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permitting reform
Senate Dems Stop Permitting Talks Over Trump's 'Reckless and Vindictive Assault' on Wind Power
"By sabotaging US energy innovation and killing American jobs, the Trump administration has made clear that it is not interested in permitting reform," said Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse and Martin Heinrich.
Dec 22, 2025
The top Democrats on a pair of key US Senate panels ended negotiations to reform the federal permitting process for energy projects in response to the Trump administration's Monday attack on five offshore wind projects along the East Coast.
Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Ranking Member Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Energy and Natural Resources Committee Ranking Member Martin Heinrich (D-NM) began their joint statement by thanking the panels' respective chairs, Sens. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) and Mike Lee (R-Utah), "for their good-faith efforts to negotiate a permitting reform bill that would have lowered electricity prices for all Americans."
"There was a deal to be had that would have taken politics out of permitting, made the process faster and more efficient, and streamlined grid infrastructure improvements nationwide," the Democrats said. "But any deal would have to be administered by the Trump administration. Its reckless and vindictive assault on wind energy doesn't just undermine one of our cheapest, cleanest power sources, it wrecks the trust needed with the executive branch for bipartisan permitting reform."
Earlier Monday, the US Department of the Interior halted Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind off Virginia, Empire Wind 1 and Sunrise Wind off New York, Revolution Wind off Rhode Island and Connecticut, and Vineyard Wind 1 off Massachusetts, citing radar interference concerns.
Governors and members of Congress from impacted states, including Whitehouse and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), condemned the announcement, with Whitehouse pointing to a recent legal battle over the project that would help power Rhode Island.
"It's hard to see the difference between these new alleged radar-related national security concerns and the radar-related national security allegations the Trump administration lost in court, a position so weak that they declined to appeal their defeat," he said.
This looks more like the kind of vindictive harassment we have come to expect from the Trump administration than anything legitimate.
— Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (@whitehouse.senate.gov) December 22, 2025 at 12:59 PM
Later, he and Heinrich said that "by sabotaging US energy innovation and killing American jobs, the Trump administration has made clear that it is not interested in permitting reform. It will own the higher electricity prices, increasingly decrepit infrastructure, and loss of competitiveness that result from its reckless policies."
"The illegal attacks on fully permitted renewable energy projects must be reversed if there is to be any chance that permitting talks resume," they continued. "There is no path to permitting reform if this administration refuses to follow the law."
Reporting on Whitehouse and Heinrich's decision, the Hill reached out to Capito and Lee's offices, as well as the Interior Department, whose spokesperson, Alyse Sharpe, "declined to comment beyond the administration's press release, which claimed the leases were being suspended for national security reasons."
Lee responded on social media with a gif:
Although the GOP has majorities in both chambers of Congress, Republicans don't have enough senators to get most bills to a final vote without Democratic support.
The Democratic senators' Monday move was expected among observers of the permitting reform debate, such as Heatmap senior reporter Jael Holzman, who wrote before their statement came out that "Democrats in Congress are almost certainly going to take this action into permitting reform talks... after squabbling over offshore wind nearly derailed a House bill revising the National Environmental Policy Act last week."
That bill, the Standardizing Permitting and Expediting Economic Development (SPEED) Act, was pilloried by green groups after its bipartisan passage. It's one of four related pieces of legislation that the House advanced last week. The others are the Mining Regulatory Clarity Act, Power Plant Reliability Act, and Reliable Power Act.
David Arkush, director of the consumer advocacy group's Climate Program, blasted all four bills as "blatant handouts to the fossil fuel and mining industries" that would do "nothing to help American families facing staggering energy costs and an escalating climate crisis."
"We need real action to lower energy bills for American families and combat the climate crisis," he argued. "The best policy response would be to fast-track a buildout of renewable energy, storage, and transmission—an approach that would not just make energy more affordable and sustainable, but create US jobs and bolster competitiveness with China, which is rapidly outpacing the US on the energy technologies of the future.
