Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via AP Images
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) is seen in the U.S. Capitol after a vote on May 11, 2023.
The irresistible force of the climate crisis collided again last week with the immovable object of West Virginia’s conservative Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin. Even as congressional Democrats have been working on legislation to speed the development of the electric transmission system needed to move wind and solar power to cities and farms, as a counterweight to an ugly House Republican bill that would mainly accelerate fossil fuel projects, the White House announced that it would be Manchin’s permitting bill, which accords greater urgency to the laying of still more oil and gas pipelines, that would be the basis for a new round of negotiations.
The negotiators themselves should be cause for concern. The four senators now meeting to chart just how clean or dirty America’s energy future will be are Manchin, his West Virginia Republican colleague Shelley Moore Capito, Wyoming Republican John Barrasso, and Delaware Democrat Tom Carper. No two states have economies more dependent on the extraction of coal and fossil fuels than Wyoming and West Virginia, which are also the two states that went most heavily for Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election.
On matters of Manchin and energy, the rift between Democrats in Congress and the Democrats in the White House is nothing new. Last year, Manchin demanded legislation to speed pipeline permitting as a condition for his support for the Inflation Reduction Act. Once they read Manchin’s bill, however, a substantial majority of congressional Democrats refused to support it, though the White House lobbied them to go along with it. Now, as the 2024 election grows closer, those differences persist but may not be as great as they were last year.
The need for vastly expanding the nation’s electric transmission lines—the only means by which wind and solar power can be carried to consumers, and thus the sine qua non of the nation’s efforts to mitigate the climate crisis—is glaringly obvious. While last year’s Inflation Reduction Act greatly incentivized such clean power sources as electric vehicles, the electric grid required to bring clean power to buildings and their contents is plainly too small to do the job.
“We have to build transmission lines at three to five times the current rate,” says Rep. Sean Casten (D-IL), who with Rep. Mike Levin (D-CA) has been developing an omnibus electricity transmission bill. “Today, there are 2,000 gigawatts of wind and solar power available, but half of it is waiting to be connected with consumers, since the current grid can’t handle that much.”
The immediate problem is that it can take years, if not decades, before a high-capacity electricity transmission system can get the permitting required to start construction. Recently, a project to bring the power generated by wind turbines in Wyoming to California consumers got its approval, after a process that took 18 years.
Why are fossil fuel pipelines so much easier to build than electric transmission lines? As Casten says, “there’s no single agency that’s responsible for transmission.” The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has sole authority to permit the construction of interstate pipelines, but lacks such authority when it comes to interstate transmission lines. Last year, FERC passed new rules that would extend its authority over permitting the transmission lines as well, but those rules have yet to be finalized, and the commission is currently without a chair, as the senator chairing the Senate’s Energy and Natural Resources Committee—you guessed it, Joe Manchin—declined to hold hearings to reconfirm the Biden appointee, Richard Glick, who had steered those rules to provisional approval.
The immediate problem is that it can take years, if not decades, before a high-capacity electricity transmission system can get the permitting required to start construction.
The other big issue with transmission is cost allocation. Multiple utility operators use these lines, but there’s no process to determine who pays what, and the monopoly utilities try to squirm out of footing the bill, in one of the nation’s more damaging free-rider problems. Again, FERC put forward rulemaking to fix this, but again, Manchin decapitated the leadership of FERC.
The bill on which Casten and Levin have been working would vest sole permitting power for interstate electricity transmission in FERC, establishing in law what would just be a FERC rule, assuming that rule was actually finalized. It would also create a balance of payments between grid owners and consumers that would incentivize the power-line owners to build new lines, with the added cost to consumers to be offset (or more than offset) with cheaper electricity charges. It would speed the permitting process by eliminating multiple choke points, while at the same time establishing community outreach programs to hear and address locals’ reactions (whether supportive or critical) to the proposed lines, and providing funding to cities, tribes, and local groups that decided to pursue the often costly course of seeking to alter such proposals.
