Permitting Reform Splits the Left Between Builders and Protectors

In the summer of 2024, two senators who agreed on almost nothing put their names on the same bill. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, by then an independent and on his way out of the Senate, and John Barrasso of Wyoming, a reliably conservative Republican, introduced the Energy Permitting Reform Act. It moved through the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee with votes from both parties, and then it did what most ambitious energy bills do in a crowded election year: it ran out of time. What made the bill interesting was not its fate. It was who showed up to argue about it. Some of the country's biggest climate groups said, in effect, give us the transmission lines and we can live with the rest. Others, many of them rooted in the Gulf Coast towns that sit beside refineries and export terminals, said the rest was the whole problem. The left had discovered that it was two coalitions wearing one jacket.

In short: Permitting reform pits two progressive goals against each other: building clean power and power lines quickly, and keeping the reviews and lawsuits that let frontline communities fight dangerous projects. The 2024 Manchin-Barrasso bill died, but the argument it exposed is the one that will shape climate policy for years, and there is a version of reform that could serve both sides.

What was actually in the 2024 bill

Bills get remembered by their nicknames, so it helps to look at the parts. The Manchin-Barrasso package tried to do several things at once.

On the clean-energy side, it reached for the problem that grid planners talk about constantly: long-distance transmission. It aimed to give federal regulators more power to approve big interregional power lines and to settle who pays for them, which is the question that tends to stall such lines for a decade. It also set tighter clocks on lawsuits, shortening the window in which opponents could challenge a federal energy approval in court and pushing judges to resolve cases faster.

On the fossil side, it carried the price of Barrasso's support. It required the federal government to keep holding oil and gas lease sales on public lands and offshore, and it tried to make it harder for an administration to slow approvals of liquefied natural gas exports. Those were not side details. They were the trade.

The theory of the deal was simple. Clean energy needs more new infrastructure than fossil energy does, because wind and solar are spread out and often far from cities, so anything that speeds up building will, on balance, help the climate even if some of the speed goes to pipelines. The objection was just as simple. A pipeline or an export terminal built in 2026 might run for forty years, and the people breathing next to it do not experience "on balance."

The builders' case, stated at full strength

The strongest argument for permitting reform starts with a number that grid researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have tracked for years. The amount of proposed generation and storage waiting in line to connect to the American grid has grown so large that it exceeds the capacity of every power plant currently operating in the country. Most of what waits is solar, wind and batteries. Much of it will never be built, and the reasons are mostly not environmental review at all. They are the slow, expensive studies that utilities and grid operators run before a new project can plug in, and the lack of high-voltage lines to carry power from where it is made to where it is used.

Then there is the decarbonization math. Modelers who studied the 2022 climate law found that a large share of its emissions cuts depended on building transmission much faster than the country had been doing. If the lines do not get built, the subsidized wind farms have nowhere to send their power, and the gas plants keep running.

Builders also point to history that should make progressives uncomfortable. The tools of review and litigation have been used against clean projects again and again. A wind farm in Nantucket Sound was fought for more than a decade by wealthy waterfront owners and never built. Transmission lines meant to carry hydropower or wind into New England have been stopped or delayed by local and state fights. Solar farms in the desert have been tied up over habitat. The process does not know whether a project is good for the climate. It only knows who has the lawyers.

And finally there is a point about who benefits from delay. Slow permitting protects whatever is already built. In an electricity system that is still mostly fossil, the status quo is the polluter. A rule that makes everything new hard to build is, in practice, a rule that favors the old.

The protectors' case, stated at full strength

The other side begins somewhere else: in places like the Louisiana parishes along the Mississippi between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, where petrochemical plants sit beside small, mostly Black communities, or the Texas and Louisiana coasts where new LNG terminals have been proposed one after another. For people there, the environmental review is often the only moment when anyone with power has to write down what a project will do to them.

Review documents have to describe air emissions, flood risk, effects on fishing, and the cumulative burden of adding one more plant to a place that already has several. Public comment periods are frequently the first time a community learns the details. And the possibility of a lawsuit is what makes agencies take those comments seriously. Shorten the litigation window and you may shorten it below the time it takes a volunteer group to find a lawyer.

The protectors also notice what the 2024 deal paired with the transmission language. Mandated lease sales and protection for gas export approvals are not neutral process reforms. They are policy choices in favor of more fossil fuel, written into law, at the very moment the science says the country should be winding down. Accepting them in exchange for power lines that might or might not get built is, in this view, paying a guaranteed price for a speculative benefit.

There is also a memory problem. In 2023, as part of the deal to raise the debt ceiling, Congress approved the Mountain Valley Pipeline by statute and limited the courts' ability to review it. People along the route in West Virginia and Virginia had fought the project for years. Many progressives remember that episode as proof of what "permitting reform" looks like when it actually passes: the pipeline gets its exemption and the transmission lines get a study.

What the review process really slows, and what it does not

Here is where the argument needs more precision than either camp usually offers.

The National Environmental Policy Act requires federal agencies to study the effects of major actions before they take them. It does not require them to pick the greenest option. It is a look-before-you-leap law. Most federal actions get a quick categorical exclusion, a smaller share get an environmental assessment, and a small minority get a full environmental impact statement. The big statements are where the delays and the lawsuits concentrate.

