Corey

Ezra Klein's column this morning strongly endorses the bipartisan permitting reform deal. Key points in his argument for BAAJA: 1. "BAAJA is the largest reimagining of the federal permitting process in a generation. It would make it far easier to build new energy infrastructure of all kinds: wind and solar farms and interstate transmission lines and, yes, natural gas pipelines. It would make it easier to build much else, too: rail and transit infrastructure and affordable housing and broadband internet." 2. "The bill represents Democrats and Republicans deciding that the fight over what gets built should play out in elections and markets rather than in the bowels of administrative agencies and courts. It should be driven by what people want, in public, rather than what they can block, often in private." 3. "At its core, BAAJA would do the same thing over and over again: It would make it faster and simpler to build energy infrastructure by rolling back the opportunities for delays, lawsuits and vetoes that have proliferated in recent decades." 4. "The Democrats who won Senate seats, or look likely to win them, in Kansas, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas and Alaska ran on an all-of-the-above energy strategy. Democrats everywhere ran on putting affordability first. The bill is an early test of whether they meant it. A Democratic Party that was saying what voters wanted to hear, but has no intention of doing what voters asked them to do, will not hold power for long." 5. "A significant backlog of energy projects is waiting to be built or hooked into our overloaded, archaic energy grid. That backlog is overwhelmingly tilted toward green energy. At the end of 2025, more than 85 percent of the energy projects seeking to get plugged into the grid were renewable sources and storage. The fossil fuel projects of the past are already built and connected; the green energy projects being built are not." 6. "Some renewable energy sources like solar and wind require more land per unit of energy than fossil fuel sources, and then they require transmission lines to move energy from, say, the deserts of the Southwest to the urban centers across the West. That makes them much more exposed to permitting risk than fossil fuels." 7. "Capriciously blocking wind power is what Trump is doing now. The bill makes it harder for Trump to sit on wind projects in the future. 'His departments have to give an answer, yes or no, and the answer has to be justified, and there’s a time frame by which they have to deliver it,' said Daniel Palken. The remedies here become severe, including one that says agency heads cannot travel more than 25 miles from their headquarters if a permit is more than 60 days delayed." 8. "If you believe that Democrats will build on the blue tsunami and take the presidency in 2028, perhaps with even larger House and Senate majorities, then the case for this bill is extremely strong. It’s a force amplifier of anything they might do on clean energy. That’s why Janet Yellen and Jared Bernstein, who led Biden’s Treasury Department and his Council of Economic Advisers, both backed the bill." 9. "If you believe there’s going to be more pressure for decarbonization by 2029, you want to begin the process of making it easier to build green energy now. If Democrats then have so much power that they can pass more radical laws to help green energy, or impose a social cost on carbon emissions, then all the better. BAAJA can be a floor, not a ceiling. But even in his scenario, you need a new floor. and I don’t think we should wait years to start to build one." 10. "Democrats have spent years saying that the green tech revolution is ready. They have spent years promising to put affordability first. And they have as good a shot as they’ve had in a generation of wielding supermajority power in 2029. I don’t dismiss the concerns any of them have about this bill. But it’s a risk worth taking to make the future they’ve promised possible."