Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle shared frustration over the nation’s archaic permitting process Wednesday at a House Natural Resources Committee hearing on energy and minerals.
Republicans fumed the incumbent process established under the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) impedes progress on oil and gas production while Democrats complained the regulatory regime stands in the way of wind and solar projects. Everyone, seemed frustrated by the regulatory regime’s impediment to producing critical minerals for all of the above.
“I welcome my Republican colleagues interested in permitting reform,” said Michigan Democrat Rep. Debbie Dingell, whose late husband wrote the legislation known as the Magna Carta of environmental law in the 1960s. “We need an honest conversation about permitting and the implementation of NEPA in the 21st century…We can accelerate deployment by becoming much more efficient and predictable [with] clear timelines.”
Current timelines have jeopardized national security by leaving America behind foreign adversaries developing natural resources while domestic enterprises are left with a headache over pending approvals. Minnesota Rep. Pete Stauber, whose district is home to a vast copper and cobalt reserves cut off from extraction by the Biden administration last month, complained that companies hoping to mine in his state have been waiting decades for permits.
“In the Duluth complex in northern Minnesota, the biggest copper and nickel find in the world, which Joe Biden just banned mining in my district, there’s a company in its 20th year of permitting and then there’s another one within 9 years of
