This is the second installment in a four-part series critiquing Matt Yglesias’ support for deregulating the permitting process.
All emphasis (bold text) is mine.
In his “Let Joe Manchin have his pipeline” post (9/14/22), Yglesias implied that a) because “the infrastructure for a fossil fuel economy already exists,” permitting reform would boost clean energy more than dirty energy and b) the potential net benefits for renewables are so great that they outweigh the risks of new fracked gas pipelines and export terminals:
The infrastructure for a fossil fuel economy already exists; the infrastructure for a net zero economy does not. Reforming the permitting process to make it easier to build the economy we need is good and important, and it continues to be good and important even if a fair permitting deal also lets some fossil fuel projects go forward.
He also floated these hypotheses in a pair of tweets, one of which promotes a separate post titled “Energy innovation needs more than R&D” (11/2/21).
Why Yglesias Is Wrong
Just because a lot of fossil fuel infrastructure already exists doesn’t mean that more can’t be (and isn’t already being!) built and planned right now. Global fossil fuel use and associated greenhouse gas emissions both reached record highs in 2024. Even though extant planet-heating pollution is putting humanity on a cataclysmic trajectory of nearly 3°C of warming by 2100, the world’s fossil fuel-producing countries are still plowing ahead with new investments in and construction of fossil fuel infrastructure. If completed, the planned expansion of coal, oil, and gas (in some cases now underway) would exceed the planet’s rapidly shrinking carbon budget—the amount of CO2-equivalent emissions consistent with limiting temperature rise to 1.5°C—twice over. Worse yet, this dirty energy buildout is being led by the U.S. and other wealthy nations with the capacity to swiftly adopt clean energy.
Yglesias doesn’t provide proof that clean energy would be the biggest winner of permitting reform. Last year, evidence-based analyses found that the fossil fuel industry, especially liquefied natural gas (LNG), stood to benefit immensely from former Sen. Joe Manchin (I-W.Va.) and Sen. John Barrasso’s (R-Wyo.)’s Energy Permitting Reform Act—enough to negate the decarbonization gains associated with building more transmission lines to carry renewably powered electricity. In the words of Climate and Community Institute executive director Johanna Bozuwa, “The amount of fossil fuels that can be deployed out of this far outweighs to me the gains we would get in transmission.” Although people “are sick of transmission not being deployed,” Bozuwa continued, “what is being built into this bill is not next year’s emissions. It’s thirty years of emissions.”
The recent and ongoing buildout of fracked gas pipelines and export terminals makes it more likely that the world will overshoot its rapidly dwindling carbon budget. As my colleagues Hannah Story Brown and Dylan Gyauch-Lewis wrote for The Nation in November 2023: “The Energy Information Administration is forecasting that US natural gas production and LNG exports will grow through 2050, and a rapid increase in companies signing long-term LNG contracts, like Cheniere’s recent deal to export LNG to Germany’s BASF through 2043, is locking us into this nightmare scenario.”
“This is an especially fraught step backward because fossil energy production’s total lifetime costs skew heavily toward upfront capital expenditures, rather than toward ongoing operating expenses,” Hannah and Dylan observed. “Once fossil fuel companies invest in building new operations, they have a strong financial incentive to continue operating them for their full lifespans.”