This divide is between those who would build and those who would not, between vitality and malaise, between dynamism and stasis.
It's dynamism vs. stasis.
W ith one of the lowest economic-growth rates in the country, and much of its wealth tied to an indisposed coal industry, West Virginia is an unlikely champion of dynamism. And yet, with senators Shelley Moore Capito (R.) and Joe Manchin (D.) each proposing an energy-permitting-reform plan in September, the state has become just that.
Capito’s Simplify Timelines and Assure Regulatory Transparency (START) Act, introduced on September 12, would codify regulatory simplifications promulgated by the previous administration pertaining to the National Environmental Policy Act and to the Navigable Waters Protection Rule under the Clean Water Act; codify shortened permitting-review schedules and limitations on the length of environmental documents; and grant states significant exclusive rights to take decisions on energy projects of all kinds within their borders. It has drawn support from 46 other (Republican) senators, and it represents principles of reform that could undo years of energy and infrastructure stasis.
It is Manchin’s less ambitious proposal, however, that is making front page news. Manchin, wielding power as his party’s most conservative member in the upper chamber, exacted a pledge seven weeks ago from Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer that, in exchange for supporting the summer’s climate-spending bill, Manchin would see permitting come up next on the Senate agenda. On September 21, Manchin put forward text for his plan, believing that September’s continuing resolution would be the right moment for recompense.
The Manchin plan would direct the administration to instate shorter timelines and page limits for NEPA reviews, create a White House priority list for key energy projects, and direct federal agencies “to issue all approval and permits” for the nearly complete Mountain Valley pipeline. To the dismay of those on Manchin’s right, the plan would grant the secretary of energy and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission sweeping authority on transmission lines deemed in the national interest. To the dismay of those on his left, it would reserve a lane for fossil fuels well into the future. On the whole, though, as Alex Stapp of the Institute for Progress said, the plan is “a step in the right direction on permitting.”
Just one week later, permitting reform again finds itself on the outside looking in. The Capito plan, for all its virtues, appeals only to the minority party. And Manchin’s plan, despite the pinky-swear from the majority leader, was unable to rally the Democratic caucus; he pulled it off the table of his own accord September 27 to avoid a government shutdown.
Why can’t we get permitting reform done? One possible answer can be found in Virginia Postrel’s The Future and Its Enemies.
Way back in 1998, Postrel argued that the more meaningful clusters in politics are not formed around progressive and conservative poles, but around competing outlooks on the relationship between humanity and nature: Namely, whether this relationship is of dynamism or stasis. That divide marks the permitting debate. Rather than parting the Senate along red and blue lines, Manchin’s permitting plan rallied one faction from his own party’s erstwhile coalition while alienating another.
On one flank of today’s largely internecine Democratic Party split are the pragmatists, the ecomodernists, the neoliberals, and, if somewhat oddly, Senator Manchin. This faction, into which one can plausibly lump everyone from Hawaii senator Brian Schatz and Colorado senator John Hickenlooper to writers Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias, espouses dynamism, is willing to admit different conceptions of economic progress, and is attuned to the realities of global energy systems. The dynamists seek to optimize the human experience amid a changing world.
On the other flank are the progressives saddled with the sundry misconceptions of legacy environmentalism, misconceptions rooted in naturalism, Population Bomb mythology, and, it must be said, Marxist ideology. This faction, which includes such notables as Vermont senator Bernie Sanders and old-guard environmentalist Bill McKibben, would impose stasis on the rest of us. For them, the only progress is that which conforms to a narrowly drawn set of environmentalist parameters. It brooks no compromise and, in the end, leaves us deadlocked.
To be sure, few of the legacy environmental activists who threaten the passage of permitting reform would see themselves as enemies of a brighter future. In their own eyes they carry the mantle of a righteous caus — what they now often call environmental justice.
The truth of the matter, however, is that they would leave us all worse off by blocking the trial-and-error and the big gambles that beget technological advance, our only real path to bending the emissions curve. Postrel’s elucidation of their mindset reads as if it could have been written with today’s debate as its focus. “The ideal of the untouched paradise, of orderly nature undisturbed by human action,” she writes, “still shimmers in many imaginations. Nature is a source of moral authority for some, of security for others. It offers standards and models. It is autonomous and eternal.”
The Capito and, to a lesser degree, Manchin plans would move the U.S. and partner economies abroad closer to energy security, and they would do so while simultaneously opening new possibilities for non-fossil-fuel energy. Yet, for now, they’re going nowhere. What this episode uncovers is a fault line in American politics today. It is not a divide between right and left, or between industry and environment, or between capital and labor. This divide is between those who would build and those who would not, between vitality and malaise, between dynamism and stasis.