Co-authored with Delta County Commissioner Wendell A. Koontz. Previously published by the Delta County Independent, the Grand Junction Sentinel, and the Montrose Daily Press. Photo: Senators Manchin (I-WV) and Barrasso (R-WY), authors of the Energy Permitting Reform Act of 2024.
As we watch another contentious presidential election play out across the media, it’s easy to assume Americans can’t agree on anything important. That’s a false story, though, amplified noise from cable TV and the Twittersphere.
It takes courage, but real people are still working together to solve real problems — even in the U.S. Congress, where lawmakers are forging a common-sense solution to address our energy needs and mitigate climate change. It’s happening through a wonky process called energy permitting reform.
The two of us wrote an op-ed last year after discovering, at a Club 20 meeting, our shared interest in this critical topic. Wendell is a conservative-leaning Commissioner from Delta County. I’m a left-of-center citizen climate lobbyist from Durango. We both believe that America needs an all-of-the-above energy strategy. We both believe that worthy energy projects should be buildable within reasonable timeframes, with appropriate environmental safeguards, and shouldn’t be held hostage by attorneys and lawsuits.
Wendell and I, like members of Congress and a lot of normal Americans, have different ideas about the types of energy infrastructure we’d like to see built and why. I’m comfortable with that. Modern energy projects have to compete on price, reliability, resilience, and pollution impacts. They have to weigh near-term and long-term consequences. May the best solutions win.
Nobody wins when projects are routinely bogged down by rules crafted half a century ago to solve a different set of problems than the ones we face today. Environmental risks have changed. So have energy technologies, consumer demand, and geopolitical threats. America has a future to build. We need to do it quickly and we need modern rules to make that happen. What we don’t need are intentional delays and runaway litigation costs enabled by outdated rules.
Congress recognizes this. One of the few areas of bipartisan collaboration right now is energy permitting reform. Since Wendell and I wrote a year ago, the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee passed a comprehensive permitting reform bill on a vote of 15-4. Senator Hickenlooper authored parts of that bill. The House Natural Resources Committee held a recent hearing to discuss reform proposals.
The Senate’s Energy Permitting Reform Act of 2024 (EPRA) is a compromise bill pragmatically designed for broad appeal. It would accelerate transmission planning; get more clean energy on federal lands; set reasonable rules and timelines around legal challenges; make domestic mining more feasible; add more lease sales for solar, wind, geothermal, and oil & gas; and require a timely yes-no decision on LNG terminals and coal leases once the project’s full environmental review has been completed.
EPRA is a net win on climate; with likely emissions reductions of 10%, and perhaps as much as 25%, by 2050. It’s also a win on reliability and affordability. Right now, consumers are paying extra for redundancies and delays that increase costs for all energy projects – renewable projects are affected by this even more than fossil fuel projects. They’re paying for damage to their homes and health from power outages during extreme weather events. Our permitting process wastes time and money, and leaves Americans stuck in a status quo that threatens our energy security and our plans for a clean energy future.
Congressional compromise gets a bad rap on cable TV and the Twittersphere these days, but neither party can solve either of these problems alone. Encourage your members of Congress to be courageous and work together on this key issue (https://www.congress.gov/members/find-your-member). I hope Wendell and I will be writing again soon to tell you that Congress passed comprehensive bipartisan permitting reform and the president signed it into law.
Powering Forward 
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