Democrats divided over permitting reform's climate math

Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) says a bipartisan energy bill would be a huge win for the climate; Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) says it would be a disaster. 

The Democratic caucus is divided over whether to support legislation that seeks to speed up the nation’s energy build-out — largely based on disagreements about what its actual climate impacts would be. 

Emissions analysts tell The Hill there's good reason for the conundrum: It’s fairly unclear what the bill would mean for the climate due to political and economic uncertainties in the years ahead.

“It truly is hard to arrive at a top line for this, because it depends on assumptions about what the market is going to do,” said Derrick Flakoll, U.S. policy analyst at research firm BloombergNEF. 

However, Jackson Ewing, director of energy and climate policy at Duke University’s Nicholas Institute of Energy, Environment and Sustainability, says the legislation’s climate benefits likely outweigh its costs. 

“There is uncertainty there, because we'll see potential gains from renewable energy and transmission infrastructure project development accelerating, but also risks associated with expanded fossil fuel leasing,” Ewing said. 

“I do think, though, that on balance, it's likely to be positive, in particular, because the bottlenecks facing renewable energy and transmission are so pronounced in slowing down what would otherwise be a much more rapid expansion,” he added. 

The bill in question seeks to speed up the permitting processes for energy projects and is a compromise between Sens. Joe Manchin (I-W.Va.) and John Barrasso (R-Wyo.). 

When it came to a vote before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee last month, seven Democrats and independents who caucus with them voted for it, while three voted against it. 

Both left-wing supporters of the bill and opponents invoked climate change. 

“Just one provision in this bill … will greenlight five massive LNG projects that will lock in annual carbon emissions equal to 165 coal plants,” Sanders said, referring to liquid natural gas. 

He lamented that despite the dire consequences of climate change, Congress “is still considering legislation to provide a huge giveaway to big oil to drill, produce and sell more fossil fuels.”

Heinrich, meanwhile, said the bill’s oil and gas provisions “will likely increase emissions on a scale of less than 160 million tons of CO2,” but said that other provisions, like those supporting power lines and geothermal energy, could cut emissions “by 2 to 3 billion” metric tons.

“This puts us on a much faster path to addressing the things that are causing drought and forest fires and all kinds of stress across the country.”

Experts agree the legislation would be sure to expand the construction of power lines  — crucial for increasing the build-out of renewable power in the years ahead. Provisions in the bill would give federal energy regulators greater authority to approve new power lines and those that require planning between regions of the electric grid.

In addition, the legislation includes provisions aimed at speeding up the timelines for wind and solar projects on federal lands, as well as increasing opportunities to pursue offshore wind and geothermal energy, the latter of which comes from heat within the earth and does not produce planet-warming emissions. 

“There's a large amount of solar and wind build-out that would be economical if transmission could be reliably built that we don't expect to be built because transmission cannot reliably be built,” Flakoll said. 

“This bill is important because it's codifying a lot of expanded authority to build interregional transmission and to give the authority to site national interest electric transmission corridors that has been called into question by recent Supreme Court cases that have really limited the ability of agencies … to just make regulations without extremely explicit law coming from Congress.”

Ewing also noted the nation needs a grid that can transmit renewable power across regions to places of heavy demand. 

“If the permitting reform proposal is able to galvanize more long-distance transmission, find ways to reward communities where transmission is occurring but energy is not necessarily being used, and by extension, meet growing electricity demand for data centers, for [electric vehicle] penetration, for electrifying industrial processes ... it would be a real boon to our emissions trajectory.”

But the extent to which the legislation's profossil provisions would harm the climate are less clear. 

The bill contains language requiring more opportunities to drill offshore and a faster process for reviewing or denying permits for facilities that ship natural gas abroad. It also puts constraints on the Biden administration’s efforts to review the criteria for shipping natural gas to other countries, requiring it to go through a formal process including a public comment period and to use existing findings in the meantime. 

Other provisions seek to limit legal challenges to energy projects across the board, saying lawsuits can only be filed within 150 days of a project’s approval. 

Whether those parts of the bill would actually make a difference in part depends upon politics: If former President Trump wins back the White House, he’s likely to adopt some similar profossil policies anyhow.

“If you had a Democratic trifecta in place in January, then maybe you could just get the clean energy stuff right through and not have to make this compromise,” John Larsen, partner at the research firm Rhodium Group, said. “And then meanwhile, if you had a different administration in place in January, they might be able to do a lot of the stuff ... on their own, executive action-wise.”

Not only that: Whether expanding gas production and exports would increase emissions is also debatable — depending on both whether the shorter timeline for reviewing facilities would actually change how much gas infrastructure gets built and whether it would displace coal, a fuel that typically has even greater emissions, or climate-friendly renewables.

Larsen added that it makes a big difference whether additional gas exports are “going to Africa and displacing what would otherwise be new energy demand met with solar and wind, which would be zero-emitting,” or “going to Southeast Asia or China, and displacing really old, dirty coal plants.”

In addition to their concerns about profossil provisions, however, climate advocates who are critical of the bill argue measures that would curtail legal challenges to energy projects could also harm the climate.

Raúl García, vice president of policy and legislation at Earthjustice, noted that currently, even if high-emitting projects ultimately win federal approval, they’re often stopped in court.

But if the bill were to pass, “all the projects that are being stopped by a legitimate legal claim in court because the agency did not follow a proper process [are] suddenly greenlighted and shielded from judicial review,” García said, adding that his organization had an 80 percent success rate in suits against the Trump administration. 

In addition, regardless of their climate impacts, provisions restricting such challenges could also cause other harms like pollution in surrounding communities, García said.

“The LNG provisions alone and the mining provisions alone will cause harms to communities on the ground by cutting them out of a permitting process,” he added