PERMITTING REFORM POLITICS JUST GOT MORE INTERESTING
The White House signed back up for Sen. Joe Manchin’s permitting reform bill, before there’s even a full-fledged Democratic alternative, after the Energy and Natural Resources chairman reintroduced it yesterday.
The White House stakes its position with a solidly “all of the above” strategy favoring all energy sources, with some special carve-outs for natural gas of the sort that key administration allies staunchly oppose, and is ready to push its allies to moderate on the matter, adviser John Podesta said.
“We’re willing to take on some of our friends, in terms of pushing them hard to say we need to build things again in America,” Podesta said in an interview yesterday.
Not a total surprise: President Joe Biden gave his backing to the exact same text in December, and Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm went out of her way to give her department’s support to the Mountain Valley Pipeline, the worst provision in Manchin’s bill in the eyes of the Senate Democrats who voted against it.
But other congressional Democrats are actively putting together legislation that at least in principle could serve Biden administration’s permitting aims and its climate change and environmental justice priorities with fewer compromises on language favoring fossil fuel projects.
A look at the House permitting draft: The House Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition last week released a permitting discussion draft based on its November policy brief.
The rough draft proposes to create the role of environmental justice liaison at FERC to “consult with environmental justice communities impacted by the construction or operation” of FERC-authorized projects.
It would also provide funding for intervenors to help the public participate in and navigate the legal depths of FERC proceedings and require the provision of a community impact report for a given federal action under NEPA where it’s determined to have “potential to cause negative environmental or public health impacts on an environmental justice community.”
The House SEEC draft also includes some provisions akin to the NEPA review constraints put forward in Manchin’s text and in HR 1, in terms of capping the duration of environmental reviews, although it gives a lighter touch.
For example, the SEEC draft directs the Council on Environmental Quality to establish a method to determine the deadlines for environmental reviews and authorizations for major projects, but it does not put a number on the number of years an agency may take to perform an environmental assessment or EIS.
Another provision would facilitate more consultation with project developers during the review process.
“This is our attempt at finding pieces of both HR 1 and Manchin that we could build off of but that we revised with Democratic values in mind that we think could be politically palatable for Dems,” a House Democratic aide told Jeremy.
Still some fundamental disagreements: At the heart of this permitting reform dispute is whether rewriting NEPA and other laws, particularly in a way that puts firmer deadlines on agency review or constraints on litigation under those laws, reduces the strength of their environmental protections.
Podesta pledged at CERAWeek, where he spoke at length of the virtue in Manchin’s bill and the need for reforms in order to maximize the Inflation Reduction Act, that Biden “is never going to sign something that abandons rigorous scientific standards and doesn’t support environmental protection.”
But the remaining criticism among a number of Democrats is that Manchin’s bill, with its timelines and litigation limits, does exactly that.