The News
The US needs to speed up federal permitting reform to get renewable energy projects that are “sitting at the five yard line … into the end zone,” Ali Zaidi, the White House’s top climate official said.
“We’ve made a lot of progress” on reducing the time to get permits for energy projects, Zaidi said, but “there’s a lot more to do.” “We’ve got to come together quickly as a country and take additional steps forward,” he said Friday at Semafor’s World Economy Summit in Washington, DC.
US Sens. Joe Manchin, D-WV, and John Barrasso, R-Wyo., proposed to streamline the federal permitting process for big infrastructure projects that have slowed down the renewable energy industry.
While their bill has “some really good things in it,” Zaidi warned that there are some things in it “that create some real anxiety for me.”
“When you think about some of the provisions that pull back regulatory authority, that unsettle regulatory certainty in the environmental space, that are aimed at trying to shift the dynamic, I think the industry has already gelled around in the conventional energy space, those are challenging,” he said.
The think tank Third Way said the Manchin-Barrasso bill would lead to a net reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, despite some measures that would expand onshore and offshore oil leasing.