Is Permitting Reform About to Break Through?

Guest

Jim Connaughton

CEO, JLC Strategies; Former Chairman, White House Council on Environmental Quality

Transcript

Jim Connaughton: Every issue like this comes around every 20 years. And then there’s a period where it ramps up and it takes five to eight years before it tips over the edge and you get it. And so we are in year six of the permitting cycle. All the stars are aligning just on economics. Even more importantly, they’re aligning on national security. There are very few things these days on which there is profound common ground. And getting America back building things again is one of them.

Bill Loveless: The National Environmental Policy Act is designed to ensure that federal agencies assess the environmental impact of proposed energy and other infrastructure projects. Supporters consider it a landmark law that set important guardrails for communities, but developers have long criticized it as being slow and in need of reform. Past attempts at permit reform have failed, but now momentum is building again. Several legislative efforts are underway, most notably the Bipartisan SPEED Act, which streamlines the permitting process and sets limits on judicial review. So how likely is meaningful permitting reform this time around? How would it enable timely development of energy infrastructure without jeopardizing environmental concerns and what might make it feasible to supporters of fossil and renewable energy alike?

This is Columbia Energy Exchange, a weekly podcast from the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. I’m Bill Loveless.

Today on the show, Jim Connaughton.

Jim is the CEO of JLC Strategies and the former chairman and CEO of Nautilus Data Technologies. During the George W. Bush administration, he served as chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality and directed the White House Office of Environmental Policy. We talked about past attempts at permitting reform, and the multiple efforts underway today in Congress. We discussed the shifting motivations for permitting reform in DC and where Jim thinks policymakers could find common ground to push efforts forward. And Jim explained why he thinks brownfields and opportunity zones offer excellent options for building energy projects relatively quickly. Here’s our conversation.

Jim Connaughton, welcome back to Columbia Energy Exchange.

Jim Connaughton: Thanks. It’s always a pleasure.

Bill Loveless: Well, Jim, when we last spoke about permitting reform on this program back in October 2022, you said, I’ve been waiting for this conversation for more than 30 years. Are you still that enthusiastic about this topic?

Jim Connaughton: I am even more enthusiastic now than ever because of the promise of addressing this topic, the promise of what this topic means for environmental protection, for people being better off, and for growing our economy. So no time better than now.

Bill Loveless: Well, it’s getting a lot more attention these days and it has recently. It’s getting attention in Congress and among interest groups. Why is that so? And does it make sense now given the deadlines Congress faces to act on the budget and other urgent matters?

Jim Connaughton: Well, so it does make sense now more than ever, particularly in light of having to act on the budget and other matters. There are very few things these days in which there is profound common ground. And getting America back building things again is one of them. We had these three massive bills, the Infrastructure Bill, the CHIPS Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act backed by huge amounts of government sponsorship in addition to trillions of dollars of pent up capital waiting to deploy into all of our nation’s infrastructure projects, compounded by now this new and quite welcome demand for more electricity to power more beneficial things to make everybody better off. And then add to that the bipartisan desire to continue to grow our manufacturing and production base in addition to reshoring some of the manufacturing and production base we’ve lost. So all the stars are aligning just on economics.

Even more importantly, they’re aligning on national security. We want to do more here because it’s more secure to do it here. And also on domestic security. Our grid is failing to keep pace with demand for the first time since World War II, and that’s not sustainable, and especially for the least economically advantaged among us. There’s no reason for prices to be going up faster than the rate of inflation if we’re building at the pace of demand. In fact, if we build at the pace of demand, you can see more competition and prices flattening and declining.

Bill Loveless: Well, so much of this is about the National Environmental Policy Act, right? And to be clear to anyone who may not entirely understand what that law is, let’s remind them, Jim, when was NEPA enacted and under what circumstances?

Jim Connaughton: Yeah, so NEPA was enacted, signed into law in 1970 by Richard Nixon. And it was the first modern environmental law in America. And really it set the mark for the rest of the world. It laid the foundation for the consideration of the full range of environmental aspects of building and growing an economy. And it had a very simple mission, which is telling federal agencies doing federal projects to think about more than just the human and economic aspects of those projects. But also to give a good think about what’s happening in the environment, in making decisions about where to put the projects, how to run them, how to manage them. So it was a great start and it was an important start, but it gave birth to something more spectacular. It gave birth to 30 years of substantive environmental lawmaking: clean air, clean water, wetlands, toxic substances, hazardous waste management, natural resource conservation, better forest management, expansion of our parks, more attention to heritage locations.

We had 30 years of more than 30 federal statutes providing for health, safety and environmental protection and natural resource protection and conservation. I mean, that’s just huge and we’re the beneficiaries of that. And it’s hard looking back, Bill, you and I are of an age when we can remember when we were trying to eliminate the brown haze, when we wanted to go swimming again in the local streams. Well, our kids and our grandkids are now enjoying that pretty much everywhere. Is there more to do? Absolutely. But have we done a lot? No question. And so I always start the permitting discussion by pausing here and saying we need to celebrate the fact that not only do we have all these protections more stringent than anywhere in the rest of the world, but now 55 years later, we are excellent at complying with all of them.

