The bill drew criticism from both sides of the aisle, but it’s unclear how it would affect U.S. emissions.
By Jake Bittle & Naveena Sadasivam, Grist
This story was originally published by Grist. You can subscribe to its weekly newsletter here.
Joe Manchin on Wednesday made public the text of his long-awaited permitting bill, the result of a side deal that the senator from West Virginia made with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer as a condition of passing major climate legislation last month. The bill provoked a variety of strong and polarized reactions from climate experts, environmental justice advocates, and renewable energy boosters, but it’s still unclear how it would change the nation’s energy mix. Even less certain is whether the legislation can pass as a rider to a budget resolution that Congress must pass by the end of the month to avoid a government shutdown.
Biden said Sunday that the US would send troops to defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese attack, marking the fourth time he made the pledge. Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ), who is spearheading the Taiwan Policy Act, said the comment from Biden surprised him since the White House expressed reservations about the bill.
The Taiwan Policy Act, which has been approved by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, would provide Taiwan $6.5 billion in military aid, give the island the benefits of being a major non-NATO ally, and require sanctions as a response to Chinese aggression against Taiwan.
After the bill was introduced by Menendez and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), the White House expressed some concerns, causing the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to make some minor changes.
The bulk of the bill consists of a series of revisions to the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, a sweeping 1970 law that requires federal agencies to review the environmental impacts of nearly all the decisions they make. The legislation would set a two-year ceiling on NEPA reviews of major infrastructure projects and a one-year ceiling on reviews of minor projects, though it isn’t clear what would happen if agencies exceed those timelines, and the bill doesn’t contain any funding to help agencies meet the new mandates. The bill also shrinks the statute of limitations on court challenges against agency permitting decisions from six years to about five months.
In theory, the reforms in the bill will make it easier to build all kinds of energy projects, from mines to pipelines to gas terminals to solar farms. In practice, it’s unclear how big of an effect the bill will have on construction timelines, or how it will benefit fossil fuel projects compared to renewables.
Many liberal and libertarian thinkers have criticized NEPA and expressed support for the bill, saying it would speed up clean energy. The free-market R Street Institute, for instance, has found 40 percent of the active NEPA reviews at the Department of Energy are for clean energy projects, compared to 15 percent for fossil fuels. The liberal columnist Ezra Klein, writing for the New York Times, said that the bedrock environmental law is one of many “checks on development that have done a lot of good over the years but are doing a lot of harm now.”
However, some research has suggested that NEPA review delays are primarily caused not by the constraints of the law itself but by staffing shortages at the administrative agencies charged with undertaking the reviews. The Southern Methodist University law professor James Coleman, furthermore, has written that NEPA reform wouldn’t do much to help renewables, since the main obstacle for those projects tends to be getting approval at the state and local level, where they often run into fierce opposition.
Many of the bill’s opponents also allege that the bill further burdens communities vulnerable to the harms of polluting infrastructure by weakening the review process for new projects and closing off avenues for litigation. Representatives from Greenpeace, the Sunrise Movement, the Indigenous Environmental Network, and dozens of other environmental groups all spoke out against the bill after hosting a rally outside of the U.S. Capitol earlier this month to oppose Manchin’s deal with Schumer.
“By making it more difficult for communities to participate in the permitting process, the fossil fuel industry and others will be able to hastily secure permits without adequate time for review and consideration of the environmental impacts, which will only continue the legacy of pollution that has turned these communities into sacrifice zones,” said Peggy Shepard, co-founder of WE ACT for Environmental Justice, a Harlem-based advocacy organization, in a statement.
Reception inside the Capitol was no friendlier. Schumer and Manchin plan to attach the bill to a so-called continuing resolution, a measure that temporarily funds government operations, forcing senators to vote on keeping the government open rather than approve or deny the permitting deal on a standalone basis. A number of progressive senators, including Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, said they wouldn’t support a funding resolution with the permitting language in it, with Warren saying it “should be debated and voted on separately.” Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, meanwhile, called it a “disastrous side deal,” and a group of several dozen progressives in the House of Representatives have also come out against the deal. Many Senate Republicans, burned by Manchin’s support of the Inflation Reduction Act, have announced their opposition as well.
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