Trump Names Price For Avoiding All Environment Regulations: $1 Billion Or More

President-elect Donald Trump said on Tuesday he planned to expedite federal regulatory approvals, including all environmental permits, for any company or individual proposing to invest $1 billion or more in a construction project.

“Any person or company investing ONE BILLION DOLLARS, OR MORE, in the United States of America, will receive fully expedited approvals and permits, including, but in no way limited to, all Environmental approvals,” Trump wrote Tuesday afternoon on Truth Social. “GET READY TO ROCK!!!”

The announcement on Trump’s own social network comes as lawmakers in Congress are working to pass a bipartisan bill aimed at easing federal permitting requirements, a step widely seen as necessary to hasten building of upgrades in roads, bridges and energy systems as aging infrastructure heaves under pressure from increasingly extreme weather and a growing population. 

During the first half of his term, President Joe Biden signed into law three landmark bills aimed at modernising US infrastructure. That includes the hundreds of billions of dollars earmarked in the Inflation Reduction Act for clean energy projects, marking arguably the largest government investment into meeting demand for fossil fuels with lower-carbon alternatives outside of China. 

But the federal permitting process that developed in the 55 years since the passage of the National Environmental Policy Act slowed the deployment of those dollars as opponents of anything from a solar farm to a lithium mine to a natural gas pipeline seized on the country’s bedroom ecological-protection law to halt or delay projects with lawsuits. 

Obtaining final environmental permits for a project subject to the NEPA process takes on average 4 1/2 years, according to a 2020 study by the White House Council on Environmental Quality. The average for electrical transmission projects is even higher, with the majority taking 6 1/2 years to get final approvals.

Since the cheapest technologies to generate zero-carbon renewable electricity ― such as wind turbines and solar panels ― require vast areas of land often far from the cities where power is used, transmission lines are seen as one of the main bottlenecks to bringing more clean power onto the grid.

The bipartisan deal brokered by Senators Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) sought to ease the process. But some environmental groups came out against what they called the “dirty deal” because the legislation benefited fossil fuel companies as well as clean-energy projects. 

Progressive critics of the permitting overhaul argued instead for increasing staffing and budgets at federal agencies to add more capacity to assess and make judgments on applications. But some of the Democrats’ most prominent self-described climate hawks in Congress backed the bill Manchin negotiated, citing repeated analyses showing that the permitting reform package promised to slash more planet-heating emissions on net by helping clean-energy projects reach the finish line than it contributed by clearing the way for more gas infrastructure.

Unless Congress manages to pass the bill in the coming weeks, the Republican majorities set to control both the Senate and the House of Representatives are unlikely to enact the compromise package. It’s unclear, however, what Republicans may propose as an alternative. While some top Republican leaders have vowed to gut the Inflation Reduction Act, others have pleaded with colleagues to preserve much of the clean-energy spending, which has overwhelmingly gone to red and purple states. 

The changes to energy policy come as the US is experiencing its first major uptick in demand for electricity in three decades thanks to the need for more data centres to power artificial intelligence software, more air conditioners to keep Americans cool amid worsening heat waves, and record purchases of electric vehicles. 

At the same time, the US power grid is becoming less reliable and more expensive as dependable coal and nuclear plants shut down in favour of gas and renewables that, while cheap individually, have driven up electricity costs in many markets where the two sectors combined make up the majority of power generation. 

Trump pledged on the campaign trail to slash electricity prices, and drive up US oil and gas production up beyond the record levels set under Biden.