive, high-quality Chinese EVs. That would dramatically accelerate adoption, which would be good for the climate.
But that would also deal a crushing blow to the American car industry, which is why neither party will allow it. What may happen, though, is that Chinese car companies may build factories in Mexico, or even here in the U.S., just as many European and Japanese companies have, so that their cars wouldn’t be subject to tariffs. That will take time.
Of course, whatever happens will depend on Trump following through with his tariff promise. We’ve seen before how he declares victory even when he only does part of what he promised, which could happen here. Once he begins implementing his tariffs, his administration will be immediately besieged by a thousand industries demanding exemptions, carve-outs, and delays in the tariffs that affect them. Many will have powerful advocates — members of Congress, big donors, and large groups of constituents — behind them. It’s easy to imagine how “across-the-board” tariffs could, in practice, turn into Swiss cheese.
There’s no way to know yet which parts of the energy transition will be in the cheese, and which parts will be in the holes. The manufacturers can say that helping them will stick it to China; the installers may not get as friendly an audience with Trump and his team. And the EV tariffs certainly aren’t going anywhere.
There’s a great deal of uncertainty, but one thing is clear: This is a fight that will continue for the entirety of Trump’s term, and beyond.
Give the people what they want — big, family-friendly EVs.
The star of this year’s Los Angeles Auto Show was the Hyundai Ioniq 9, a rounded-off colossus of an EV that puts Hyundai’s signature EV styling on a three-row SUV cavernous enough to carry seven.
I was reminded of two years ago, when Hyundai stole the L.A. show with a different EV: The reveal of Ioniq 6, its “streamliner” aerodynamic sedan that looked like nothing else on the market. By comparison, Ioniq 9 is a little more banal. It’s a crucial vehicle that will occupy the large end of Hyundai's excellent and growing lineup of electric cars, and one that may sell in impressive numbers to large families that want to go electric. Even with all the sleek touches, though, it’s not quite interesting. But it is big, and at this moment in electric vehicles, big is what’s in.
The L.A. show is one the major events on the yearly circuit of car shows, where the car companies traditionally reveal new models for the media and show off their whole lineups of vehicles for the public. Given that California is the EV capital of America, carmakers like to talk up their electric models here.
Hyundai’s brand partner, Kia, debuted a GT performance version of its EV9, adding more horsepower and flashy racing touches to a giant family SUV. Jeep reminded everyone of its upcoming forays into full-size and premium electric SUVs in the form of the Recon and the Wagoneer S. VW trumpeted the ID.Buzz, the long-promised electrified take on the classic VW Microbus that has finally gone on sale in America. The VW is the quirkiest of the lot, but it’s a design we’ve known about since 2017, when the concept version was revealed.
Boring isn’t the worst thing in the world. It can be a sign of a maturing industry. At auto shows of old, long before this current EV revolution, car companies would bring exotic, sci-fi concept cars to dial up the intrigue compared to the bread-and-butter, conservatively styled vehicles that actually made them gobs of money. During the early EV years, electrics were the shiny thing to show off at the car show. Now, something of the old dynamic has come to the electric sector.
Acura and Chrysler brought wild concepts to Los Angeles that were meant to signify the direction of their EVs to come. But most of the EVs in production looked far more familiar. Beyond the new hulking models from Hyundai and Kia, much of what’s on offer includes long-standing models, but in EV (Chevy Equinox and Blazer) or plug-in hybrid (Jeep Grand Cherokee and Wrangler) configurations. One of the most “interesting” EVs on the show floor was the Cybertruck, which sat quietly in a barely-staffed display of Tesla vehicles. (Elon Musk reveals his projects at separate Tesla events, a strategy more carmakers have begun to steal as a way to avoid sharing the spotlight at a car show.)
The other reason boring isn’t bad: It’s what the people want. The majority of drivers don’t buy an exotic, fun vehicle. They buy a handsome, spacious car they can afford. That last part, of course, is where the problem kicks in.
We don’t yet know the price of the Ioniq 9, but it’s likely to be in the neighborhood of Kia’s three-row electric, the EV9, which starts in the mid-$50,000s and can rise steeply from there. Stellantis’ forthcoming push into the EV market will start with not only pricey premium Jeep SUVs, but also some fun, though relatively expensive, vehicles like the heralded Ramcharger extended-range EV truck and the Dodge Charger Daytona, an attempt to apply machismo-oozing, alpha-male muscle-car marketing to an electric vehicle.
You can see the rationale. It costs a lot to build a battery big enough to power a big EV, so they’re going to be priced higher. Helpfully for the car brands, Americans have proven they will pay a premium for size and power. That’s not to say we’re entering an era of nothing but bloated EV battleships. Models such as the overpowered electric Dodge Charger and Kia EV9 GT will reveal the appetite for performance EVs. Smaller models like the revived Chevy Bolt and Kia’s EV3, already on sale overseas, are coming to America, tax credit or not.