Instead, Arkush said, congressional Republicans and President Donald Trump "are shamefully pushing legislation that would only exacerbate the energy affordability crisis and further entrench the dirty, dangerous, and unaffordable energy of the past."
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11 House Democrats Help GOP Pass 'Disastrous' Pro-Polluter Permitting Bill
"The SPEED Act protects corporate interests, not the public, and it should be rejected by any senator who claims to stand with the people," said one campaigner.
Dec 18, 2025
Eleven Democrats on Thursday voted with nearly all Republicans in the US House of Representatives to advance a permitting reform bill that climate and frontline organizations warn is a "disastrous" attack on a landmark environmental protection law.
Democratic Reps. Jim Costa (Calif.), Henry Cuellar (Texas), Don Davis (NC), Chris Deluzio (Pa.), Lizzie Fletcher (Texas), Jared Golden (Maine), Vicente Gonzalez (Texas), Adam Gray (Calif.), John Mannion (NY), Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (Wash.), and Marc Veasey (Texas) voted with all Republicans present expect Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (Pa.) to pass the bill.
The Standardizing Permitting and Expediting Economic Development (SPEED) Act, spearheaded by Golden and House Committee on Natural Resources Chair Bruce Westerman (R-Ark.), would amend the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which "is often called the 'Magna Carta' of federal environmental laws."
In a statement after the vote, Food & Water Watch legal director Tarah Heinzen said that "for decades, NEPA has ensured logical decision-making and community involvement when the federal government considers projects that could harm people and the environment. The SPEED Act would eviscerate NEPA's protections."
The group detailed key ways in which the SPEED Act attacks NEPA:
- Drastically limiting NEPA's scope of review: Removes many actions from NEPA review altogether, potentially allowing factory farms and coal plants to build and expand without any environmental review or public input;
- Limiting agency accountability: Creates unreasonably short deadlines to challenge inadequate reviews, and limits courts’ ability to stop unlawful projects; and
- Putting polluter profits above science and the environment: Turns NEPA on its head by requiring agencies to prioritize corporate interests over the public interest and limiting their ability to consider the best science.
"Today's absurd House vote is yet another handout to corporate polluters at the expense of everyday people who have to live with the real-world impacts of toxic pollution from dirty industries like fossil fuels and factory farms," Heinzen argued. "This nonsense must be dead on arrival in the Senate."
Other campaigners also looked to the upper chamber after the vote. Erik Schlenker-Goodrich, executive director of the Western Environmental Law Center, said that "renewable energy and climate advocates in the Senate must hold the line against the SPEED Act's evisceration of our bedrock environmental and community protection law."
Allie Rosenbluth, Oil Change International's US campaign manager, stressed that "our senators must stand up against the SPEED Act's attempts to undermine democratic decision-making, pollute our communities, and threaten our collective future."
For a Better Bayou's James Hiatt similarly said that "the SPEED Act protects corporate interests, not the public, and it should be rejected by any senator who claims to stand with the people."
Anthony Karefa Rogers-Wright, co-coordinator of Black Alliance for Peace's Climate, Environment, and Militarism Initiative, warned that the bill "represents yet another assault on the health of frontline, Black, Brown, Indigenous, and poor white communities that have been designated as sacrifice zones by big polluters who bribe lawmakers with big money to continue a culture of extract, slash, burn, and emit at the expense of oppressed and marginalized peoples."
"Rather than speeding up the approval of dirty projects, Congress should increase funding for federal agencies and grassroots organizations accountable to frontline communities to carry out legally defensible and accurate environmental analyses," he continued, pointing to the Environmental Justice for All Act, previously led by the late Democratic Congressmen Raúl Grijalva (Ariz.) and Donald McEachin (Va.).
