The Biden

Washington's debt-ceiling showdown may be finally nearing a resolution, sparing the United States an economically ruinous default on its debt. Weeks of negotiations between President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy yielded a tentative agreement over Memorial Day weekend, the text of which was released to the public on Monday. There's much to pick over in the 99-page package: billions slashed from the IRS, a requirement to collect student loan payments as well as unspent COVID-aid funds, a two-year timeline to maintain current funding for safety-net programs while adding new work requirements. Important as all these closely watched measures are, the most significant parts of the agreement involve the climate—and the very real progress American has recently made toward protecting it.

For a while, it appeared that Biden's Inflation Reduction Act, the climate and energy bill passed last year (through an elaborate hoodwink of the Senate Republican caucus), would be one of the biggest targets in the debt-ceiling fight. Going into the talks, McCarthy and House Republicans initially proposed a law that would claw back subsidies for the production and manufacturing of clean energy and electric vehicles that had been established by the IRA (despite the fact that such subsidies disproportionately benefit, and have already been welcomed by, red states and districts). This came with additional asks to repeal the IRA's methane-pollution tax, order more oil-and-gas drilling auctions for federal lands, and roll back legal restrictions on fossil-fuel development and exports. As Politico reported, the green portions were among the talks’ most contested, with negotiations on environmental reviews and energy supply continuing well into Sunday.

To the planet's great relief, none of the GOP's climate cuts made it into the current agreement. Still, that doesn't mean Biden's climate ambitions were left unscathed; in fact, climate-concerned lawmakers and activists are already voicing their displeasure with new compromises to the federal environmental agenda. Dems are likely to support the bill anyway, but they may attempt to make a few more changes of their own.

Just what are the complaints here? How much climate relief actually remains in the bill? Are there glimmers of hope among the less desirable changes? Read on.

The biggest sore spot for climate legislators is the agreement's surprise approval of the Mountain Valley Pipeline, a controversial energy project that would shepherd natural gas supplies across a 300-mile expanse from West Virginia to lower Virginia. Sen. Joe Manchin, the last Democrat standing from deep-red West Virginia, had extracted a promise from Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to grant unilateral approval to the legally embattled pipeline in exchange for Manchin's vote in support of the Inflation Reduction Act. Although pipeline signoff did not make the IRA, Democratic leaders have not forgotten their pledge to Manchin—who's been throwing tantrums by threatening to repeal the very energy legislation he negotiated—and are now hoping to fulfill this debt, through measures that would preempt the types of environmental lawsuits that have obstructed the MVP up through now.

The final language in the debt-ceiling bill states that MVP construction "will reduce carbon emissions and facilitate the energy transition," a bit of rhetorical trickery: Natural gas may not be as carbon-intensive as oil or coal, but gas infrastructure does release wild amounts of methane, a greenhouse gas that heats up the atmosphere at a far faster rate than carbon dioxide. And even though the IRA's methane tax is intact, it may not be enough on its own to urgently, significantly reduce methane emissions. So, in addition to the environmental destruction necessitated by MVP construction, the line's operation would release tens of millions of tons of greenhouse gases every year. For this reasons, Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine has stated that he’ll file an amendment to cut the pipeline approval from the bill. It's unclear how much traction that amendment would gain among Dems who simply hope to sidestep a debt default.

Notably, Manchin's initial asks during Inflation Reduction Act negotiations also included requests to speed up the permitting process for establishing new energy projects, whether renewable or non-renewable. While that ultimately stalled last year, the debt-ceiling talks have now opened up a door for …

Here's something Democrats and Republicans could agree on, albeit for very different reasons. Both have expressed interest in reforming the environmental impact review process necessitated by 1970's National Environmental Policy Act for the establishment of new energy projects—that is, figuring out in advance how much a planned energy project would harm the natural environs of its location, and then greenlighting or nixing the proposal accordingly. However, Democrats are interested in NEPA reform mainly to speed up the implementation of solar, wind, and other renewable power sources—which we need installed now if we want to make the energy transition work. Republicans (and Joe Manchin), meanwhile, want much more harmful oil and gas to sidestep NEPA reviews. Both parties are also interested in lifting the burdens that inhibit the installment of power lines needed to transfer electricity from new sources and interact with the grid. So-called permitting reform has thus remained a bipartisan priority, and it looks like the debt-ceiling agreement addresses it … or, well, kinda.

The debt-ceiling agreement doesn't fully overhaul NEPA in the way Republicans had hoped. Rather, it constricts the timelines for the environmental review process regarding new energy installations: a maximum of two years for big projects, and one year for smaller ones. The NEPA reforms also relax mandates on what gets included in a given review; per the text, "an agency may make use of any reliable data source; and is not required to undertake new scientific or technical research," unless that research is "essential" and can be done quickly. In addition, the bill caps the number of pages that that can be included in an environmental impact assessment (150 pages, with a backup limit of 300 pages if the proposal is particularly complex) and in an environmental assessment (75 pages). The bill also consolidates reviewing power under one particular federal "lead agency" assigned to the task, although such an agency can draw upon counsel from state-level and Native American administrators if needed. The Council on Environmental Quality has been given a half-million dollars to carry out a one-year study on how to "improve public accessibility and transparency" by means of an online government portal, which would purportedly post these reviews up for public access.

Yes, it's all a little vague, even before you get to the section about a "categorical exclusion" that would allow federal administrators to get around any environmental review if a project appears to have "low environmental impact." Or the part that grants energy companies a little more leeway in prepping their own environmental reviews. The bill is similarly unclear on enforcement, other than opening up agencies to lawsuits if they don't meet the hastened NEPA time frames.

Notably, all the NPEA changes apply exclusively to energy projects (of any sort), while transmission towers are yet a distant dream. Democrats want way more power lines—like, way, way more power lines—in order to get transfer power generated from new wind and solar farms to the grid, without overwhelming existing power structures or grid capacity. Earlier iterations of the debt-ceiling legislation included permitting-reform roadmaps, but the current proposal's only measure in this realm asks the North American Electric Reliability Corporation to carry out an 18-month study on how best to plan and implement networks of new power lines, which would then be presented to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission for congressional disclosure, public comment, and final amendment and approval. Basically, we’re gonna have to wait a little longer for that permitting reform.

One bit of unambiguously good news: The bill amends 2015's Fixing America's Surface Transportation Act to streamline permits for energy storage—namely, batteries that can hold onto power generated from solar, wind, and other renewables. We’re going to need a lot of these, too.

.@RepGarretGraves did say the bill will give battery storage projects expedited permitting reviews under FAST 41, which could help balance renewables on the grid

Some of the knottier, less discussed portions of the debt agreement's climate role involve some aggressive accounting.

For one, a White House proposal to raise new revenues from a double-digit tax rate levied on electricity use from Bitcoin mining was left out of the agreement, and likely won't come up again for the next two years. There's also the fact that the myriad federal agencies that have helped to implement parts of the Democrats’ climate legislation—e.g., the Environmental Protection Agency, as well as the Transportation and Agriculture and Interior departments—will receive flat funding over the next two years, which ultimately amounts to a reduction because of inflation.

That's before you get to the unused money that the government wishes to "permanently rescind." The agreement, if passed, would require the return of so-far-unspent funds that had formerly been appropriated for agricultural programs, highway-sited EV chargers, domestic and international disaster aid, Defense Production Act purchases (which Biden has utilized for climate tech like heat pumps and building insulation), and Department of Energy expenses for establishing scientific research hubs. After all, why impose new taxes for government revenue when you can merely starve climate programs of the money you already granted?