We have a culture of environmental compliance and stewardship. We have a culture of moving beyond compliance. So think of all the companies that have greenhouse gas commitments. They’re not required by any law and they’re going about doing it because they want to do it. They’re committed to doing it. They do the same thing on wetlands protection and other natural resource preservation measures. So this permitting now is all about let’s declare success on protection and continue to build on that. And then while we’re at it, why don’t we go ahead and put America back to work?

Bill Loveless: So then do you see less of a need for NEPA now given all these many other laws that have been passed since then? Or do you see some lesser role for that law as projects are considered, infrastructure projects, all are considered?

Jim Connaughton: Yeah, I think the best way to say it is we need to do less with NEPA now than we did then because in 1970 there was essentially nothing. Today, everything is well regulated, everything is well managed. All of our health, safety, and environmental laws have mandatory monitoring. They have mandatory reporting. If you have a violation, you actually have to report non-compliance. They have civil and criminal penalties, they have judicial review, they have citizen suits, and they have damages not just for hurting people but hurting the environment. So all of that is in the substantive environmental statutes. None of that is in NEPA, by the way. And so for NEPA, now really the issue is we should be studying under NEPA—it remains relevant in helping to inform management planning decisions—but we should only have to study under NEPA the environmental matters that aren’t covered by other statutes. Why are we duplicating that? And that’s what we should be able to do with the confidence of sustaining all of the other statutes and all of the other protections afforded by those statutes. So a lot less to do, but it will still be relevant in guiding decisions around now increasingly local considerations that aren’t subject to affirmative environmental law.

Bill Loveless: So there are a number of reforms contemplated under the bills that are under consideration today. How do they compare to proposals in the past from Senator Joe Manchin and other legislators?

Jim Connaughton: So I really look at permitting in two tracks. One is how do you work within the existing system and try to make it better? So all of the bills going back most recently, HR 1, which was the big House Republican bill from a few years back, then you had the Manchin-Barrasso bill. There’s three bills pending in the House right now. They just had a hearing on it last week. There’s new bills being written in the Senate. We had Senator Joe Manchin getting a permit waiver for the Mountain Valley pipeline. The Congress voted on that, huge bipartisan vote in favor of that. Congress had a bipartisan vote led by Chuck Schumer to waive permitting for the fabrication plants for semiconductors that were authorized and funded under the CHIPS Act. And then another example is most recently in California, Governor Newsom and the supermajority of a Democrat-led legislature in California decided that public housing is critically needed, which I agree with. And they didn’t even try to amend their version of NEPA. They just said, we’re going to waive it.

Now I point to this because what’s happening is everybody’s realizing we all comply. So we’re not going to suffer an environmental harm by letting people who want to build important infrastructure including housing for the citizens of America—we’re okay if we let that proceed and just hold people accountable to comply. So these permit waivers are not compliance waivers. So that’s the meta point. The micro point, everything pending on the Hill right now is focused on how do you direct the judges and how they review disputed cases. What’s the timeline to file? Recently courts have been issuing injunctions for basically process violations, not substantive noncompliance. And so they’ve been focusing really on the backend of the building chain, which is projects that can survive long enough to actually be able to afford defending a lawsuit and then facing injunctions.

And that’s maybe one out of 10,000 projects. And so I think all of those proposals are perfectly sound. So I want to be very clear. I think the work that’s been done is exactly right and I don’t see any threat to the environment from any of it. And I see a big advantage of reducing the challenges of litigation. But we need to understand litigation comes at the end of an eight to 10 year process of trying to develop a site. I really hope the Congress and the states can look at the front end. How do we just get these projects moving without dispute and without litigation?

Bill Loveless: And when you say look at the front end, what sorts of provisions do you have in mind? What would make the process work better as these projects are first proposed and as the engineering studies are done, as capital is being considered, all of those things?

Jim Connaughton: So I think there are two key things you can add to this discussion. And the first one was recommended by a bipartisan group led by me and Katie McGinty, my counterpart in the Clinton-Gore administration who was on this program with me three years ago. And—

Bill Loveless: That’s right, following a report that the two of you had headed up for the Aspen Institute.

Jim Connaughton: And at the time it was called Building Cleaner Faster. And in the present moment, I think it’s clearer to tell people who aren’t informed well about this—I call it Build and Comply, which is similar to what we do for health and safety. So there’s no permitting for health and safety when you’re building a project. You actually build it in accordance with specified regulatory standards for health and safety. And then there’s inspection and enforcement of non-compliance. So what we propose is let’s do that same thing for environmental permitting under the substantive statutes and let people hire their professionals, which they all do, and their funders hire another set of professionals and their insurers hire another set of professionals. So it’s like having nine CPAs looking at your IRS, your tax return, and let them build and then take our very talented public civil servants and let’s put them in the business of inspecting and enforcing non-compliance.