Mar Zepeda Salazar, legislative director at Climate Justice Alliance, also pointed to that alternative: "The SPEED Act fast-tracks harmful fossil fuel and polluting projects, not the community-led clean energy solutions families and Indigenous peoples across the country have long called for. Instead of pushing the SPEED Act—a bill that would strip away what few legal protections communities still have, weaken safeguards for clean air, land, and water near new industrial development, and sidestep meaningful consultation with federally recognized tribal nations—Congress should be advancing real, community-driven permitting reform."
"Examples include the Environmental Justice for All Act, which lays out meaningful public engagement, strong public health protections, respect for tribal sovereignty and consultation obligations, and serious investments in agencies and staff," she said.
Representatives from the Institute for Policy Studies, Sacred Places Institute for Indigenous Peoples, and Unitarian Universalists for Social Justice also spoke out against what David Watkins, director of government affairs for the Climate and Energy Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, condemned as "a sizable holiday gift basket for Big Oil and Gas." He, too, urged the Senate to "reject this retrograde legislation and stand up to the deep-pocketed, polluting industries lobbying for it."
Lauren Pagel, policy director at Earthworks, pointed out that passing the SPEED Act wasn't the only way in which the House on Thursday "chose corporate interests over people, Indigenous Peoples' rights, and our environment." It also passed the Mining Regulatory Clarity Act, which "will remove already-scarce protections for natural resources and sacred cultural sites in US mining law."
"Today's House votes are a step backwards for our nation, but we continue to stand firm for the rights of the people and places on the frontlines of oil, gas, and mining," Pagel said. "Communities and ecosystems shouldn't pay the price while corporations rush to profit off extraction—with a helping hand from our elected officials."
Along with those two pieces of legislation, Public Citizen pointed to the House's approval of the Power Plant Reliability Act and Reliable Power Act earlier this week. David Arkush, director of the consumer advocacy group's Climate Program, said that the bills advancing through Congress "under the guise of 'bipartisan permitting reform' are blatant handouts to the fossil fuel and mining industries."
"We need real action to lower energy bills for American families and combat the climate crisis," Arkush asserted, calling on congressional Republicans and President Donald Trump "to fast-track a buildout of renewable energy, storage, and transmission—an approach that would not just make energy more affordable and sustainable, but create US jobs and bolster competitiveness with China, which is rapidly outpacing the US on the energy technologies of the future."
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Manchin’s Last Hurrah Is a Bad Deal for the Planet
The fossil fuel lobby has now supersized their hostage demands with the single-minded goal of guarding against an incoming Harris administration by mandating a steady stream of fossil fuel leases and permits.
Aug 12, 2024
The hardest lesson I have learned over my career working on climate policy is to never underestimate the power and craftiness of the fossil fuel lobby. The evidence of their success: global fossil fuel consumption and emissions were higher in 2023 than at any time in history. That, in a nutshell, is how we are losing the fight against climate change.
This is why I grew alarmed when U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin (I-W.Va.), the fossil fuel industry’s strongest champion in Congress, rushed a new energy deal through his committee late last month before it could be properly scrutinized. Manchin will give up his energy gavel when he retires this year. This is his last hurrah, and it’s a doozy.
The Energy Permitting Reform Act combines significant reforms in electricity transmission—potentially unlocking big gains in renewable energy—with coal, oil, and gas boons that would be big wins for the fossil fuel lobby.
The permitting laws surrounding oil, gas, and coal leases and permits may be an arcane abstraction to most analysts, but they are the keys to the energy kingdom to fossil fuel industries intent on expanding production for decades to come.
Now energy analysts are in the hot seat as they are asked to validate whether this energy bargain is a good deal for the planet.
Déjà Vu
The lessons from a similar energy deal in 2015 should give anyone pause before joining the Manchin parade. The 2015 budget deal paired renewable energy tax credits with a provision to lift the decades-old ban on exporting U.S. crude oil. Energy analysts rushed to validate the bargain. Those clean energy provisions would “dwarf the impact on carbon emissions of allowing oil exports,” wrote Michael Levi in an analysis widely quoted at the time.
