Biden administration moves to speed up clean energy permits
The Biden administration on Tuesday released rules designed to speed up permits for clean energy while requiring federal agencies to more heavily weigh damaging effects on the climate and on low-income communities before approving projects like highways and oil wells.
As part of a deal to raise the country’s debt limit last year, Congress required changes to the National Environmental Policy Act, a 54-year-old bedrock law that requires the government to consider environmental effects and to seek public input before approving any project that necessitates federal permits.
That bipartisan debt ceiling legislation included reforms to the environmental law designed to streamline the approval process for major construction projects, such as oil pipelines, highways and power lines for windand solar-generated electricity. The rules released Tuesday, by the White House Council on Environmental Quality, are intended to guide federal agencies in putting the reforms in place.
But they also lay out additional requirements created to prioritize projects with strong environmental benefits, while adding layers of review for projects that could harm the climate or their surrounding communities.
“These reforms will deliver smarter decisions, quicker permitting and projects that are built better and faster,” said Brenda Mallory, chair of the council. “As we accelerate our clean energy future, we are also protecting communities from pollution and environmental harms that can result from poor planning and decisionmaking while making sure we build projects in the right places.”
The move comes as President Joe Biden rushes to push through a slew of major environmental rules before November’s presidential election, including policies to limit climate-warming pollution from cars, trucks, power plants and oil and gas wells; to protect the habitats of the sage grouse and other endangered species; to ban asbestos; and to remove so-called forever chemicals from tap water.
The rules announced Tuesday could help to more quickly carry out Biden’s signature climate law, the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which includes at least $370 billion in tax incentives to expand renewable energy, such as wind and solar power, as well as electric vehicles. Analysts say it could be difficult to fully realize the benefits of the law if, say, the construction of transmission lines needed for renewable energy or electric vehicle charging stations is bogged down in the permitting process.
The National Environmental Policy Act, known as NEPA, was signed into law by President Richard Nixon in 1970, after several environmental disasters, including a crude oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, and fires on the heavily polluted Cuyahoga River in Ohio, that shocked the nation.