That’s a really good use of the time and talents of our government officials rather than having them check over the paperwork that’s been done by nine sets of equally skilled private professionals assuring that their clients are building environmentally and health and safety compliant projects. So it’s called Build and Comply. Now we focus that to make it even more—give people more confidence in doing it this way. We focus it on brownfields. So it turns out there’s more than 450,000 brownfields in America. The Inflation Reduction Act created a new category of brownfield called energy communities. And then the recent reconciliation bill created version two of a law called the Opportunity Zone Law by which the governors designate 11 or 12% of their census tracts for investment in jobs in economically disadvantaged communities. So just those three federal designations gives you more than half a million locations where we could be building tomorrow in places where we’ve already built, and different than 60, 70 years ago before there were any environmental standards, these are locations that are well practiced in complying with all of our environmental standards.

Bill Loveless: So what you’re saying is let’s give a preference or maybe it’s just simply clarity to opportunities for infrastructure development, brownfields, opportunity zones, those sorts of things, emphasize those as the sorts of activities that should be prioritized. And from there, just simply rely on the other existing laws that exist, the many that you say have been enacted over the years to assure that they’re done in an environmentally sensible manner.

Jim Connaughton: That’s right. And again, I want to distinguish which means we can skip the permitting step. That’s where the delay is. The delay is having people look over the shoulder of the professionals that are already certifying compliance for these projects and holding up the approval that allows the money to flow and the workers to be hired to actually build the project. And you’ve done sessions on this, and I’ll reiterate, it’s about four to five years of delay per project waiting for federal, state, local officials to agree with the private officials that the projects are going to be built and operated in a way that meets the law. And so we’re just suggesting if you’re going to rebuild in a brownfield, these areas are well understood and we would list the kinds of projects. So it wouldn’t be a big chemical plant, it wouldn’t be something really complicated.

But if you’re in a brownfield, we could list things like adding more transmission wires to an existing transmission corridor, rebuilding a natural gas power plant where a coal power plant was, adding wind and solar power to where an existing natural gas power plant is. So these would be sensible projects in clearly acceptable locations where the communities have already zoned for this kind of activity and have told all of us that they want the investment. And so you put the two together, we’re well practiced in these areas, and importantly, the community wants the project. And with that, there’s hundreds of thousands of these locations.

Bill Loveless: Okay, I was going to say, you’re saying that there are hundreds of thousands of these locations. I was going to ask you, are there enough of these locations or suitable locations for some of the infrastructure that’s needed, whether it’s transmission lines or gas pipelines or solar or gas powered power plants?

Jim Connaughton: Yeah, so if you just do the math on power, we need to replace about 70% of our existing power infrastructure. So step one of this is just the 70% we know we have to replace. Do we really have to go through a five-year permitting process to just go ahead and take the old stuff, which by the way may not be as environmentally beneficial as the new stuff will be—could we just say yes to that? If you have an existing pipeline corridor, we know we want to expand, we want to provide more access. And if that corridor is suitable technically for an expansion, do we really have to wait eight or 10 years before we can add some more capacity on that footprint that already exists? So in each of these examples, take an old warehouse district that was abandoned because we offshored the manufacturing, do we really have to go through seven years of review when the community—it’s already zoned for the warehouses, the community wants the redevelopment, and we can literally replace the old awful stuff with new modern, environmentally and health and safety compliant stuff?

That’s what we’re talking about. But it’s also the case that in order to just do 2% economic growth and we really want three, but just to support 2% economic growth, we have to double our electricity footprint. That’s just electricity. You talk highways, water systems, rebuilding our military industrial base—there’s a lot of other things we have to add to. But just electricity, we have to double it. So we actually have to find existing brownfields to add more energy to. And then by the way, we have to build in greenfields. And because we’re not building big coal, we’re not building big nuclear and we’re not building big hydro anymore, that greenfield footprint is going to be five to 20 times more acres than the current footprint of the current electricity system. And right now politically we’re not even talking about that. And the proponents of wind and solar in particular, which I’m a big supporter of, they’re trying to explain to the opponents who share their vision for adding more low and zero emission electricity grid—they’re trying to explain we need five to 20 more acres than what we’re currently sitting on. And that conversation isn’t being had yet. And that’s why these conversations are important.

Bill Loveless: So to the extent that all of these brownfields exist around the country and opportunity zones, what you’re suggesting is they’re not getting the sort of consideration that they should as potential sites for new energy infrastructure because of the red tape and the difficulties of dealing with the permitting process as it stands now.

