The Battle Over Energy Permitting Reform: Tensions Between Climate Goals and Environmental Justice Demands Intensify

As the Biden administration seeks a net-zero U.S. economy by 2050 and begins deploying up to $1.6 trillion in climate and infrastructure funds, efforts to update permitting processes for renewable energy, transmission, and other projects are catalyzing fierce debate—sometimes even among policy allies who usually align.

Clean energy groups broadly support streamlining permitting to accelerate deployment of renewables, storage, and other resources, helping mitigate near-term climate change impacts. But many environmental organizations oppose permitting reforms that could also benefit the fossil fuel industry or weaken the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).

"NEPA has always been seen as the vanguard for environmental justice communities," said Anthony Rogers-Wright, a racial and climate justice advocate. He previously worked at ICF International and the New York Lawyers for the Public Interest. "It's not even as good as it should be, but it's still seen as the first line of defense for cultural communities and Indigenous communities. Now to see it being tinkered with—for some, it's almost like tampering with Social Security."

The high stakes of this conflict "have brought us to a stage where we're starting to see a lot of tit-for-tat, lines being drawn, and then all the various ideas and approaches that come with that," he said.

From an environmental justice perspective, advocates argue that removing permitting and siting barriers could endanger communities already bearing pollution burdens.

"In some cases, we actually want these analyses to be lengthy. We don't want them to be rushed. We're talking about critical resources and activities that require disturbing soil and surface," Rogers-Wright said.

Costs, Delays, and Uncertainty

On the other hand, advocates of permitting reform argue that current requirements on project developers are not only burdensome but also unhelpful to the communities they are supposed to protect.

In a 2022 analysis,the Institute for Progress arguedthat current NEPA "imposes enormous costs on the federal government, delays clean energy projects for years, and creates uncertainty that prevents other projects from getting off the ground."

Alec Stapp, co-founder and co-CEO of IFP and one of the report's authors, said he advocates for a "strong" permitting process that provides both certainty and efficiency.

"I think a strong permitting process can be described as one that gives a quick and informed answer on whether a project gets government approval to build—that is, a very fast and certain 'yes' or 'no' on whether you can build that project," he said.

Stapp said an efficient permitting process with time limits would be "strong," but "that's the opposite of what environmental activist groups want—they want tools they can use to stop projects they don't like."

These groups want "to easily use [the permitting process] to stop bad projects they simply don't want built," he said—such as "pipelines, new gas facilities, and export terminals."

Stapp said he supports the use of categorical exclusions in the NEPA environmental review process—defined by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as "actions that federal agencies have determined, after review by the [White House Council on Environmental Quality], do not individually or cumulatively have a significant effect on the human environment."

In April, the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) finalized a rule to update federal environmental review processes under NEPA, including "new, more flexible approaches for agencies to establish categorical exclusions to expedite low-impact projects" such as solar, EV charging infrastructure, and transmission,the White House said in a press release。

Earlier that week, the U.S. Department of Energy issued a final rule establishing theCoordinated Interagency Transmission Authorizations and Permits (CITAP)program, which will make DOE the lead agency for permitting new transmission projects.

Congress is also addressing permitting reform, with 10 bills introduced in this session alone, but these bills, despite bipartisan calls, havestruggled to advance. Senators Joe Manchin (I-W.Va.) and John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) on May 21announcedthat they would soon share a new bipartisan permitting reform legislative draft with colleagues.

Manchin commented that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's (FERC)recently issued transmission planningand cost allocation reform rules were, "as my friend Senator Hickenlooper said... 'a Band-Aid on congressional inaction.'"

Stapp said he hopes reform will end "the litigation death spiral that various projects are currently in." He cited concerns about the uncertainty facing project developers and their financiers, as well as the unresolved fate of the massive investments represented by the CHIPS Act, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act.

"Does that money turn into steel in the ground?" he asked. "Are projects actually being built in the real world? Or are these just big contracts that have been spent but are stuck in permitting purgatory? ... We're far from having final answers, but we're starting to see some warning signs."

Stapp added that the president himself "reportedly is also concerned that there aren't enough new projects breaking ground that are funded by the infrastructure bill or the IRA."