The question for the legacy car companies is where to go from here. It takes years to bring a vehicle from idea to production, so the models on offer today were conceived in a time when big federal support for EVs was in place to buoy the industry through its transition. Now, though, the automakers have some clear uncertainty about what to say.
Chevy, having revealed new electrics like the Equinox EV elsewhere, did not hold a media conference at the L.A. show. Ford, which is having a hellacious time losing money on its EVs, used its time to talk up combustion vehicles including a new version of the palatial Expedition, one of the oversized gas-guzzlers that defined the first SUV craze of the 1990s.
If it’s true that the death of federal subsidies will send EV sales into a slump, we may see messaging from Detroit and elsewhere that feels decidedly retro, with very profitable combustion front-and-center and the all-electric future suddenly less of a talking point. Whatever happens at the federal level, EVs aren’t going away. But as they become a core part of the car business, they are going to get less exciting.
Current conditions: Parts of southwest France that were freezing last week are now experiencing record high temperatures • Forecasters are monitoring a storm system that could become Australia’s first named tropical cyclone of this season • The Colorado Rockies could get several feet of snow today and tomorrow.
This year’s Atlantic hurricane season caused an estimated $500 billion in damage and economic losses, according to AccuWeather. “For perspective, this would equate to nearly 2% of the nation’s gross domestic product,” said AccuWeather Chief Meteorologist Jon Porter. The figure accounts for long-term economic impacts including job losses, medical costs, drops in tourism, and recovery expenses. “The combination of extremely warm water temperatures, a shift toward a La Niña pattern and favorable conditions for development created the perfect storm for what AccuWeather experts called ‘a supercharged hurricane season,’” said AccuWeather lead hurricane expert Alex DaSilva. “This was an exceptionally powerful and destructive year for hurricanes in America, despite an unusual and historic lull during the climatological peak of the season.”
AccuWeather
This year’s hurricane season produced 18 named storms and 11 hurricanes. Five hurricanes made landfall, two of which were major storms. According to NOAA, an “average” season produces 14 named storms, seven hurricanes, and three major hurricanes. The season comes to an end on November 30.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced yesterday that if President-elect Donald Trump scraps the $7,500 EV tax credit, California will consider reviving its Clean Vehicle Rebate Program. The CVRP ran from 2010 to 2023 and helped fund nearly 600,000 EV purchases by offering rebates that started at $5,000 and increased to $7,500. But the program as it is now would exclude Tesla’s vehicles, because it is aimed at encouraging market competition, and Tesla already has a large share of the California market. Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who has cozied up to Trump, called California’s potential exclusion of Tesla “insane,” though he has said he’s okay with Trump nixing the federal subsidies. Newsom would need to go through the State Legislature to revive the program.
President-elect Donald Trump said yesterday he would impose steep new tariffs on all goods imported from China, Canada, and Mexico on day one of his presidency in a bid to stop “drugs” and “illegal aliens” from entering the United States. Specifically, Trump threatened Canada and Mexico each with a 25% tariff, and China with a 10% hike on existing levies. Such moves against three key U.S. trade partners would have major ramifications across many sectors, including the auto industry. Many car companies import vehicles and parts from plants in Mexico. The Canadian government responded with a statement reminding everyone that “Canada is essential to U.S. domestic energy supply, and last year 60% of U.S. crude oil imports originated in Canada.” Tariffs would be paid by U.S. companies buying the imported goods, and those costs would likely trickle down to consumers.
Amazon workers across the world plan to begin striking and protesting on Black Friday “to demand justice, fairness, and accountability” from the online retail giant. The protests are organized by the UNI Global Union’s Make Amazon Pay Campaign, which calls for better working conditions for employees and a commitment to “real environmental sustainability.” Workers in more than 20 countries including the U.S. are expected to join the protests, which will continue through Cyber Monday. Amazon’s carbon emissions last year totalled 68.8 million metric tons. That’s about 3% below 2022 levels, but more than 30% above 2019 levels.
Researchers from MIT have developed an AI tool called the “Earth Intelligence Engine” that can simulate realistic satellite images to show people what an area would look like if flooded by extreme weather. “Visualizing the potential impacts of a hurricane on people’s homes before it hits can help residents prepare and decide whether to evacuate,” wrote Jennifer Chu at MIT News. The team found that AI alone tended to “hallucinate,” generating images of flooding in areas that aren’t actually susceptible to a deluge. But when combined with a science-backed flood model, the tool became more accurate. “One of the biggest challenges is encouraging people to evacuate when they are at risk,” said MIT’s Björn Lütjens, who led the research. “Maybe this could be another visualization to help increase that readiness.” The tool is still in development and is available online. Here is an image it generated of flooding in Texas:
Maxar Open Data Program via Gupta et al., CVPR Workshop Proceedings. Lütjens et al., IEEE TGRS
A new installation at the Centre Pompidou in Paris lets visitors listen to the sounds of endangered and extinct animals – along with the voice of the artist behind the piece, the one and only Björk.