This is the first installment in a four-part series critiquing Matt Yglesias’ support for deregulating the permitting process.
All emphasis (bold text) is mine.
In “Let Joe Manchin have his pipeline,” a Slow Boring newsletter published on September 14, 2022, Yglesias insisted that “the NEPA review process is basically bad”:
The whole concept of ‘permitting reform’ is broad, big, important, and somewhat vague, and it is currently generating a lot of interesting dialogue and arguments among smart people on the internet. I tend toward the school of thought that says the NEPA review process is basically bad. Like any process that makes it easier to delay or block things, you can certainly point to specific situations in which it is used to delay or block things that deserve to be delayed or blocked. But it also delays and blocks lots of things that shouldn’t be delayed or blocked. And if you want to transform the nation’s energy system, then delay is fundamentally not your friend.
Why Yglesias Is Wrong
Permitting reform advocates like Yglesias conflate several complex factors to pin the blame for clean energy delays almost exclusively on NEPA and other regulations, and they pretend that weakening existing protections is the only logical response. But as the Roosevelt Institute and the Climate and Community Institute (CCI) explained in their joint August 2023 report, “A Progressive Take on Permitting Reform,” new clean energy projects are typically slowed down by factors other than environmental review; thus, deregulating permitting is not the panacea that Yglesias and his allies think it is.
The National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) has provided evidence that undermines the anti-NEPA camp’s claims. As NRDC notes, the White House Council on Environmental Quality has estimated that 95 percent of all projects subject to NEPA analyses “are granted categorical exemptions… meaning no review is needed. Fewer than 5 percent require environmental assessments, which are significantly less involved than the full environmental impact statements (EIS) required of the remaining projects—less than 1 percent of the total.”
David Adelman’s analysis of federal permits and environmental reviews for energy infrastructure built between 2010 and 2021 also found that “most projects were subject to streamlined administrative procedures or avoided federal regulation altogether.” According to Adelman: “Less than 5 percent of wind and solar projects required a comprehensive environmental review or project-specific permit. Further, the number of federal environmental cases challenging new projects was remarkably low—a total of 28 cases involved wind projects, 8 solar, and 14 transmission lines over this 12-year period.”
In a separate report decrying the “false dilemma” between maintaining robust environmental safeguards and speeding up the renewable energy transition, the Roosevelt Institute wrote that “the anecdotal examples of four- to ten-year timelines to complete a NEPA analysis are the exception, not the rule. Most NEPA decisions are made within a reasonable time for the complexity of the project, and the analytical rigor applied to a project is tailored to the intensity of a project’s impacts.” So where does the blame lie when things move sluggishly? As the report goes on to say: “A wide body of research indicates that most delays in the NEPA process are functional, not regulatory. Insufficient staff, unstable budgets, vague or incomplete permit applications, waiting for information from a permit applicant, or poor coordination among permitting authorities are the primary causes of delay.” The good news, the report adds, is that “these unproductive causes of delay can be addressed without eliminating environmental standards, analytical rigor, or community engagement.”
In addition to hiring more civil servants, other solutions that are explored in the Roosevelt-CCI joint report but go unmentioned by Yglesias and his co-thinkers include co-locating wind and solar, integrating solar on agricultural land, and deploying solar tracking technology to increase the capacity of panels. Moreover, increasing energy efficiency is a vital, if overlooked, step to alleviate pressure on the grid. Because Yglesias and other NEPA critics ignore these factors, their calls to simplify the environmental review process are a Trojan horse for rolling back laws aimed at preventing water and air pollution, for running roughshod over tribal sovereignty, and for further deregulating energy production—all of which is poised to help the fossil fuel industry most of all while further harming overburdened frontline communities.
For the energy transition to be just and sustainable, we need to increase regulatory capacity, coordination, planning, and public input (i.e., we need better regulatory implementation and stricter adherence to democratic principles, not less). Nobody on the left is saying that zero changes are required to achieve decarbonization at the speed and scale demanded by the climate emergency (see here, here, and here for examples to the contrary).
However, in addition to stressing the need to keep fossil fuels in the ground, we are saying that a) the necessary regulatory reforms extend beyond what’s generally understood to constitute the federal permitting process (they encompass state and local zoning laws and contracts between private entities, for instance); and b) when it comes to regulatory modernization, expanding the federal workforce and enhancing community buy-in is better than taking shortcuts (such as weakening bedrock laws and allowing fossil fuel expansion to proceed apace) that will come back to haunt us.
The photo above is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
