SPEED Act passes in House despite changes that threaten clean power projects
SOURCE:Ars Technica|BY:
Aidan Hughes, Carl David Goette-Luciak, Inside Climate News
The bill would significantly curtail scope of the federal environmental review process.
massive overhaul
The bill would significantly curtail scope of the federal environmental review process.
Rep. Bruce Westerman (R-Ark.) speaks during a news conference in the US Capitol Visitor Center on Oct. 22. Credit: Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc/Getty Images
The House of Representatives cleared the way for a massive overhaul of the federal environmental review process last Thursday, despite last-minute changes that led clean energy groups and moderate Democrats to pull their support.
The Standardizing Permitting and Expediting Economic Development Act, or SPEED Act, overcame opposition from environmentalists and many Democrats who oppose the bill’s sweeping changes to a bedrock environmental law.
The bill, introduced by Rep. Bruce Westerman (R-Ark.) and backed by Rep. Jared Golden (D-Maine), passed the House Thursday in a 221-196 vote, in which 11 Democrats joined Republican lawmakers to back the reform effort. It now heads to the Senate, where it has critics and proponents on both sides of the aisle, making its prospects uncertain.
The bill seeks to reform foundational environmental regulations that govern how major government projects are assessed and approved by amending the landmark 1970 National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), signed into law under the Nixon administration. NEPA requires federal agencies to review and disclose the environmental impacts of major projects before permitting or funding them. Although NEPA reviews are only one component of the federal permitting process, advocates argue that they serve a crucial role by providing both the government and the public the chance to examine the knock-on effects that major projects could have on the environment.
Critics of the law have argued for years that increasingly complex reviews—along with legal wrangling over the findings of those reviews—have turned NEPA into a source of significant, burdensome delays that threaten the feasibility of major projects, such as power plants, transmission lines, and wind and solar projects on federal land.
Speaking on the floor of the House Thursday before the vote, Westerman described the SPEED Act as a way to “restore common sense and accountability to federal permitting.” Westerman praised the original intent of NEPA but said the law’s intended environmental protections had been overshadowed by NEPA becoming “more synonymous with red tape and waste.
“What was meant to facilitate responsible development has been twisted into a bureaucratic bottleneck that delays investments in the infrastructure and technologies that make our country run,” Westerman said.
After the bill’s passage through the House on Thursday, the SPEED Act’s Democratic cosponsor, Golden, praised the bill’s success.
“The simplest way to make energy, housing, and other essentials more affordable is to make it possible to actually produce enough of it at a reasonable cost,” Golden said in a press release following the vote. “The SPEED Act has united workers, businesses, and political forces who usually oppose each other because scarcity hurts everyone.”
According to an issue brief from the Bipartisan Policy Center, the bill aims to reform the NEPA process in several key ways. First, it makes changes to the ways agencies comply with NEPA—for example, by creating exemptions to when a NEPA review is required, and requiring agencies to only consider environmental impacts that are directly tied to the project at hand.
It would also drastically shorten the deadline to sue a federal agency over its permitting decision and constrain who is eligible to file suit. Current law provides a six-year statute of limitations on agency decisions for permitting energy infrastructure, and two years for transportation project permits. Under the SPEED Act’s provisions, those deadlines would be shortened to a mere 150 days and only allow lawsuits to be filed by plaintiffs who demonstrated in public comment periods that they would be directly and negatively impacted by the project.
NEPA does not require the government to make particular decisions about whether or how to move forward with a project based on a review’s findings. However, critics argue that in the decades since its passage, interest groups have “weaponized” the NEPA process to delay or even doom projects they oppose, sometimes forcing agencies to conduct additional analyses that add costly delays to project timelines.
Strange bedfellows on either side of the bill
Although climate activists and environmental groups have used NEPA to oppose fossil fuel projects, such as the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines, oil and gas interests are far from the only group seeking respite. Some voices within the clean energy industry have called for permitting reform, too, arguing that delays stemming from the current permitting process have had a negative impact on America’s ability to build out more climate-friendly projects, including some offshore wind projects and transmission lines to connect renewables to the grid.
So when Westerman and Golden introduced the SPEED Act in the House, a hodgepodge of odd alliances and opposition groups formed in response.
The American Petroleum Institute, a trade association for the oil and gas industry, launched a seven-figure advertising campaign in recent months pushing lawmakers to pursue permitting reform, according to a report from Axios. And the bill also initially enjoyed support from voices within the clean power industry. However, last-minute changes to the bill—designed to win over Republican holdouts—undermined the SPEED Act’s cross-sector support.
The bill’s opponents had previously raised alarm bells that fossil fuel interests would disproportionately benefit from a more streamlined review process under the current administration, citing President Donald Trump’s ongoing war against wind and solar energy projects.
In recent months, the Trump administration has sought to pause, reconsider, or revoke already approved permits for renewable energy projects it dislikes. Those moves particularly impacted offshore wind developments and added significant uncertainty to the feasibility of clean energy investments as a whole.
