In his election night victory speech, Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York said he and his fellow Democrats would fight to “make this country affordable for every single American.” They have an opportunity to start now, before they take control of Congress in January. They should seize it.
The Senate this week is debating a bill on a subject that is more important than it sounds: permitting reform. The bill would make it easier to build solar energy farms, battery storage, power lines and more. As a result, it would reduce energy prices. The status quo is expensive, dirty and unstable. The country needs to build a lot of big, new things to make its future cheaper and cleaner.
The bill has the support of some of the Senate’s most environmentally minded members — and of the White House. This political miracle reflects years of bipartisan negotiations, false starts and near misses. But following their party’s whopping midterm victory, some Democrats are tempted to scrap this legislation and wait to act until they take control of Congress next year. Democrats would then draft a new bill more to the liking of some environmental groups.
The current bill has a good chance to pass the Senate. By a margin of 73 to 25, senators approved a procedural measure on Monday, with a final vote expected in the coming weeks. The situation in the House is murkier. Among the potential no votes on the bill is Mr. Jeffries, the Democratic leader, who has raised concerns about it.
The bill’s Democratic skeptics are making a mistake. President Trump would almost certainly veto a follow-up bill next year. And time matters, especially for the climate. Congress should pass this bill now. It can then return next year and pass other bills that would do even more good.
The country’s current permitting regime is the result of many good intentions. Legislators wrote laws intended to protect water, air, endangered species and precious land. Over the years, though, the rules have become so complex and restrictive that the country cannot build the future it needs. This complexity feeds cynicism about whether government can get anything done.
Today, for instance, it typically takes between five and 13 years to build a long-distance power line, like the one that transports clean hydropower from Quebec to New England. That line took about a decade to finish, and opened in January. It has enough capacity to meet about one-fifth of Massachusetts’s electricity demand, and it’s projected to save consumers $50 million a year.
Many other valuable projects, unfortunately, remain incomplete or were never begun because of permitting bureaucracy. The slowness weakens the fight against climate change. Without lines to transport clean power from sunny and windy regions to other parts of the country, the country ends up using dirty energy in its place. Democrats who call climate change an emergency should not defend a permitting system too slow to build the clean energy that would address it.
Many of the country’s permitting rules were written at a time when industrial development usually caused environmental harm. In response, the environmental movement developed a habit of opposing new projects. Today, though, inertia often benefits fossil fuel companies. They, too, can use the regulatory state to tie up clean energy projects in permitting purgatory.
The costs of today’s bureaucracy are broader than its effect on the climate. A more robust, cleaner grid would make American energy more reliable and less dependent on hostile foreign nations. No country can embargo the wind. Better permitting rules would improve traffic and road safety: A road signal project in Connecticut that would fix a dangerous highway intersection — but would also affect nearby wetlands — was proposed in 2024 but may not be finished until 2032. And public health can suffer too. In January, a Washington sewage line burst after a repair was delayed for eight years, sending hundreds of millions of gallons of waste into the Potomac River.
Finally, the current permitting system raises costs for Americans — the issue that dominates politics today. The status quo increases their energy costs by making it harder for new projects to come online, including inexpensive renewables such as wind and solar. The bill in Congress would make progress against these problems and begin to deliver on Democrats’ promise to address affordability.
The bill also has a provision addressing data centers, another subject on which Democrats made many promises during this year’s campaign. It would force data center operators to pay the full costs of the electricity they use, protecting the average electricity consumer.
Opponents of the bill, such as the Sierra Club, complain that it might harm the environment. That concern is misplaced.
Yes, the bill would ease the construction of a range of projects, including fossil fuel infrastructure. But the United States will not stop using oil or natural gas anytime soon, and adding unnecessary costs to those projects serves little purpose. On net, the bill would cut greenhouse gas emissions from power plants by as much as 18 percent by 2040, according to the Rhodium Group, a research firm. It would do so in part by nearly tripling the construction of high-voltage transmission lines, which whiz electricity from often remote wind farms and solar plants to cities that need power.
Common sense supports that finding. Oil and gas companies have built their infrastructure over decades; renewables need to catch up quickly. The country currently gets less than a fifth of its energy from zero-carbon sources. Rapidly increasing that share will be impossible if it takes a decade to build a transmission line.
This is why the bill draws support from passionate climate crusaders such as Senator Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island. Both of Georgia’s senators, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, voted to advance it this week. Practical-minded environmental groups such as the Citizens’ Climate Lobby and the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions have endorsed it, as has Consumer Reports.
The bill’s supporters recognize that it is merely a first step toward a much broader agenda to reduce carbon emissions and lower energy costs. But anyone who cares about climate change should cheer this bill. And a party that just won an election on affordability should not pass up a chance to start delivering immediately.
Source photograph via Getty Images.
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