Permitting reform is back. Will lawmakers sacrifice America's public lands to the fossil fuel industry?

Like a zombie risen from the dead, permitting reform is back on the congressional agenda. The Energy Permitting Reform Act of 2024, a bill reintroduced by the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and sponsored by Senators Joe Manchin (I-WV) and John Barrasso (R-ID), could soon come to a vote in the Senate. It includes provisions for everything from lifting the construction freeze on new liquefied natural gas plants to allowing mining companies to dump waste on public lands to promises to speed up the siting process for power transmission lines And Fossil fuel infrastructure. In the bipartisan fashion typical of energy bills, public lands in the West are up for sale to the energy and mining industries. It gives oil and gas producers access to more energy on land and at sea, forces approval of new liquefied natural gas plants for export on the Gulf of Mexico, and overturns a major court decision allowing mining companies to treat public lands like a hazardous waste site.

More than 360 environmental organizations have sent a letter to the committee chairman asking him to reject the vote, calling it “the latest dirty permitting deal.” The letter points to the impact of the new fossil fuel infrastructure enabled by the legislation. By one estimate, it will lock in carbon-burning infrastructure that will emit greenhouse gas emissions equal to the emissions of 165 coal-fired power plants over its lifetime.

While most environmental organizations oppose this latest dirty deal, some climate activists point to the positive aspects of the bill, which calls for expanding renewable energy and power transmission lines to get them where they are needed. Among other things, the bill expands the Interior Department's mandate to provide enough land to build 50 gigawatts of renewable energy projects, including solar, wind and geothermal projects, by 2030:

“Subsection (a) sets a new goal for the Secretaries of the Interior and Agriculture to authorize 50 gigawatts of renewable energy on federal lands by 2030 and directs a periodic review of the national goal for renewable energy production on federal lands.”

Many will see the 50 gigawatts in the proposed policy and assume that this is additional renewable energy. Good news! We need all the renewable energy we can get, don't we?

Unfortunately, that's how it works now. The 50 gigawatts are for renewable energy projects that utilities and other power buyers have already committed to building to meet their obligations under state renewable energy portfolio laws. The requirement to make public lands available to renewable energy developers only guarantees that these projects will result in land use change and environmental impacts. In the language of carbon offsets, these renewable energy projects are not “additional.” Without this policy of building solar on public lands, these 50 gigawatts would have to be built elsewhere. Across the American West, most solar projects are built on water-stressed, salt-contaminated, or marginal farmland or other already degraded landscapes. Instead, the federal land requirement steers projects toward developing open space with cultural resources and wildlife habitat, while creating cheaper projects for utilities, community choice aggregators, and other renewable energy buyers who must meet pre-existing obligations and regulations.

Proponents of solar development on public lands should be aware that they get nothing back from this policy; it merely formalizes existing activities. In May, the Secretary of the Interior announced that 20 gigawatts of renewable energy had already been approved, and according to their data, that will be 25 gigawatts by the end of 2024, meeting the goal ahead of schedule; and by the end of 2025, if everything currently in the various stages of planning and review is built, that will be over 35 gigawatts. The 50 gigawatts enshrined in this law will be achieved well before 2030 anyway. The Western Solar Plan, which governs solar development on public lands, just approved 31 million acres for solar development in late August. Based on analysis by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the Western Solar Plan already projects 93 gigawatts to be built on public lands by 2035, even without the regulation outlined in the proposed authorization bill.

The bill also includes a provision that affirms a Bureau of Land Management policy required by the Inflation Reduction Act that ties renewable energy development on public lands to oil and gas production. It requires the Secretary of the Interior, the agency that oversees the Bureau, to conduct oil and gas lease sales within one year of granting a right-of-way for solar energy development. As the draft Energy Permitting Reform Act of 2024 states:

“Subsection (d) clarifies that this section does not modify existing requirements for the Secretary of the Interior to conduct a minimum amount of lease sales of onshore oil and gas properties in certain years before granting rights of way for renewable energy projects in the following year.”

The “anything goes” strategy of energy abundance, which ties fossil fuel use on public lands with renewable energy in perpetuity, is a recipe for simultaneously undermining conservation and climate goals. Energy abundance should mean more clean energy infrastructure and affordable green housing, as well as clean air, clean water, spaces for people to access nature, and ecosystems protected from energy sprawl. This Faustian pact guarantees continued fossil fuel exposure without any tangible benefits from renewable energy deployment. It is a poorly negotiated concession to the fossil fuel industry.

It should come as no surprise that the distribution of public lands has been at the center of repeated efforts to reform the National Environmental Policy Act and remove the green “bureaucracy” that supposedly slows renewable energy, despite evidence that it does not. Congress and energy developers view public lands as valuable only for disposal; decarbonization researchers and practitioners view land only as useful for renewable energy development and environmental assessments as a barrier to development. Widespread dissemination of these views will lead to weaker environmental laws to combat fossil fuels, more public lands for mining and energy, and less land and habitat for conservation and climate adaptation.

Many of the supporters of the Manchin-Barrasso legislation specifically point to the benefits of planning new transmission lines that encourage renewable energy integration. But this permitting reform proposal does nothing to address the biggest hurdles to building new interregional transmission lines, such as who will pay for them and how to overcome utilities' aversion to competing with neighboring utilities. Instead, it makes marginal improvements at best by requiring utilities to plan more transmission lines and revises policy tools that the federal government largely already has, such as speeding up permitting timelines to get projects built faster, and calls them new. In fact, the Rocky Mountain Institute's modeling, which Third Way also reports on, is the only one that shows a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions associated with the proposed permitting reform bill, but only because they incorrectly assume that the law is the reason all future transmission lines will be built. This ignores years of incremental policy incentives to facilitate transmission expansion, such as the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's recently implemented Order 1920, and greatly overstates the greenhouse gas emissions benefits of permitting reform.

The fight against permitting reform is never-ending, especially when its beneficiaries—the utilities and oil and gas industries—have so much to gain. Accelerating the energy transition to renewables should not be contingent on the continued dominance and expansion of fossil fuels, nor should it undermine the environmental laws that have helped clean our water and air under the guise that they will somehow enable greater renewable energy development. The return of permitting reform from the dead appears to be less about cutting red tape and expanding renewables than about satisfying the energy industry's insatiable appetite for America's public lands.

Read more: Laura Kuhl and Jamie Shinn on the Mountain Valley Pipeline, permitting reform, and energy justice.