To quell fears about the oil provisions, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) sent a letter, writing: “While lifting the oil export ban remains atrocious policy, the wind and solar tax credits in the omnibus will eliminate around 10 times more carbon pollution than the exports of oil will add.”
Her appeal worked. The bill passed. Contrary to the assurances of energy experts, the oil export floodgates opened. Crude exports surged from zero to 4 million barrels a day today. This growth in exports was 20 times higher than the worst-case scenario forecasted in 2015 by Levi, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), and others.
As I said at the start, the oil lobby is smart. They knew that fracking technology was going to transform oil and gas production, but they needed new markets.
The Foxes Are Snickering at the Hen House Door
The 2015 experience should caution everyone to step back and look more closely at what the fossil fuel lobby helped Manchin write behind closed doors. The permitting laws surrounding oil, gas, and coal leases and permits may be an arcane abstraction to most analysts, but they are the keys to the energy kingdom to fossil fuel industries intent on expanding production for decades to come.
There is ample cause for concern. Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), Manchin’s co-author, gloats that the bill “guarantee[s] future access to oil and natural gas resources on federal lands and waters” in ways that not even former U.S. President Donald Trump could do under current law. Further, he says that “it will permanently end President Joe Biden’s reckless ban on new liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports.”
The Wall Street Journal editorial board agrees, urging Trump to “steal a march on Kamala Harris by endorsing” Manchin’s energy bill.
The Danger of Locking in Fossil Fuel Infrastructure
Changing the law in order to expedite new fossil fuel infrastructure can directly threaten global climate goals. The IPCC, the world’s leading authority on climate science, warned in their 2022 report that “cancellation of plans for new fossil fuel infrastructures” is needed to avoid “significant carbon lock-ins, stranded assets, and other additional costs” and potentially putting the Paris climate goals “out of reach” (p. 267).
Similarly, the International Energy Agency, the world’s leading tracker of global energy trends, concluded in their 2023 World Energy Outlook that “investment in oil and gas today is almost double the level required in the [net zero emissions scenario] in 2030, signaling a clear risk of protracted fossil fuel use that would put the 1.5°C goal out of reach” (p. 19).
Supersized Demands from Fossil Fuel Allies
Every energy bill ever passed by Congress has some degree of “hold your nose” compromise. Even the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, the most important piece of climate legislation ever enacted, gave some ground, tying oil and gas leases together with offshore wind leases in a Beltway version of a shotgun wedding.
But the fossil fuel lobby has now supersized their hostage demands with the single-minded goal of guarding against an incoming Harris administration by mandating a steady stream of fossil fuel leases and permits.
In a separate analysis (update available here), I calculated the energy and greenhouse gas impacts of the LNG portion of the Manchin bill. The five LNG liquefaction plants expedited by the bill are designed to produce up to 77 trillion cubic feet of natural gas through 2050 (10.6 Bcf/day).
This long-lived fossil fuel infrastructure is far more likely to dampen investment in renewable energy, electrification, and energy conservation than displace other fossil fuels.
Liquefying gas, which must be cooled to 260°F below zero, requires significant energy. According to EIA, 14% of the gas used to produce LNG is consumed during liquefaction. That means that up to 13 trillion additional cubic feet of natural gas through 2050 (1.7 Bcf/day) will be consumed to produce the LNG from these five projects.
The total volume of natural gas consumed and processed by these LNG projects (94 trillion cubic feet through 2050) is enough to meet almost all of the gas needs for homes across America (99 trillion cubic feet) over the same timeframe. It is also equivalent to 62% of the total amount of gas (152 trillion cubic feet) EIA forecasts will be used by the electric power sector from 2030-2050.
The lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions of all LNG produced by these five plants would be 616 million metric tons annually (13 gigatons through 2050), equivalent to 165 coal-fired power plants.
