Post 3: Permitting Reform Is Not Just for Pipelines
Open Washington’s permitting-reform debate, and a familiar caricature appears: reform helps fossil fuels, opposing reform protects nature. That framing is wrong on the facts and wrong on the politics. The same statutes that delay an oil pipeline are delaying the forest health, watershed, and wildlife projects that conservatives, conservationists, and the public all say they want.
Consider prescribed fire. According to a Property and Environment Research Center analysis of Forest Service projects, the average time from initiation of environmental review to first ignition is 4.7 years. For projects that require a full environmental impact statement, the average rises to 7.2 years. When those projects are litigated, the average climbs above nine. Every year a fuels treatment is delayed is another year that overgrown stands accumulate dead biomass and another fire season in which a small, manageable burn becomes a catastrophic one. Permitting delay is not preserving the forest. It is queueing it up to burn on someone else’s terms.
Consider abandoned mine cleanup. There are tens of thousands of inactive hard rock mines across the West, many leaking heavy metals into headwaters that supply municipal drinking water. Cleanup has long been blocked by an ironic legal trap. Under the Clean Water Act and CERCLA, a third party who attempts to remediate a mine they did not pollute can become legally responsible for that pollution. In December 2024, Congress passed the Good Samaritan Remediation of Abandoned Hardrock Mines Act, a bipartisan pilot that releases qualified Good Samaritans from certain CERCLA and Clean Water Act liability. The pilot is welcome, but it is small, it is time-limited, and it exists at all only because the underlying permitting regime made cleanup harder than walking past the mine.
Consider water and habitat infrastructure. Land and Water Conservation Fund projects, fish-passage restorations, wetland reconnections, and tribal water settlements all run through a federal permitting process that does not distinguish a culvert removal from a coal mine. The same documentation, the same comment periods, and the same litigation exposure attach. When ConservAmerica argued in 2022 that permitting reform would help conservation, prescribed fire and proactive restoration were exactly the projects we had in mind.
Consider transmission. The TransWest Express line, which finished its 15-year permitting odyssey in 2023, will deliver Wyoming wind to Southwestern utilities. The SunZia line, approved 17 years after its proposal, will move New Mexico wind to West Coast load. Without modern transmission, the renewables built under recent climate legislation will sit stranded behind interconnection queues. The investment America made in clean electrons cannot be delivered without wires.
This is the argument no other permitting reform advocate can make with the same credibility. ConservAmerica is not asking to weaken environmental review for the benefit of one industry. We are asking Congress to fix a process that is failing the entire conservation portfolio at the same time it is failing the energy sector. Forests are burning while environmental impact statements get rewritten. Headwaters are leaching arsenic while liability law deters cleanup. Wildlife corridors are getting cut by roads that highway agencies cannot upgrade because the EIS for the upgrade is in its eighth year.
A reform debate that treats permitting as a fossil-fuel issue is a reform debate that will produce fossil-fuel-only solutions. Conservatives can offer a better one. Real reform makes the same statute work for a wind farm, a wildfire treatment, and a wetland.