Jim Connaughton: That’s exactly right. And then the next dimension of that, of course, is—and we all know this from our own houses or apartments—every year a project is delayed, the cost goes up about 20%. So delay a project by six or seven years, you’re talking about a project that’s three times more expensive than it needed to be, and then we all pay for that as consumers.

Bill Loveless: So you think then that the provisions that are being suggested in these various bills that would streamline the permitting process, shorten permitting timelines, reduce the frequency of frivolous litigation, establish judicial review limitations for NEPA claims—all of those things are good and should be done, you think—but at the same time, any new law addressing this should focus on these opportunities in these brownfields and these opportunity zones, make it point to them as where the development should be taking place now because it simply makes more sense, you say, and would be easier or should be easier to permit.

Jim Connaughton: Yeah. I describe what we need to do as looking through the right end of the Hubble telescope. Right now we’re looking through the narrow end at the end of the line of projects that are being hung up after they’ve already gone through 6, 7, 8 years of review. And I’m suggesting, let’s turn the telescope around and look at the projects that are starting on day one, all of them. And by the way, that’s going to be around half a million projects over the next 25 years, probably more than that, but I think it’s about half a million. If I’m off by a hundred thousand plus or minus, it doesn’t matter. It’s a lot. And if you think about four years of delay, five years of delay, times half a million projects, that’s many millions of years of delay for projects that will comply with all of our laws.

And then that delay means all of those projects are costing two to three times more than they need to. And many of them die along the way. They just can only afford to be in development for so long. And so we lose, I believe, and we can do the research on this, but I believe it’s somewhere north of—well, north of only one in five projects makes it. And so that millions of years is probably more than 10 million years of delay. And that’s kind of crazy. It’s just delay. It’s not anything other than delay. So wouldn’t it be great to pull all these projects forward in time, cut their costs by two thirds and put people to work three times faster?

Bill Loveless: You recall the report that you and Katie McGinty did for the Aspen Institute, and when you and Katie led that report back in 2022, the title as you noted before, was Building Cleaner Faster. The emphasis was on decarbonizing the economy. Now the discussion has shifted to energy security. How have the motivations for permitting reform changed?

Jim Connaughton: I would say it’s become additive, not subtractive. So I testified last March in the House of Representatives, and it was important to emphasize it was a brownfields hearing to say, we’ve been trying to get these brownfields moving for 25 years since the Congress unanimously created a new law to try to accelerate that. And we’ve been making tiny success. 5% of the 450,000 project opportunities are moving forward. And what I was underlining—my whole career has been about finding common ground and stuff passes on the Hill where you don’t need everyone to agree with each other. You just need shared interests or aligned interests. And so that report was speaking to folks that wanted to see net zero by 2050, and we determined it was procedurally impossible. That was an important finding of this bipartisan group. But at the same time, my whole career started as I’m an air pollution guy, I’m about reducing air pollution and improving public health, and we still have work to do there.

So if you care about air pollution, we still have 5% of the US still doesn’t operate under meeting clean air standards. By the way, California is a big transgressor, ironically enough. And then we now have the additional one of energy security because the grid isn’t keeping pace with demand. So we have a real emergency there. I agree with the Trump administration that we have an emergency, it’s a slow moving train wreck and it is an emergency and we should align behind that. We also have a national security imperative. We need to sustain a diversity of energy supplies and we need to have that energy be affordable, reliable, and available to support not just our civilian economy, but actually to support our new defense industrial base. So if you care about that, which I would hope people do, but at the end of the day, it’s about people.

I care about more people having better jobs, making more money. That’s what it is to have life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And so all of these align. And so the only maybe dissonance is there’s half the country that wants to see more investment in lower carbon emitting resources. That’s great. The other half the country is not as concerned about that, although there’s broad support for carbon abatement, as long as it’s sensible. And my view is the carbon issue should just be debated in the place where it’s supposed to be debated in deciding what the emissions levels should be. We shouldn’t be using the permitting process as a proxy for and hold up projects of any kind as a proxy for the fact that there’s disagreement, there’s not consensus on how fast on climate, and that’s fine. There’s not consensus. So you do the best you can and you make the progress you can.

Now, I’ll make one other point, Bill. Through Republican and Democratic administrations, starting with the Clinton administration actually starting with the first Bush administration in power, the rate of progress in climate change in power has been linear. We have made, regardless of who’s in the White House and regardless who’s running the Congress, America is doing more faster than most of the rest of the world through a crazy mix of technology innovations, profitable investments, government regulations, partnerships at the—crazy mix. It’s a stewpot of policies and partnerships. But we’re making steady progress, no greater under Biden than under Trump one, no greater under Obama than under Bush two. So I feel like we’re all rowing together on this. It’s kind of stormy seas, but we’re plowing ahead. And this is a bit of a long answer, but I’m giving it because there’s so much common ground about building a lot more faster and replacing the old stuff with new stuff. And we all know it’s a matter of common sense that it’s all better for the environment than what it’s replacing.

