Sounding like a dad who’s had enough tomfoolery for one day, former Ohio Congressman Tim Ryan issued a warning: “We can’t have stupid fights about everything.”
This is exactly why people distrust politicians, he said, speaking on a panel at an energy summit organized by City & State last month.
Mr. Ryan was there representing the natural gas industry, which desperately wants to see pipeline permit reform that would speed up the process and taper the number of agencies and courts that could influence it. But he said that permitting red tape will endanger any big project, even those that pipeline opponents might want to see built.
“A lot of the money in the [Inflation Reduction Act] will never get deployed without permitting reform,” he said, referring to the estimated $369 billion intended to fund the energy transition from carbon-heavy sources to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.
Permitting reform is a phrase broad enough to serve two constituencies: those who care about getting things built and those who care about where they are built or not built. Sometimes those groups intersect. Other times, they clash.
In unleashing an unprecedented amount of money to fund the transition to cleaner energy, the Biden administration has also mandated a kind of cultural transition as well, elevating the field of environmental justice into a guiding principle for how the money gets doled out.
One way to describe environmental justice is that it tries to right the wrongs of the past, to give communities that are historically disadvantaged — majority Black or brown, low-income, disproportionately saddled with pollution — more benefits and fewer burdens from our energy infrastructure. Environmental justice communities should have a greater voice when decisions are being made, advocates say. Often, the most tangible of those decisions is a project permit.
Pennsylvania, too, has been trying to weave these two concepts into action. Gov. Josh Shapiro and his secretary of the Department of Environmental Protection, Rich Negrin, both vowed to make environmental permitting more predictable, more efficient and more customer-friendly.
Mr. Negrin debuted his 10-point permit reform plan, which includes identifying “key performance indicators” and “apply(ing) private sector management principles to quarterly operations reviews,” at a state budget hearing in March, where he asked lawmakers to fund 30 more permitting staff positions.
In a recent presentation to the DEP’s Citizens Advisory Council, Mr. Negrin said that improving the permitting process is an investment in the department’s standing in the community.
“If we don’t do that well, I think it hurts our credibility” with some of the big things the DEP wants to accomplish, like climate leadership and a focus on environmental justice, he said.
Mr. Negrin said he wants to broaden the federal government’s definition of environmental justice to include not just demographic information but the cumulative health and environmental burden a community faces. The DEP plans to release an interactive tool that relies on 32 different parameters to define communities.
“I think we’re looking at 75% of Pennsylvania as environmental justice communities,” he said.
A few months ago, DEP named Fernando Trevino as special deputy secretary for environmental justice, elevating the office to a top rank at the department. The DEP has also hired environmental justice coordinators for each of its six regional offices and one additional coordinator to focus, in part, on Asian and Pacific Islander communities.
Earlier this month, Mr. Trevino delivered the DEP’s full support to a bill making its way through the state Legislature that would give the department the power to deny permits based on environmental justice considerations. It would also require permit applicants in those communities to prepare an environmental impact statement, forecasting the cumulative impact of their proposed projects.
Martin Causer, the Republican chair of the Environmental Resources and Energy Committee, questioned Mr. Trevino on how the proposed policy could possibly square with the “streamline the permitting process” talk he’s been hearing from Gov. Shapiro and Mr. Negrin.
“We can do both,” Mr. Trevino said. He suggested that with more staff and funding, the DEP could engage with environmental justice communities and get ahead of the permitting process.
Mr. Causer tried a different track.
“Don’t you think there should be uniform environmental requirements across the commonwealth,” he pressed.
“The answer is, if a community is more vulnerable, it should have extra protection,” Mr. Trevino said.
This reminded Committee Chair Greg Vitali, D-Delaware, of a quote he’d heard in law school: “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”
The issue, as he saw it, was about cumulative impacts.
Any community that’s now dealing with a cluster of industry saw that cluster grow from one emission source permit layered on top of another and another. While the residents of that community experience the cluster as a whole pollution profile, each new facility that applies for a permit is being judged only on its own merit. There’s no way for the DEP to declare a community saturated.
Mr. Vitali said he was surprised to learn that.
“I just think it’s essential,” he said during the hearing this month. “To give them — the DEP — one more tool… that they can in some instances, yes, even deny permits to protect public health. I think it’s a good thing.”
“I firmly believe that this legislation actually makes things worse,” Mr. Causer said, warning of more permit delays and specifically calling out natural gas pipelines whose permits are in purgatory.
The Inflation Reduction Act, which passed by the skin of Joe Manchin’s teeth last year, included the West Virginia Senator’s bargain with the White House to secure the future of one of those pipelines.
Canonsburg-based Equitrans Midstream Corp. started building the 300-mile Mountain Valley Pipeline in 2018, but faced a steady stream of legal challenges to its environmental permits, with federal courts vacating some permits and sending the company back to reapply.
Last month, Mr. Manchin was finally able to collect on the White House’s promise. Thrust into the debt ceiling compromise was a mandate for Mountain Valley Pipeline to be given whatever permits it needs to finish construction and start carrying gas. It also stripped the courts of their jurisdiction over the pipeline’s permits.
An act of Congress declared that the review process, for this project, is over.
Anya Litvak: alitvak@post-gazette.com
First Published: June 19, 2023, 9:30 a.m.
Updated: June 20, 2023, 11:29 a.m.