On Wednesday, John Podesta, who is the administration’s point person on clean-energy policy, outlined the White House’s stance on building out the grid. Noting the contrast between the long time it takes to get the lines authorized and up and running, and the short time in which the nation will have to shift to cleaner energy sources, Podesta outlined a series of administration actions already in place—including FERC’s yet-to-be-finalized rules—that will speed up the process. He also called upon Congress to do more. “Congress,” he said, “should give FERC clear authority to issue permits for interstate transmission lines.”
But in the policy memo the White House released at the same time as Podesta’s speech, there was no specific recommendation that Congress pass legislation that gives FERC sole permitting authority, though it did announce an inter-administration memorandum of understanding that accelerates “the permitting of transmission lines by directing the Department of Energy to use existing authority under the Federal Power Act to coordinate onshore transmission planning and permitting activities across the federal government.”
More problematic still, Podesta declared that
the President supported Senator Manchin’s permitting legislation in December, and he continues to support the same bill the Senator re-introduced last week. Congress should treat that bill—and particularly the deadlines it imposes for environmental reviews—to start serious bipartisan negotiations in the Senate to eliminate roadblocks to clean energy projects and bolster our energy security. The President doesn’t love everything in the bill, but we support it.
There is, of course, a fuzzy line between putting a time limit on environmental reviews that drag on so interminably that they delay or kill an urgently needed project (like delivering clean power), and requiring them to be so hasty that they’re perfunctory. Congressional Republicans have made clear they’d like to dismantle the 50-year-old National Environmental Policy Act, which first required environmental impact reports and which passed with overwhelming Republican support. Today’s Republicans will no doubt enter into the bargaining the White House wants with the goal of making environmental oversight as perfunctory as possible.
Resurrecting the Manchin bill as the starting point for discussion has alarmed many progressives, and many climate-concerned non-progressives as well. “Where you start is important to where you end up,” says Tyson Slocum, who directs Public Citizen’s Energy Program. Starting with the Manchin bill, he says, “guarantees a more Republican-focused permitting reform, which means gutting environmental standards.”
As Slocum explained, the Democratic priority in permitting reform is boosting electric transmission. “The White House has now effectively said that FERC’s rules will suffice,” he said. “After that, Republicans will insist that a compromise not include anything like the Casten-Levin proposal.” (For their part, Casten and Levin released a rather tepid statement noting that the administration’s desire for permitting reform was a good thing, and diplomatically declining to comment on its reviving the Manchin bill as the starting point for negotiations.)
For their part, House Republicans actually threw their own tunnel-vision (actually, pipeline-vision) version of permitting reform into their what-we-need-to-do-to-raise-the-debt-ceiling legislation, which they passed on a party-line vote. It made no reference to electric transmission whatever.
By including that bit of irrelevancy, however, the Republicans linked the whole permitting discussion to their willingness to raise the debt ceiling. That the permitting talks in the Senate are now proceeding has intensified expectations that a grand bargain on energy (It’s clean! It’s dirty! You don’t have to choose!) is afoot, and might even lead to a grand bargain on the debt ceiling, too. Both Kevin McCarthy and Biden have intimated that permitting is a live issue in debt ceiling talks. There’s no reason to believe that the farthest-right Republicans, to whom McCarthy owes his speakership, will settle for anything short of the total repeal of the New Deal, but if something emerges that can get a mix of Democrats and Republicans for passage, permitting is likely to be a centerpiece of it.
As for the Democrats, their senators know that, should Manchin lose his seat in the 2024 elections, it will be all the harder to maintain their majority. Manchin has told them that he needs his bill to pass to even have a chance at holding it. The Democrat in the White House knows that should Manchin decline to seek re-election but opt instead to wage an independent campaign for the presidency next year, that could well return Donald Trump to the Oval Office. And perhaps Joe Biden also hopes that if he can strike a deal that promotes some wind and solar energy and doesn’t totally eviscerate long-standing environmental protections, maybe he can also avert the debt default and its ensuing disasters.
He’s been around way too long to plausibly believe he could draw to this inside straight, but hope, like ambition, springs eternal.