Bill Loveless: And there have been statements on both sides of the aisle finding common ground when it comes to these sorts of energy reforms. I was reading where in the House of Representatives, one of the co-sponsors of the SPEED Act, the Standardizing Permitting and Expediting Economic Development Act, SPEED Act, which is a Democratic Rep. Jared Golden of Maine, said the problems with the NEPA process are energy neutral. They can be detrimental to both fossil fuel and renewable energy projects. And these problems with NEPA can cut both ways and so too should the solutions. This is an energy bill that takes in an all of the above technology approach. And even in the Senate where the Chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, Shelley Moore Capito, who has a bill, a permitting reform bill in the works with Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, I think that’s an interesting combination.

She said, it’s just not new pipelines or natural gas. It’s solar, it’s wind, it’s broadband, it’s housing development, it’s transportation projects. I think that we’re seeing here is a convergence of clean energy folks and people like me who are all of the above meeting together with an urgency. So it’s interesting to see these comments coming from both sides of the aisle right now. There’s even more of it I think today. I was reading just before we began to talk about a bipartisan House group called the Problem Solvers Caucus, some 47 Republicans and Democrats called today for a permitting reform framework. So there’s a lot of stuff going on there, and yet it seems to contrast with the politics as usual that we know of today, the strong partisan splits, ideological splits in politics in Congress that just seem to make an enactment of this kind of legislation so difficult.

Jim Connaughton: Yeah, it’s funny because if you think about the CHIPS Act, very bipartisan and it came with money and there was sort of great—I’m a close harmony singer, so not everyone has to sing in unison. In fact, I like it—

Bill Loveless: Literally.

Jim Connaughton: I like it when you don’t sing in unison. I like harmony. And so people have different interests. But in the CHIPS Act, they came together and said, we really want this. They did the same thing on the—they called it the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill. I thought that was kind of funny. And then the IRA, the energy subsidies had broad bipartisan support with maybe a little bit of fighting over wind and solar. But I think that bill, had it only gone forward with the energy pieces, which it didn’t—it had some other, what Republicans would call it, poison pills in it. That bill would’ve passed overwhelmingly bipartisan too. And how do we know this? Because the reconciliation bill that just passed kept almost all of the Inflation Reduction Act and nobody’s commenting on that. So—

Bill Loveless: But with pretty severe cuts in government support for tax credits and loans for renewable energy and batteries.

Jim Connaughton: But I want to underline that bill was very broad and those two were the fighting ground. But what’s the reality on wind and solar? The reality is wind and solar projects were still taking three times longer than they needed to and costing three times more to build. And so the subsidy was actually—it was like putting your foot on the accelerator and the brake at the same time. So the subsidy was lowering the added cost the permitting delay was causing the projects, if you think about it. So if you actually do permitting reform—and I think I’ve really followed Sheldon Whitehouse closely, and he’s just super smart, super sensible, and he knows where to cut a deal. If you could just let people build wind and solar where it’s suitable and where people want it, let people decide where they want it. If you cut the cost of that by a third, you don’t need the subsidy.

Now it’s also the case, by the way, the Opportunity Zone Law, which is in the same bill, can also be used to dramatically lower the cost of wind and solar if you build those projects in opportunity zones. So the community hasn’t been looking at that yet. And so there’s so much real estate in opportunity zones to do wind and solar. I’m not sure that what you said is correct. I’m a market guy. The market will always find the best, most profitable, cheapest places to build. And if that subsidy is available for these projects, which it is, then I’m going to move my solar development, my wind development to opportunity zones. So maybe in the end, nothing really has changed other than there was some political points scored.

Bill Loveless: Is permitting reform possible in the face of the Trump administration’s efforts to block wind and solar projects, even some which have already been approved? I recall at this House hearing recently, Democrats again expressed support for easing federal environmental reviews to make it easier to build new energy projects. But said they won’t agree to a permitting reform deal with Republicans unless President Trump stops his attacks on renewables. Congressman Seth Magaziner of Rhode Island said, I want to get to yes on this bill, meaning the permitting reform bill. We need to make it easy to build in this country again, but we are having this conversation in an abnormal time when the Trump administration is unilaterally and most likely illegally stopping clean energy projects. He said, we can’t ignore the broader context.

Jim Connaughton: So since the end of the Bush administration when we did the big 2007 energy bill, which I believe passed 87 to 13 in the Senate, there’s been—

Bill Loveless: Those were the days when there was broad bipartisan agreement on big energy bills. Yeah.

