![]() ![]() ![]() Which is to say that, transmission aside, it’s not obvious that these measures, taken all together, are a win for decarbonization and climate.īut you can’t exactly put transmission aside, given that getting to net zero carbon emissions may require a doubling of the current grid. And it would have made a special and especially odious oversight exception for a pet project of Manchin’s, the Mountain Valley Pipeline, which would carry natural gas from West Virginia to southern Virginia and had run aground in the courts and became a sort of unflattering fossil fuel hood ornament for the reform bill as a whole. Manchin’s version would also have granted the Department of Energy the authority to highlight a small set of projects for expediting, but it also would have required that the list be pretty balanced between fossil fuel and clean energy infrastructure. Its review process slows projects enough, though, that even modest changes like these would accelerate things somewhat (and make it presumably harder to object to new projects on the basis of conservation values or environmental justice). But Manchin’s particular version? Alongside reforms to promote more rapid build-out of the electricity grid, its major elements included modest changes to the National Environmental Policy Act, the environmental-review law whose impacts on energy infrastructure build-out are debated. That’s because there are, I think, pretty strong climate arguments for permitting reform in principle: To more or less replace or rebuild the country’s whole energy infrastructure would require an enormous construction effort, ideally undertaken at warp speed. (Nothing breaks a partnership like success, I guess.) But it also suggests an obvious next step for the left side of the now fractured climate coalition: its own alternative permitting reform bill, focused on building more electric transmission lines and streamlining regulatory approval for clean energy projects (without allowing for more fossil fuel infrastructure or the stampeding of frontline communities). ![]() This was seemingly a victory for the progressive caucus, activists and environmental justice groups, which opposed the agreement as a fossil fuel handout, and another mark of a growing climate rift on the left in the aftermath of what was widely hailed as the most significant decarbonization bill passed into American law. 27, the coalition had fallen apart, with Manchin somewhat abruptly pulling what had become known as the side deal from a must-pass budget resolution. After weeks of speculation and intracoalitional debate, the text of the compromise was released on Sept. One conspicuous cost of the compromise reached was a promise made by Senator Chuck Schumer to Manchin on what was vaguely called permitting reform: a catchall phrase referring to a whole host of efforts to cut red tape and ease the rollout of energy infrastructure. The alliance that pushed the Inflation Reduction Act into law in August was always a somewhat fragile and ramshackle one: Green New Dealers and the coal-state senator Joe Manchin, carbon-capture geeks and environmental justice warriors, all herded together in the sort of big-tent play you get with a 50-50 Senate and one party functionally indifferent on climate. ![]()
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