Using government estimates of the economic damage caused by greenhouse gas emissions, we can put a dollar estimate to these emissions: $1.7 trillion (cumulatively through 2050).
Keep in mind this only accounts for the LNG section of the Manchin bill and does not include the impacts of the bill’s oil, coal, and gas leasing mandates.
A Misused Measuring Stick
Assumptions used in greenhouse gas analysis can have profound effects on policymaking. It’s impossible to achieve numerical science targets without good measurements.
One set of assumptions in particular can make or break assessments of fossil fuel infrastructure. Energy substitution analysis looks at what happens to energy markets when new energy sources are added or removed, which in turn shapes how greenhouse gas emissions are calculated.
This is where some energy analyses get sloppy, relying on outdated, simplified assumptions to minimize the climate impact of fossil fuel infrastructure. The federal government is particularly bad at this. It can be awkward to approve projects after finding they superchage global warming. My analysis of seven major environmental impact statements across five federal agencies found that the agencies erased 98% of the greenhouse gas emissions from oil and gas projects, on average, obscuring $1 trillion in climate damages.
The pertinent question when assessing the substitution effects of energy infrastructure is whether the energy helps or hurts in achieving deep decarbonization pathways. This question is kept firmly in sight when analysts assess clean energy supply policies but can fade into the background when people argue that fossil fuel supplies don’t matter because the emissions aren’t any worse than current pollution sources.
Someone can claim a punch to your right arm won’t hurt more than a punch to your left arm, but the reality is that the punch still hurts. You can claim that LNG doesn’t increase emissions because it’s substituting for other fossil fuels, but the reality is that the planet is still getting cooked.
The theoretical argument that U.S. LNG coming online in five years will replace coal in China is especially unrealistic in light of global and regional trends toward renewable electricity. According to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA): “Evidence from China, the world’s largest coal consumer, shows that LNG is unlikely to materially displace coal-fired power generation.”
Keep in mind that these LNG plants won’t come online until about 2030, and the billions of dollars invested are dependent on decades of LNG production thereafter. This long-lived fossil fuel infrastructure is far more likely to dampen investment in renewable energy, electrification, and energy conservation than displace other fossil fuels.
The oil and gas industry has a particularly long and successful history of creating and defending markets to absorb supply. Consider, for example, the oil lobby’s successful efforts to keep fuel economy standards, and how they have pushed fossil fuel-based plastics across the world. Now that America is shifting off gas, they have turned their sights to shifting those emissions overseas.
Common Ground
There are many factors that go into assessing the impacts of Manchin’s energy bill, with valid grounds for different approaches and results. I suggest the following principles as potential common ground and a worthwhile test for any analysis:
- Be transparent — Include the full (i.e., gross) lifecycle emissions from all fossil fuels that are brought to market by the bill as a reference point so users can understand the impact of substitution assumptions.
- Be consistent — Assumptions used to assess the emissions profile of policies that bring fossil fuels to markets should be analogous with the assumptions used to assess the benefits of clean energy policies. If permitting policy to expedite clean energy infrastructure can lead to big emission reductions, then it also stands to reason that permitting policy to expedite fossil fuel infrastructure can also lead to big emission increases.
- Use the precautionary principle — Assume that fossil fuel lobbyists knew what they were doing when they wrote the detailed fossil fuel provisions of the bill. Talk to the lawyers who take these companies to court and understand the stakes when language mandates the use of particular studies and processes. At a minimum, provide a worst-case scenario that truly reflects the breadth of what the authors say their bill will do.
- Get methane right — Too many emissions models rely on methane data that is known to be wrong. Numerous studies (for example, here, here and here), based on more than 1 million measurements, show real-world methane emission leaks from U.S. natural gas production are 3-4 times higher than the industry-reported data used by the government and modelers. Peer-reviewed studies show that, with proper methane accounting, natural gas has a climate impact as bad as coal.
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