Permitting Reform to Unleash American Energy: The Art of the Possible
We are trapped in a mire of our own making.
We are trapped in a mire of our own making.
The generation that came before us faced unparalleled environmental challenges and was well-intentioned in their remedy; they cared deeply about the world and used the extraordinary windfall of wealth won by the blood and sweat of the Greatest Generation to build massive legal fortifications around their green places. They saw smog coalesce around cities like New York and Los Angeles, they watched their rivers literally burn, and they mourned as their fields filled with poison. These catastrophes led to guardrails: the National Environmental Policy Act, the EPA, Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act, Toxic Substance Control Act, Marine Mammal Protection Act, for example.
Make no mistake: these reforms were needed for their time. Ours is a different time, however. A time in need of action and abundant, American-made energy to meet our country’s growth and innovation.
Ours is a time in need of permitting reform to unleash American energy.
The very movement that once sought to protect America’s natural lands has, over time, ensnared it. Admittedly, the environmental awakening of the 1960s and 1970s arose from legitimate and justified concern. A prosperous generation enjoying the wealth boom following WWII, secure and able to look to the future, rightly demanded cleaner air and water. Unfortunately, embedded within that movement was a dark philosophy: humanity itself was the pollutant. The adopted idea was progress had become a threat to nature rather than its partner; that man and nature had become diametrically opposed.
From that pessimistic anthropology emerged an architecture of restraint and degrowth, a web of procedural hurdles designed to slow, study, and stop any advancement out of fear that it would damage our environment. These statutes succeeded in cleaning our air and protecting our rivers, but in doing so, they metastasized into an ideology of paralysis. Preservation through stasis. What began as guardrails became walls, and the garden of conservation rotted into a grim swamp of cold preservation. Today, the same legal fortifications that once shielded the environment now prevent us from building the new and innovative energy infrastructure that can secure its future. The outdated environmentalism of restraint must give way to an environmentalism of renewal that understands American ingenuity is the good engine for stewardship, for true conservation.
Along with the mire of red tape born from the environmental movement came the disordered philosophy of degrowth, preaching that the very best way to reduce pollution was to reduce the consumption of resources required to build, produce, and ultimately live. To reduce ourselves. The problem with this philosophy is twofold, however: it requires us to reject not only our faith but our own instinct, and it requires total global consensus.
We are not called to diminish. We are called to steward creation.
We cannot accept or adopt an idea so fundamentally anti-human, so counter to our very being. Thankfully, degrowth has never become mainstream thanks in no small part to American ingenuity and innovation, enabling us to grow more food and build more with less. We’re Americans. It turns out we can steward the environment while still producing what we need to ensure we humans survive and thrive. Indeed, there is still some sanity left in the world. Today, we see a return to true conservation and stewardship, of an understanding that we are able to use our resources wisely, protect our natural heritage, and leave something good and green and beautiful for our children and grandchildren.
We need to break the walls down to do this, though. We need to navigate out of this swamp. Society is hungry for clean, abundant energy, and the need is ever-growing with the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) and data centers. The contemporary version of degrowth might propose something to the effect of restricting AI, lobbying against it, and making sure that the development of any related technology was overburdened by regulatory hurdles. We’re not there, and neither should we be.
There are, of course, social problems and questions of virtue we need to answer as a culture before we go much further down the path of AI. However, the innovations AI allows for in energy production, industrialization, agriculture, and even forestry can improve the conservation mission and should not be ignored. AI is not going away, and I anticipate we will find ways to harness it for more good than just chatbots and image generation. Corporations, NGOs, farms, and government entities will use it to aid in their aims, and in doing so, they will create a massive energy draw.
We need an answer for that energy draw.
The answer to demand will not be found within the existing restrictive framework. Indeed, the same regulatory architecture that once purified our skies now smothers the very innovations that could keep them clean. Every major energy project must now wade through the swamp of reviews, lawsuits, and redundant agency oversight. The average environmental impact statement under NEPA exceeds seven hundred pages and can take half a decade to complete, long enough for inflation, litigation, or political change to kill the project outright. The Clean Water Act, once a tool for protecting our rivers from industrial waste, is now wielded to block geothermal wells in Nevada and transmission corridors in Arizona. The Endangered Species Act, written to save the bald eagle, is invoked to sue hydropower dams or American-made solar farms.
We are stagnating in the name of preservation.
Despite this, the truth is finally cutting through the partisan fog. Last week, a bipartisan coalition of thirteen governors, led by Pennsylvania Democrat Josh Shapiro and Oklahoma Republican Kevin Stitt, urged Congress to pass comprehensive permitting reform. Writing on behalf of the National Governors Association, they warned that without modernization, America would continue to lose its economic edge to China and fail to meet the surging energy demand of the AI era. Their proposal calls for a simple reordering of priorities: faster reviews, limits on endless legal challenges, and authority for FERC to designate national-interest transmission corridors so the nation can actually build the infrastructure required to sustain growth. They advocate reducing the statute of limitations for environmental suits from six years to one, setting strict judicial timelines, and reforming the Clean Water Act to prevent abuse by states weaponizing it against critical energy projects.
Historically, Democrats and Republicans have had distinct priorities on reforming our current permitting landscape:
Democrats want transmission build-out and faster clean energy expansion to keep up with increasing energy demand
Republicans want faster permitting times for pipelines, NEPA reform, and an end to the litigation doom-loop that stops energy projects in their tracks
Informed by these priorities, a robust permitting deal must include:
Reforming and streamlining the National Environmental Policy Act to prevent frivolous lawsuits
Expediting all linear infrastructure, including transmission lines and pipelines, to ensure energy gets where it needs to go
Creating expedited permitting processes for low-impact, well-understood energy and mining projects
Ultimately, permitting reform is about the art of the possible. We have a unique political window during this Congress to achieve a deal that makes both sides happy, while genuinely addressing the very real challenges facing our nation. Read more about what that deal could look like in terms of concrete policy recommendations, from our sister organization, ACC Action, here.
These efforts are a necessary recognition that the machinery of human-focused abundance, of true conservation, has stalled under the bloated weight of outdated rules and that the moral work of stewardship now demands we not only build, but make up for lost time. We need the redemption of environmental law, a permitting framework that prizes prudence and stewardship over paralysis, over stasis, over stagnation. This reform must also dispel the disordered degrowth philosophies of the past and restore the rightly ordered understanding that human flourishing is the end and environmental protection is the means.
We are grateful for the efforts of the generations who came before us. They were right for their time. However, those efforts have since served their purpose and have long been in need of reform. We now navigate our way out of the mire of the past toward a time where we will unleash the energy abundance necessary to power both the material and moral renewal of our nation.
Chris Barnard is the president of the American Conservation Coalition (ACC). Follow him on X @ChrisBarnardDL.
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