For a Clean-Energy Future, We Need Deregulation

Environmental protections from decades past are blocking the infrastructure urgently needed to combat climate change

By Ted Nordhaus. Excerpts:

"Though the Biden administration and Democrats currently propose to spend close to a trillion dollars on low-carbon infrastructure and technology, there is little reason to believe the U.S. is capable of building any of it in a timely or cost-effective way."

"President Biden’s landmark executive order on environmental justice, for example, has directed every federal agency to screen all new infrastructure and clean-energy spending for disparate racial impact while carving out 40% of all spending for marginalized communities. Congress, meanwhile, has produced complicated formulas to guide its proposed new clean-energy investments in order to encourage the use of union labor and to achieve various other wage and occupational outcomes.

Greater equity and inclusion and more high-wage jobs are laudable goals, but these new policies are sure to make the already slow, costly business of building new infrastructure and energy projects even slower and more costly. And make no mistake, such projects are already shockingly difficult to build. Merely completing an environmental-impact statement for infrastructure projects now takes almost five years on average."

"since its founding in 1975, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has never licensed a new commercial nuclear reactor design that was subsequently built. The two most recent developers to try, Westinghouse and Nuscale, have been at it for well over a decade and have yet to generate a single electron."

"Today’s thicket of environmental regulation at the federal and state levels thwarts permitting, siting, construction and operation of virtually every class of new infrastructure and technology. There are simply too many veto points and opportunities for obstruction, at too many procedural and jurisdictional levels, to conceivably embark on a rapid mission to remake the nation’s energy economy."