Capito and Carper at a hearing this month. Photo: Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images
House Republicans did their thing on energy permits. Now it’s the Senate’s turn — and the action is about to get much more complicated.
Why it matters: Divides over how to define “permitting reform” — and whether it’s even a good idea for combating climate change — are going to make or break Senate talks on any environmental law overhaul.
What’s happening: Key Senate Democrats made clear to Nick and Jael that they want to change permit-related laws specifically to make a renewable energy glidepath.
- Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, for example, wants a bill to include a focus on transmission and offshore wind. Sen. Martin Heinrich also wants transmission in the foreground of discussions, as Axios reported earlier this week.
This is far from the GOP approach that also is preferred by some moderate Democrats like Joe Manchin, who want to cut back environmental requirements for resource project permits as well, including for fossil fuels.
- “You can't do selective permitting. You've got to do it across the board,” Sen. Shelley Moore Capito told reporters.
Zoom in: Right now, two proposals loom large over Senate permit bill talks — and they exemplify how this split could stand in the way of any dealmaking.
- There’s Manchin’s legislation from last year, which would have initiated narrower changes to the National Environmental Policy Act — including permit timelines and limits on lawsuits — and approved the controversial Mountain Valley Pipeline.
- Some Democrats we talked to said this could be their starting point. “[A] good place to look for consensus would be the provisions in what's known as the Manchin amendment,” Senate Environment and Public Works Chair Tom Carper told Axios.
There's also a GOP proposal from Capito, EPW's top Republican.
- Capito’s bill includes broader rollbacks of Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act provisions coupled with language whittling away at NEPA in a more comprehensive manner.
- Finding enough consensus to meet the Senate’s 60-vote threshold may mean finding common ground between the two bills.
The bottom line: We’re about to see a flurry of activity in the Senate around permits, but if the starting point is the Manchin bill and getting a law passed means moving further to the right … brace for intense progressive pushback.
- “We would likely start losing Democrats if you go much further right of what Manchin did” on NEPA, Heinrich told Axios.
There are progressive pathways to supporting a statutory overhaul that benefits some non-fossil resource projects, like hardrock mines, if it’s coupled with fulfilling long-sought desires, like updating the 150-year-old mining law.
- But this is an inscrutable problem. If you ask Sen. Lisa Murkowski about a permit bill that touches NEPA, she’ll tell you how far away consensus really is.
- “It depends what you mean by going there on NEPA,” Murkowski said. “And I think nobody knows that yet.”
What’s next: Capito said she’s working on permits with John Barrasso — the top Republican on ENR — as well as Manchin and Carper.
- Republicans, meanwhile, are eyeing debt ceiling talks as a vehicle for a permits bill, but Senate Democrats seem wholly uninterested in that idea.
- Even Manchin was skeptical: “I don't want anything holding me voting for the debt ceiling as a quid pro quo,” he said.
