If You Want Clean Energy, Start by Repealing the Permit Maze

Here is a number that should embarrass everyone who claims to care about clean energy: 2,600 gigawatts. That is the capacity of proposed power projects — overwhelmingly solar, wind, and storage — sitting in interconnection queues, more than double everything currently on the American grid. The clean-energy future is not waiting on technology or capital. It is waiting in line at the permit office.

The average major transmission line now takes over a decade from proposal to operation, and construction is the short part. Environmental reviews that once ran dozens of pages run thousands. Litigation — often from groups whose stated mission is decarbonization — delays the very lines that would carry wind power to cities. We have built a process that makes stopping things easy and building things heroic, then we express surprise that little gets built.

Conservatives are supposed to be skeptical of grand government projects, and this argument is precisely that skepticism applied honestly. The permit maze is not environmental protection; it is a full-employment act for consultants that outsources veto power to whoever files last. A review that takes seven years does not protect a wetland better than one that takes two. It just protects the status quo — which, for the record, is fossil.

The reforms are known and boring, which is how you can tell they would work: binding shot clocks on agency review, one lead agency per project, judicial review consolidated and time-limited, categorical approvals for projects on already-disturbed land. Several were nearly enacted twice and died both times, each party preferring the issue to the win.

There is a deal here that ought to write itself — build the clean energy and the transmission and the pipelines and the mines that feed all of it, under rules that say yes or no in eighteen months. Whichever party grabs that deal first will own the only climate position that has ever polled well: the one where things actually get built.