Jim Connaughton: I don’t wear rose colored glasses though. That was hard work. That was really hard work. And that’s six years of effort to get to common ground. And we had Barbara Boxer and Jim Inhofe on the same bill. Jim Inhofe, making clear, he still thinks climate change is a hoax, but he really thought biofuels is a good idea and making sure that terrorist nations weren’t profiting from selling us oil was a good idea. And Barbara Boxer said, I think cutting greenhouse gas emissions is a good idea. And they locked arms and both voted for the bill, so without having to persuade each other of each other’s viewpoints. So that’s how legislation’s made. I would also note that there was something like a dozen authorizing bills that were passed either unanimously or near unanimously, end of Obama, and all through the first Trump administration that President Trump signed that were the authorizations that made the Inflation Reduction Act possible. Remember, that was an appropriation bill and you can only appropriate if you have the authorizing bill. Well, all the authorizing bills were bipartisan and most of them were unanimous. So I want to look more recently that this does exist. We just have to reflect on ourselves. And so when I take your question then about these holding up project permits and then canceling projects, the Republicans—

Bill Loveless: Canceling projects that are even underway, such as the wind farm—

Jim Connaughton: Fully permitted and underway off—

Bill Loveless: Rhode Island.

Jim Connaughton: And then the Republicans, by the way, had the same lament about fossil projects under the Democratic administrations. I’m a good government guy, and the government should be doing its job following the law and approving, duly approving projects that are duly worthy. And so there’s opportunity for common ground. Here’s maybe turning the position around would be if you want to see a lot more wind and solar built, which I certainly want to see, then I want to reach across the aisle and say, you let me build my projects right away. I’ll let you build your projects right away. And by the way, my projects and your projects—the difference is wind and solar versus oil and gas—but there’s common ground on everything else too. And even for Democrats, there’s a lot of Democrats that want more oil and gas. There’s a lot of Republicans that want more wind and solar.

So when I talk about joining hands, the dissonance is over those two things. But then there’s a hundred percent common ground now wonderfully on nuclear, on geothermal, on smaller scale hydro. We shouldn’t be doing large hydro. I’m looking at a whole new generation of next generation biofuels and bioenergy, on carbon capture and storage, and even how do we put coal back into the mix in a way that captures its emissions? And so there’s a lot of Democrats that support that too. So I do want to underline, maybe part of my job is to just reflect people back to themselves to realize we all want to do all of this. So why don’t we let ourselves?

Bill Loveless: I think the comments you’ve made, the quotes I’ve read from Democrats who say they support permitting reform sort of illustrate the point that you’re making. I think it’s just right now when some projects, particularly these offshore wind projects that are in one case almost entirely completed, are stopped, then it’s going to make it difficult for Democrats to go ahead and vote for any permitting reform. They’re going to want to see the White House change its position on that, I think, before they’ll proceed with legislation.

Jim Connaughton: But let me ask the more pointed question. In almost every other avenue of human endeavor, we’ve just taken the government out of the discretionary decision making process. I can go earn my money this year without getting permission from the government. I just have to pay my taxes on it. All the business transactions that are going to create all this new investment and all this infrastructure, none of that’s pre-approved by the government. But if I write a fraudulent contract, I get a lawsuit forced against me. As I mentioned, health and safety, we have standards for everything. None of that is pre-approved. So if you really want to take away the political gaming on the right and the left which they’re accusing each other of, why don’t we take the government out of the discretionary approval process altogether like we do for everything else? And that’s what we’re proposing.

That’s what we’re saying. And put the government to do what we need the government to do to be the cop on the beat, right? Go after the bad guys. Instead, we have 99% of bureaucracy holding up the good guys. And that’s not very worthwhile for the government officials either. And by the way, they’re really good. I mean, I’ve had the privilege of working top to bottom, from senior ranks to the lowest ranks of the US government. They’re really good and they’re really dedicated, but they would much rather—they would much rather spend their hours focusing on making sure everyone’s safe and dealing with people who are not practicing good citizenship. And instead, almost all of their time is frustratingly at odds with the people who are trying to keep the economy moving.

Bill Loveless: Well, speaking of those staff, the staffs at the various agencies, some would say the agencies will need more staff and funding to meet statutory deadlines sought in these permitting reform bills, but are they likely to have those resources given the personnel and funding cuts that we’re seeing implemented by the administration these days?

Jim Connaughton: Yeah, I’ve got a deeply counterfactual view on this point. There aren’t enough kids being born today that if they all decided they want to become environmental engineers, environmental lawyers, or environmental biologists for the purposes of doing permitting review, there’s not enough of them to review all of the projects we need to build over the next 25 years. And so I look at this completely differently, which is if we take the 99% of the bureaucracy that’s focused on those who will comply and do comply, and we move them over to being cops on the beat and inspecting and enforcing non-compliance, we have plenty of people to do that work.

