There is widespread momentum in Congress to streamline federal environmental regulations and accelerate agency permitting processes.
But that broad consensus is mired in partisan divergences. While the Democrat-led Senate views permitting reform as essential to implementing 2022’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the Republican-held House sees deregulation as a tool for dismantling it.
Between these polar cliffs, there may be common ground for 2024 federal permitting reform, White House National Climate Task Force Chair John Podesta said.
There is bipartisan support in both chambers for overhauling regulations and permitting to spur energy investment, revive the nation’s mining industry, and trim approval timelines, he said during an Oct. 11 Brookings Institution forum gauging the IRA’s first-year impacts.
The Biden administration shares that goal, Mr. Podesta said, and it wants Congress to act, but, thus far, the only formal regulatory reform package on the table is HR 1, The Lower Energy Costs Act, adopted in a mostly-partisan 225-204 vote by the House on March 30.
HR 1 was dispatched to the Senate six months ago and has not been heard from since. It has no chance of advancing out of the Democrat-led Senate or being signed into law by President Joe Biden, said Mr. Podesta, a former Clinton administration Chief of Staff.
“There are certain red lines we won’t cross,” he said. “HR 1 undermines core environmental laws, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, The Toxic Waste Act. We are not going to cross these red lines.”
The massive House package repeals numerous climate change programs authorized under the IRA, including its $27 billion Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Reduction Fund and methane fee, while steering policy—and tax incentives—from boosting renewable energies into domestic oil and gas production.
Under HR 1, states retain authority for regulating hydraulic fracturing, a president would be prohibited from imposing a fracking moratorium, and federal agencies would have 180-day deadlines to issue decisions after a National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) review.
HR 1 requires more oil and gas lease sales on public lands and repeals newly-increased lease fees and royalties. It permits the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to issue temporary waivers of the Clean Air Act and Solid Waste Disposal Act for projects that allow for processing or refining at a critical energy resource facility.
The House’s proposed Lower Energy Costs Act streamlines NEPA’s regulatory process for energy projects by, among other limitations, prohibiting federal agencies from considering indirect and cumulative environmental impacts. It accelerates permitting for critical minerals and natural gas pipelines.
The bill requires all federal environmental assessments to be completed in one year and environmental impact statements to be final in two years. Any legal action must be filed within 120 days.
Mr. Podesta said while there are “red lines” in HR 1 that make it dead-on-arrival in the Senate, the administration is “open to changes in NEPA, to looking at that process” as required in the bill.
‘Hopeful’ For Senate Deal
The Senate Natural Resources Committee chaired by Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) is expected this fall or next spring to propose a permitting reform package.“We remain hopeful for a deal with the Senate,” Mr. Podesta said, emphasizing that the Biden administration has made streamlining the permit process a priority “at the most senior levels, cabinet-level” in “trying to move projects along.”
If a Senate reform package doesn’t surface and find buyers in the House by early 2024, “we’re not waiting” for Congress to act, he said.
Mr. Podesta said time and technology do not wait for dawdling decision-makers. There are urgencies on every horizon. For instance, he said, the nation needs to expand its electrical transmission capacity by 60 percent in the coming decade.
The administration is “examining and using every tool at our disposal to accelerate and improve federal permitting” with an eye on increasing “capacity at permitting stage, add personnel, and new technology to move this process forward,” he said.
If it takes unilateral executive actions, that’s on the table, Mr. Podesta said.
“What I am basically saying is where we have the authority, where we have the money, we are going to utilize it to get things done,” he said. “I’m still hoping there will be legislation but, the House? Just how they’re functioning these days, how much they are internally focused … we are going to do what it takes” to get projects moving.
Getting projects moving was the point of the IRA, Mr. Podesta said.
The IRA was adopted in the Senate in a partisan 51-50 vote—Vice President Kamala Harris cast the deciding vote—and in the House in an equally partisan 220-207 tally in August 2022.
The IRA pumps up to $780 billion in federal tax credits for carbon-neutral energy generation over the next 10 years in what is “a transformation of the economy on a size and scale unlike anything ever done before,” Mr. Podesta said. “Not just in the history of the country, but in the history of the world.”
He rattled off statistics: $115 billion domestic investment in “clean energy manufacturing,” 170,000 new “clean energy jobs,” $70 billion private commitment to electric vehicle (EV) supply chains, $10 billion in solar manufacturing supply chains, $120 billion by utilities nationwide for “clean energy generation.”
Despite this, “Most Americans don’t know anything about the IRA,” Mr. Podesta said. “In that sense, it is like the ACA [Affordable Care Act].”
The impact of the ACA, or Obamacare, “took a while” to register with the public and is now widely popular with voters, he said, and so it will be with the IRA because “underlying support for clean technologies remains highly popular.”
