President Biden faces a tricky challenge as he works to expand renewable energy: speeding up clean energy permitting without sacrificing environmental reviews that give full consideration to climate change and input from regions most affected by pollution.
The challenge straddles two of Biden’s major climate priorities. The president has pledged to expand clean energy deployment, including setting a goal in an executive order on Wednesday to double offshore wind energy by 2030. Biden has also directed federal agencies to buy more clean electricity to help achieve his goal of a carbon-free power sector by 2035.
That effort will require a quicker permitting process. Renewable energy groups have complained that federal permitting has caused long project delays and cost increases for wind turbines and solar farms, as well as the transmission lines that carry renewable energy from where it is generated to population centers.
At the same time, Biden has pledged to provide more support to the minority and low-income people whose public health suffers most from pollution. He’ll face tough scrutiny from environmental activists keen to make sure he doesn’t undermine reviews under the National Environmental Policy Act, one of the few laws that offers those regions a direct forum to voice concerns about projects being built in their backyards.
“The system through which we permit large infrastructure projects is designed to create friction,” said Sasha Mackler, energy project director at the Bipartisan Policy Center. “It’s not designed for rapid and massive change, which is where we need to go if we’re going to address the risk of climate change.”
Mackler added, though, that the permitting system also contains challenges with environmental and economic equity.
“So we need to, on the one hand, be moving much faster and, on the other hand, be thinking very seriously about how we design processes that can better accommodate the protections that certain stakeholders, communities, and constituencies deserve,” Mackler said. “Those can be kind of in conflict.”
Biden and his team have already signaled an intent both to bolster the NEPA process, including by requiring a climate change assessment, and speed up clean energy development.
As part of a sweeping climate executive order on Wednesday, Biden directed the head of the White House Council on Environmental Quality and the White House budget director to require federal permitting decisions to “consider the effects of greenhouse gas emissions and climate change.” He also directed the officials to determine how to speed up deployment of clean energy and electric transmission “in an environmentally sustainable manner.”
In the same executive order, Biden redoubled his commitment to those affected most by pollution, establishing several new interagency councils and agency offices focused on addressing environmental inequities.
His Council on Environmental Quality could be well poised to thread together his climate change priorities with efforts to help minority and low-income regions overburdened with pollution. Biden has tapped Brenda Mallory, a former general counsel at CEQ during the Obama administration, as his nominee to be chairwoman of the council.
If confirmed, Mallory would be the first black person to hold that post. She has also spoken about the importance of robust environmental reviews under NEPA.
“While striving for greater efficiency can be a laudable goal, NEPA was not intended to be a process for rubber-stamping government decisions,” Mallory wrote in a November 2019 article for the American College of Environmental Lawyers. “We should not allow NEPA’s ultimate goals to be subverted by false claims for good government.”
Biden has already identified the Trump administration’s overhaul of NEPA as one of more than 100 of his predecessor’s environmental deregulatory actions he’ll seek to reverse.
Nonetheless, some in the renewable energy industry, including onshore and offshore wind developers, backed some of the changes the Trump administration made to environmental reviews that they said would make permitting quicker and more efficient.
That included two-year time limits for federal agencies to complete environmental reviews.
The Trump administration, however, also all but removed a requirement for federal agencies to consider climate change as part of their environmental reviews. Biden has already begun to reverse that move.
Renewable energy developers are hopeful that the Biden team recognizes the need for quick, efficient environmental reviews and doesn’t take steps that would draw out the process.
“It can become untenable if forced to incorporate every possible indirect and tangential type of environmental impact that could accrue from a project,” said Erik Milito, president of the National Ocean Industries Association, which represents offshore wind developers and offshore oil and gas drillers.
Milito also cautioned that while the public should be given ample opportunity to engage on NEPA reviews, at some point, agencies must “cut it off” to make a timely decision.
NEPA “doesn’t mean that you have an exhaustive process that takes 10 years and 10,000 pages,” he said.
More efficient renewable energy permitting is necessary, too, “if we’re going to accelerate renewables’ deployment at the rate scientists say is necessary to protect our climate,” said Gregory Wetstone, head of the American Council on Renewable Energy.
“We’re not saying that consideration of the range of environmental factors isn’t important or shouldn’t occur,” he added. “But decisions need to be made expeditiously, particularly because many of these projects are dependent on time-sensitive tax incentives that lapse.”
Environmental activists, though, say Biden shouldn’t have to choose between a quicker build-out of renewable energy and supporting regions most hurt by pollution.
“While some are trying to create false tensions between NEPA and renewable energy, in reality, there is no trade-off,” said Sharon Buccino, senior director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s land division.
“Consulting with communities and making sure that projects are the right ones for the right place are key to building public support for wind, solar, and other projects,” she added.
In fact, there are steps the Biden administration can take to increase public engagement with minority and low-income people affected by energy infrastructure decisions.
Mustafa Santiago Ali, vice president of environmental justice, climate, and community revitalization at the National Wildlife Federation, said he’d like to see the Biden team incorporate a “full environmental justice analysis” as part of NEPA reviews.
Ali served in the Environmental Protection Agency for more than two decades, including as its top environmental justice adviser. While in that role, he led an interagency working group of more than 200 NEPA practitioners exploring how to bolster considerations of minority and low-income regions hit hard by pollution in environmental reviews. Those recommendations can serve as a starting point for the Biden team, Ali said.
Environmental activists also rejected that NEPA reviews were slowing down project approvals. Instead, what largely delays projects is a lack of resources and funding, aspects of the permitting process outside of NEPA, or local issues of concern, said Stephen Schima, senior legislative counsel with Earthjustice.
To the extent that NEPA does cause any delay, it could be resolved by providing more dedicated resources and staffing to increasingly strapped federal agencies, he added.
“We have mountains of evidence that NEPA is not a primary source of project delay, and it never has been,” Schima said.