It’d just be such a much better use of their time and their talent. I actually, let me unpack that. Okay. If it’s 500,000 projects, every project, as I mentioned, has to have three sets of professionals. So every permitting agency—so it’s five to 20 reviews at the federal level, not to mention the hundreds of different statutes at the state, tribal, and local level—but the people you’re hiring. So the Clean Air office then has their lawyer, their engineer, their biologist reviewing the permits, and the water people have the same thing, and the wetlands people have the same thing. So you end up with, I don’t know, 50, 60 sets of lawyers, biologists, and engineers looking at each individual project times 500,000 projects times then whatever the number is of projects that don’t make it, okay? That’s just a wild waste of time and talent, which is why we don’t do it in our economic endeavors, and yet we do it here. So I’m just hoping with Ezra Klein writing the way he’s been writing, I’ve loved some of the other books that are coming out—could we just pause, catch a breath, and say, hey, we can rethink this. We don’t have to sacrifice any environmental protections. We can put our precious government resources into talented people keeping us safe in a more worthwhile way and get on with it.

Bill Loveless: Yeah, I guess it’s just that some would ask, we’re in an era right now and certainly in a government right now where the emphasis is on cutting the size of agencies and cutting staff and cutting budgets. To the extent that you need people within the agencies to do this work that you refer to, will they necessarily be there given the reductions that we see taking place in Washington?

Jim Connaughton: Yeah. The way I see the politics working over time, and my career has been about looking at the world in five and 10 and 20, 50 year blocks. So everything’s crazy in the moment, but in time, what will happen is we have this culture of compliance. There’s almost no substantive noncompliance. And where there is substantive noncompliance, there’s almost no damage that comes out of it because our laws are so strong. And so my point is we will be sure that we staff the protection against that because that’s political kiss of death. It’s really hard to actually budget for people moving paper around and causing really valuable investments to be delayed, four or 5, 6, 7, some cases, 10 years. So that’s the other challenge. The other thing is we do have $37 trillion of debt. So we should be figuring out how to use, how to best employ our most talented people in the government.

And again, I can’t continue to underline—they’re great, they’re very talented. But also, let me underline, the Inflation Reduction Act had something like a billion dollars to hire more people. Well, if you break that down by 27 federal statutes plus hundreds of state and local ones, you break that down by each department—Interior has 11 districts, 12 districts. So you take their piece of that, and remember it was over nine years, so it’s a hundred million a year, a little bit less than a hundred million a year. And you start breaking it down by the number of agencies, the number of regions, the number of offices divided by three, the lawyers, the biologists, the engineers. You end up with each permitting office with a billion dollars getting maybe 20,000 bucks more a year. So they could hire a few summer interns. What amount of money do you want to put into that for something that will not cause any more compliance? I think that’s a whopping waste of money. It won’t do anything. So you could make that 10 billion, you could make it a hundred billion. And so now it’s 200,000 per agency. And is that really going to move the needle on time?

Bill Loveless: Jim, what do you think are the prospects for permitting reform? Because again, we’ve been through this any number of times, right? I mean, it’s kind of like Groundhog Day, right? The repetitious, unchanging situation where the same event occurs over and over again. From your own honest perspective on this, how likely are we to see some sort of permitting reform in Congress at some point, and what will it take to get there?

Jim Connaughton: Every bill like this, every issue like this comes around every 20 years, and then there’s a period where it ramps up and it takes five to eight years before it tips over the edge and you get it. And so we are in year six of the permitting cycle. So I am really bullish right now, and I also think permitting will only pass under a Republican Congress with substantial Democratic support. And it doesn’t matter who’s in the White House, Republican or Democrat, because if you can get the Hill to reasonable consensus on this, every president will sign a bill like this. But also because every president has been promising, every president since Barack Obama during the financial collapse has been promising a lot more infrastructure and a lot more jobs than we’ve been delivering. And by the way, by a substantial failure margin, it’s not like we delivered 90%, didn’t get to a hundred percent.

We’ve delivered less than 10% of what’s been promised, and that is backed up as long as we can back it up. Two more things. For the first time in our lifetimes, Bill, electricity prices are rising higher, faster than the rate of inflation. Politicians go crazy when gasoline prices go up and down. When people’s home electricity bills go up and stay up, that’s political suicide. And the only way to do that is to get more resources out there at one third the price three times faster to ameliorate that. But it’s true across all infrastructure. The military industrial base, telecom, transportation, water systems are failing all over the country. We can’t do forest restoration to stop forest fires. And after the fire occurs, it takes us five to six years to get the permits to fix the thing after the fire went through. We can’t mine anymore.

We can’t build processing facilities to make use of the ore. And then all of this requires parts suppliers and component manufacturers and a whole supply chain. So all of that is backed up to a level that I have not seen in my lifetime. So how does the bill happen? When everybody wins. You have to do an end to end. I could speed up a power plant, but if I haven’t speeded up the wires that connect to it and the fiber optic lines that make it work digitally, I don’t have a project. If I don’t have the ore that goes into the processor, that goes into the wire, that goes into the electronics to make the energy plant work, I don’t have a project. And let’s remember, energy is not an end in of itself, or data centers. This is to serve the needs of people. And we often look—and the data centers are gobbling up all of our energy. No, they’re not. We are on this call. On this call we’re gobbling up the energy. In fact—

Bill Loveless: Absolutely.