A bipartisan amendment to the SPEED Act, added during the Natural Resources Committee’s markup in November, sought to address some of those concerns by adding language that would make it more difficult for the administration to “revoke, rescind, withdraw, terminate, suspend, amend, alter, or take any other action to interfere” with an existing authorization.
However, that measure encountered resistance from key Republican voices who support Trump’s attacks on offshore wind projects.
A last-minute loophole for Trump’s energy agenda
On Tuesday, Republican lawmakers in the Rules Committee were able to amend the SPEED Act in a way that would facilitate the Trump administration’s ongoing efforts to axe renewable energy projects. The changes were spearheaded by Andy Harris (R-Md.) and Jeff Van Drew (R-N.J.), two vocal proponents of Trump’s energy policies. The amendment fundamentally undermined the technology-neutral aspirations of the bill—and any hope of receiving widespread support from moderate Democrats or the clean power industry.
According to Matthew Davis, vice president of federal policy at the League of Conservation Voters, Harris and Van Drew’s amendment would allow the administration to exclude any project from the bill’s reforms that the Trump administration had flagged for reconsideration—something the administration has done repeatedly for renewable projects like offshore wind.
The result, Davis argued, is that the bill would speed up the environmental review process for the Trump administration’s preferred sources of energy—namely, oil and gas—while leaving clean energy projects languishing.
“They couldn’t pass the rule on Tuesday to even consider this bill without making it even better for the fossil fuel industry and even worse for the clean energy industry,” Davis said.
In a public statement following Thursday’s vote, Davis described the amended SPEED Act as “a fossil fuel giveaway that cuts out community input and puts our health and safety at risk to help big polluters.”
The American Clean Power Association, which represents the renewable energy industry, previously hailed the bill as an important step forward for the future of clean energy development. But after the Rules Committee’s changes on Tuesday, the organization dropped its support.
“Our support for permitting reform has always rested on one principle: fixing a broken system for all energy resources,” said ACP CEO Jason Grumet in a Wednesday statement. “The amendment adopted last night violate[s] that principle. Technology neutrality wasn’t just good policy—it was the political foundation that made reform achievable.”
The American Council on Renewable Energy (ACORE), a nonprofit trade and advocacy organization, echoed that sentiment.
“Durable, bipartisan, technology-neutral permitting reforms that support and advance the full suite of American electricity resources and the necessary expansion of transmission infrastructure to get that electricity from where it’s generated to where it’s needed are essential to meeting that challenge reliably, securely, and most importantly, affordably,” said ACORE CEO Ray Long. “Unfortunately, the changes made on the House floor are a disappointing step backward from achieving these objectives.”
Following the SPEED Act’s passage through the House on Thursday, advocacy group Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions (CRES) issued a public statement praising the bill’s success while noting how the recent amendments had affected the law.
“While we are concerned that post committee additions to the bill could put the certainty of a range of projects at risk, this bill’s underlying reforms are critical to advancing American energy,” CRES President Heather Reams said in the statement.
Mixed expectations for the reform’s impact
Even before the move to strip protections for renewables from the bill, some critics—like Rep. Mike Levin (D-Calif.)—said that the legislation didn’t go far enough to curtail the president’s “all-out assault” against clean power, arguing that the bill does nothing to restore approvals that have already been canceled by the administration and doesn’t address other roadblocks that have been put in place.
“The administration cannot be trusted to act without specific language, in my view, to protect the clean energy projects already in the pipeline and to prevent the Interior Secretary from unilaterally stopping projects that are needed to lower costs and improve grid reliability,” Levin told Inside Climate News in an interview ahead of the House vote.
Both Levin and Davis pointed to a July memo from the Department of Interior that requires all wind and solar projects on federal land to receive higher-level approval from Interior Secretary Doug Burgum.
“The administration is not even returning the phone calls of project developers. They are not responding to applications being submitted,” Davis said. “That sort of approach is in stark contrast with the ‘white glove, concierge service’—and that’s a quote from the Trump administration—the service they are providing for fossil fuel companies to access our public lands.”
The SPEED Act’s opponents also dispute the idea that NEPA reviews are one of the primary causes of permitting delays, arguing that reports from the Congressional Research Service and other groups have found little evidence to support those claims.
“Often missing in the conversation around NEPA is the empirical research that’s been done, and there’s a lot of that out there,” said Jarryd Page, a staff attorney at the Environmental Law Institute, in a September interview with Inside Climate News.
That research points to resource constraints as one of the biggest roadblocks, Page said, like not having enough staff to conduct the environmental reviews, or staff lacking adequate experience and technical know-how.
Debate over NEPA and the reform of the permitting process will now move into the Senate, where experts say the SPEED Act will likely undergo further changes.
“I think as the bill goes forwards in the Senate, we’ll probably see a neutral, across-the-board approach to making sure the process is fair for all technology types,” Xan Fishman, an energy policy expert at the Bipartisan Policy Center told ICN after Thursday’s vote.
Fishman stressed it would be crucial to ensure permits for projects wouldn’t suddenly be cancelled for political reasons, but said he was optimistic about how the SPEED Act would be refined in the Senate.
“It’s great to see Congress so engaged with permitting reform,” he said. “Both sides of the aisle see a need to do better.”
This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.