But much of what stalls clean energy has little to do with that federal law. Interconnection queues are run by grid operators and utilities. Who pays for a transmission line is decided at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and in state utility commissions. Siting is largely a state and local matter: county boards, zoning codes, state siting councils. A power line that crosses three states may need approval from each, and any one of them can say no. None of that changes if the federal review gets shorter.

The Supreme Court has also already moved the ground. In May 2025, in Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, the justices ruled unanimously that a federal board reviewing a Utah rail line did not have to study the downstream effects of the oil the railroad would carry, and the majority told lower courts to give agencies broad deference on how far their reviews reach. That decision made some of the environmental lawsuits that builders complain about harder to win. It made some of the cumulative-harm arguments that protectors depend on harder to win, too.

So the honest version of the debate is narrower than the headlines. Federal review reform matters most for the handful of large, controversial projects on federal land or with federal permits. Transmission depends far more on cost allocation and state siting. Frontline protection depends on whether communities can participate meaningfully at the moment decisions are made, not only on whether they can sue years later.

Where progressives made it harder for themselves

It is worth saying plainly that the left built a good deal of this trap. In the 1970s and after, environmental and community groups won procedural rights because the substantive laws were weak and the agencies were captured. Process was the weapon available. It worked. It stopped highways through Black neighborhoods, dams in canyons, and reactors on fault lines.

The trouble is that a weapon does not care who holds it. The same tools now let a homeowners' association delay apartments, a county board block a solar farm, and an incumbent utility slow a competitor's transmission line. Progressive cities and states, which say they want clean power and abundant housing, often have the slowest approval processes in the country. Here's the argument, and it is an argument rather than a settled fact: when a movement's main tool is the power to say no, it eventually finds itself unable to say yes to the things it wants.

That does not mean the protectors are wrong. It means the fix cannot be "less process for everybody" or "more process for everybody." It has to distinguish between projects, and it has to give communities power earlier, when it can shape a project, rather than only later, when the only option is to stop it.

A deal that could serve both

Several ideas show up again and again among people who have tried to bridge the two camps. None of them is law, and each has critics.

• Treat transmission as its own category. Give federal regulators clear authority to approve and allocate costs for interregional lines, without bundling it with mandated fossil leasing. If the case for speed rests on clean energy, write the speed for clean energy.
• Front-load community input. Require developers and agencies to consult affected communities before the route or site is fixed, with real funding for local groups to hire their own experts. A review that arrives after every important choice has been made invites the lawsuit.
• Measure cumulative burden. Several states, New Jersey among them, have passed laws requiring regulators to weigh the existing pollution load of an overburdened community before approving a new polluting facility. A federal version would protect frontline towns without slowing a solar farm in an empty field.
• Fund the agencies. Reviews are slow partly because the offices that write them are understaffed. Hiring people is less dramatic than rewriting a statute and often faster.
• Keep courts open, but on a clock. A firm deadline for filing suit, paired with notice requirements that guarantee communities know a decision has been made, could shorten uncertainty without shutting the door.

The pattern underneath these ideas is to be specific. The 2024 bill was a grand bargain, and grand bargains in Congress tend to trade the interests of people with the least leverage. A narrower set of reforms, aimed at what actually stalls clean power and paired with what actually protects frontline communities, would ask less of both coalitions.

Why this fight comes back in 2027

Democrats won control of the House and Senate on November 3, 2026, and the new Congress is sworn in on January 3, 2027. Permitting is one of the few energy topics where Republicans and Democrats have both introduced serious bills, so it is likely to come up again. Prediction is not fact, and nobody can say what form a bill would take or whether President Trump would sign one. What is certain is that the two progressive coalitions will be asked to choose again, and that the choice will be easier if each understands the other's best argument.

The builder in this story is not a corporate shill. She may be a grid engineer in Iowa who has watched wind projects die in the queue. The protector is not an obstructionist. He may be a retired teacher in St. James Parish who has watched his neighbors get sick. Both want the same century: cleaner air, a stable climate, a fair shot for the places that have carried the burden. The argument between them is real, and it is also a family argument. It deserves to be had in good faith.

What you can do

Start local, because that is where most energy projects are actually decided. Find out whether your county or state is weighing a big transmission line, a solar farm, a gas plant or an export terminal, and learn which board decides. Public hearings on these projects are often thinly attended, and a few informed residents can change the record.

When a federal agency opens a rule or a project review to the public, comment on it. The site's list of open federal comment periods shows what is closing soonest, grouped by issue, with guidance on writing a comment that an agency has to answer. A specific comment about a specific harm, or a specific delay, does more than a form letter.

Look up who in your area is regulated as a polluter before you take a side on a new facility. The polluter lookup by ZIP code shows EPA-regulated facilities near you, with their violations and penalties, which is a fair starting point for asking what one more plant would add.

Tell your members of Congress which version of permitting reform you want, and be precise. "Speed up clean transmission, protect overburdened communities, and do not mandate fossil leasing" is a position a staffer can write down. You can find your representative and senators by address, with their phone numbers and latest votes.

Support the groups doing the work on both sides of this family argument. Environmental justice organizations and clean-energy advocates are listed by state in the nonprofit directory, and the climate policy topic page gathers ongoing coverage of the permitting fight as it returns.