Permit Reform Back from the Dead: Will Lawmakers Sacrifice America’s Public Lands to the Fossil Fuel Industry?

Like a zombie coming back from the dead, permitting reform is making its way back to the congressional agenda. The Energy Permitting Reform Act of 2024, a bill rewritten by the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and sponsored by Sens. Joe Manchin (I-WV) and John Barrasso (R-ID), could soon head to the Senate floor for a vote. It includes provisions on everything from lifting a freeze on new construction of liquefied natural gas facilities to allowing mining companies to dump waste on public land to promising to speed up the process of siting electricity transmission lines. AND Fossil fuel infrastructure. In typical bipartisan energy legislation style, Western public lands are up for sale to the energy and mining industries. Oil and gas producers will gain access to more onshore and offshore energy, force approval of new liquefied natural gas production facilities along the Gulf of Mexico for export, and reverse a major court decision and allow mining companies to treat public lands as a hazardous waste dump.

More than 360 environmental organizations sent a letter to the commission chairman asking for the vote to be rejected, calling it “the latest Dirty Enabling Agreement.” The letter cited the impact of new fossil fuel infrastructure that would be enabled by the legislation, which is estimated to block coal-burning infrastructure that would emit greenhouse gases equivalent to those of 165 coal-fired power plants over their lifecycles.

While most environmental groups oppose this latest dirty deal, some climate advocates point to the positives of the bill, which proposes expanding renewable energy sources and electricity transmission lines to bring it where it’s 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, by 2030:

“Subsection (a) establishes a new goal for the Secretaries of the Interior and Agriculture to authorize the production of 50 gigawatts of renewable energy on Federal lands by 2030 and directs the 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. Great news! We need all the renewable energy we can get, right?

Unfortunately, that’s how it works now. The 50 gigawatts will go to renewable energy projects that utilities and other energy purchasers have already committed to build to meet their obligations under state renewable portfolio laws. The commitment to make public lands available to renewable energy developers merely guarantees that these projects will result in land-use change and ecological impacts. In the language of carbon offsets, these renewable energy projects are not “additional.” Without this policy of building solar on public lands, the 50 gigawatts would have to be built elsewhere. In the American West, most solar projects are built on water-constrained, saline or marginal agricultural lands, or other previously degraded landscapes. Instead, the federal land commitment directs projects toward greenfield development with cultural resources and wildlife habitats, while creating lower-cost projects for utilities, community choice aggregators, and other renewable energy purchasers who must meet preexisting obligations and regulations.

Supporters of solar development on public lands should note that they are not getting anything in return for this policy; it simply formalizes existing activities. In May, the Secretary of the Interior announced that permits had already been issued for 20 gigawatts of renewable energy, and by the end of 2024, they predicted that it would be 25 gigawatts, which would meet their goal early; and more than 35 gigawatts by the end of 2025, if everything in various stages of planning and review is built. The 50 gigawatts in this bill would be reached well before 2030. The Western Solar Plan, which governs solar development on public lands, just opened up 31 million acres to solar development in late August. Based on an analysis by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the Western Solar Plan already assumes that 93 gigawatts would be built on public lands by 2035, even without the edict in the proposed enabling bill.

The bill also includes a provision that reaffirms the Bureau of Land Management’s policy required by the Inflation Reduction Act, which ties renewable energy development on public lands to oil and gas development; it requires the Secretary of the Department of the Interior, the agency that oversees the bureau, to conduct the sale of oil and gas leases within one year of offering a right-of-way for solar development. As the Energy Permitting Reform Act of 2024 states:

“Subsection (d) clarifies that this section does not change existing requirements that the Secretary of the Interior must conduct a minimum number of onshore oil and gas lease sales in certain years before issuing rights-of-way for renewable energy projects in the subsequent year.”

An “all of the above” energy abundance strategy that pairs fossil fuel development on public lands with renewable energy forever is a recipe for undermining environmental and climate goals at the same time. Energy abundance should mean more clean energy infrastructure and affordable green housing, as well as clean air, cleaner water, spaces for people to access nature, and ecosystems protected from energy sprawl. This Faustian bargain guarantees continued exposure to the risks of fossil fuels, with few tangible benefits for renewable energy deployment. It is a poorly negotiated gift to the fossil fuel industry.

It should come as no surprise that the giveaway of public lands is at the center of repeated efforts to reform the National Environmental Policy Act and eliminate the green “red tape” that supposedly slows renewable energy development, despite evidence that it doesn’t. Congress and energy developers believe that public lands are only valuable for disposal; decarbonization researchers and practitioners believe that lands are only useful for renewable energy development and that environmental reviews are a barrier to development. If these views are widely held, they will weaken environmental regulations that oppose fossil fuels, increase the amount of public lands devoted to mining and energy, and decrease the amount of land and habitat devoted to conservation and climate change adaptation.

Many supporters of the Manchin-Barrasso legislation specifically point to the benefits of planning for new transmission lines, which helps integrate renewables. But this permit reform proposal does nothing to address the biggest obstacles to building new interregional transmission lines, such as who pays for them and how to overcome utilities’ reluctance to compete with neighboring utilities. Instead, it makes, at best, minor improvements by requiring utilities to plan for more transmission and reshaping policy tools that the federal government largely already has, such as accelerating permitting schedules to build projects faster by calling them new. In fact, the Rocky Mountain Institute modeling, also reported by Third Way, is the only one that shows any greenhouse gas reductions associated with the proposed permit reform law, but only because it wrongly assumes that the law is the reason for building all future transmission. This ignores years of incremental policy incentives intended to facilitate transmission construction, such as the recently implemented Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Order 1920, and significantly overstates the greenhouse gas benefits of permitting reform.

The fight against the specter of permit reform is never-ending, especially when its benefactors—utilities and the oil and gas industry—have so much to gain. Accelerating the transition to renewable energy should not depend on the continued dominance and expansion of fossil fuels, nor should it undermine the very environmental laws that have helped clean up our water and air under the pretense that they somehow enable more renewable energy. Bringing permit reform back from the dead seems less about cutting red tape and building renewable energy than about satisfying the energy industry’s bottomless appetite for America’s public lands.

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