Jim Connaughton: Most of your data plan is electricity. You’re just paying for it as data. So when we talk about AI data centers consuming energy, that’s not the data center’s energy, that’s our energy. And the price of that goes up too. So that’s why I really feel like we are all in this together.

Bill Loveless: Do you think that we could see a bill this year? Is that at all possible?

Jim Connaughton: Yeah, because—

Bill Loveless: I’m saying enactment, passage of a bill.

Jim Connaughton: So a couple of things. What’s on the table has really got a good shape to it as I talk about working on the backend of the process. So that’s got a good shape to it. And we do have time. We have 12 months to work on the front end and we have to work on it through regular order in the House. I think it should go through the Brownfields bill or it should go through the transportation bill. In the Senate, there’s a couple of avenues. Same thing you could do Brownfields and transportation. You can push it on a bill that’s calling for things everybody wants. Okay? So if you tie it to the funding for our new infrastructure, I think that will help people focus on what it is we’re trying to achieve and the cost of that. So I really see, that’s what I’m hopeful for. That’s what I’m advocating for.

And then the other thing is the states then have to do the same thing. Because if you solve it at the federal level and then you don’t solve it at the state level, you still have the roadblocks. And let me give you the best example of that was fracking. We had a permitting waiver in 2005 in the energy bill that waived the logjam permits for fracking. And what happened? We got the fracking boom, but we got it also because four states, Democrat-led Pennsylvania, including Katie McGinty, who was the head of the Secretary of the Environment, and then three Republican states created an equally fast streamlining process to approve fracking projects. What happened? We got the fracking boom, we cut our greenhouse gas emissions by 25% at a profit. Consumers saved money. It was incredible. And by the way, 2 million frack wells later, there’s almost no meaningful non-compliance. And where it exists, they get whacked hard.

Bill Loveless: So getting back to the prospects for success in a bill, you say it should go through the regular process. It’s begun doing that with the hearings that are taking place in the House lately. But you’re suggesting it may be a year, maybe this is the sort of thing that gets passed by Congress next year?

Jim Connaughton: Yes, and that’s perfectly appropriate because it should pass before the August recess so the Democrats and Republicans can go back to their districts and tell them, we’ve been promising these jobs. We’ve been promising this infrastructure. We’ve been promising the products of that for both defense, for national, for energy security, but also just for fun. A lot of this energy goes to us enjoying ourselves. And so that’s, we’d like to live free in America. And so every politician, Democrat, Republican, is going to need to go back to those midterms, which are going to be really hard fought. And there’s only two equations for them at this point. Are you supporting more growth, faster, cheaper, or are you opposed to more growth, faster, cheaper? And that’s what the midterm election is going to be about, and this is the single most consequential policy that they could be offering to tell people they’re serious.

Bill Loveless: All right. Well, let’s write down this timeline that you are predicting. Can we say predicting?

Jim Connaughton: Suggesting, suggesting, recommending.

Bill Loveless: Recommending. Okay. And see how this all plays out. It’s such an important issue and one that, as we’ve been discussing, is getting a lot more attention these days, and maybe something will change in the months coming ahead of us in the new year. So Jim Connaughton, thanks for taking the time to discuss this issue with us today. I appreciate it.

Jim Connaughton: Thanks, Bill. Really appreciate it too.

Bill Loveless: That’s it for this week’s episode of Columbia Energy Exchange. Thank you again, Jim Connaughton, and thank you for listening. The show is brought to you by the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs. The show is hosted by Jason Bordoff and me, Bill Loveless. Mary Catherine O’Connor produced the show, Gregory Vilfranc engineered the show. Additional support from Caroline Pitman and Kyu Lee. For more information about the show or the Center on Global Energy Policy, visit us online at energypolicy.columbia.edu or follow us on social media @ColumbiaUEnergy. If you like this episode, leave us a rating on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. You can also share it with a friend or colleague to help us reach more listeners. Either way, we appreciate your support. Thanks again for listening. See you next week.

Last year, an energy permitting reform bill sponsored by Senators Joe Manchin and John Barrasso passed out of committee but failed to gain full support in the US Senate. Since then, rising energy costs and infrastructure backlogs have only heightened pressure on Congress to take another run at reforming the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).

As a result, momentum behind permitting reform is building again. Several legislative efforts are underway, most notably the bipartisan SPEED Act, which would change NEPA requirements in order to streamline the permitting process. It would also set limits on judicial review.

So how likely is meaningful permitting reform, this time around? How would it enable timely development of energy infrastructure without jeopardizing environmental concerns? And what might make it feasible to supporters of fossil and renewable energy alike?

This week, Bill Loveless speaks to Jim Connaughton about shifting motivations for permitting reform in DC, and whether policymakers can find enough common ground to push reforms forward.

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