"I share that concern—like, where are the actual projects?" he asked. "There's a lot of investment. But there seems to be a fairly significant lag in actual deployment."

Rogers-Wright said he sees politics at play among permitting reform supporters "on the liberal side of environmentalism... because many have staked their reputations on the IRA," and "there's very little time to prove that it's actually beneficial and effective, because there's an election coming in November."

Community Engagement and Environmental Justice

Denae King is associate director and fellow at the Bullard Center for Environmental and Climate Justice at Texas Southern University. She said permitting reform is a priority, and the center is "very grateful" for recent White House and EPA actions on the issue. However, thorough environmental review remains "extremely important," she added.

"In environmental justice communities, there are often already multiple sources of industrial pollution, or sources of contaminants in the air or water," she said. "So understanding cumulative impacts becomes increasingly important, and this permitting reform does that. I think another thing it does is promote meaningful public participation."

The White House's new rule removes provisions in NEPA that allegedly "created litigation risk and jeopardized community engagement," specifically including "removing detailed and burdensome requirements for what public comments must include to be considered by agencies," and "removing provisions that sought to limit judicial review."

King said public comment periods for projects under development often are "short and not well-publicized. So when [communities] actually get a chance to weigh in, their input is not necessarily valued anymore... It's too late to ask communities after developers have drawn the full map and already decided how facilities will be laid out and sited."

That, she said, is disadvantageous to both developers and communities, as the former may end up sinking costs into a project that ultimately is not viable.

"Community members are the experts," King said. "They have a good handle on what's happening in their communities, whether it's exposure pathways or the types of health impacts they're seeing in schools, in their neighborhoods."

Renewable Project Opposition

According to a May 22report from the Hamilton Project, visual and noise complaints often drive community opposition in wind and solar project permitting.

The report cited a 2023 paper by David Adelman, holder of the Harry Reasoner Chair at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law, which found that "litigation pressure against offshore wind occurs in rural Northeastern communities where residents place a high value on preserving local landscapes."

"Other times, the renewable transition threatens existing local economies," the report noted. "In Kentucky, coal is the most powerful political incumbent, in part because the mining industry supports thousands of workers and their families each year."

Chirag Lala is director of energy policy at the Center for Public Enterprise, a nonprofit. He said he views the permitting reform issue as an efficiency problem—ensuring community-level input flows upward to inform the best possible decisions.

"The problem is not stakeholder engagement," Lala said. "And I do think some of the groups that are engaged in the permitting reform debate are either explicitly or close to implying that stakeholder engagement is the problem. But that's far from the case."

In CPE's ideal world, Lala said, projects would receive "more" automatic permits, categorical exclusions, and "public agencies would often be in a privileged position to get the permits and siting authority they need, or certainly be able to select certain types of private projects that could get automatic or expedited permits."

"But the key is, we don't think the fact that communities need and want to raise certain concerns about the investment process is itself an obstacle," Lala said. He argued that the existing permitting process is what "fails to meet their needs in that regard."

Lala suggested that environmental justice concerns, pollution cleanup, and local worker employment could be addressed through policy mechanisms outside the permitting process.

"But I think there's also a fair amount of distrust externally about what the terms of permitting reform will be and where they're headed," Lala added.

Both Lala and Stapp suggested that "veto" legal mechanisms like injunctions have the potential to threaten community benefit agreements reached between communities and developers, even when the "veto" is exercised by third parties like environmental organizations.

In a process without finality, Lala said, "when different groups engage in that process, they know that the mere fact of filing a certain document, raising a certain objection, or showing up to a certain meeting could create enough friction to prevent the project from moving forward."

"And if there's an entity that can step into the process at some point and say directly: 'Look, this project is going to move forward, everyone has said what they need to say,' that would change the incentives for some participants in the process," he said.

However, Rogers-Wright said he worries that moving toward more unilateral decision-making processes would strip voice from those directly affected by decisions.

"When you don't have a voice, when you're not part of the process, you tend to be sacrificed," he said. "If you expedite the process, that means you're going to dramatically reduce [input]—that itself is problematic, right? The so-called public participation is not at its best level."