The Risk Democrats Need to Take

AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTEzra KleinNov. 15, 2026, 6:00 a.m. ETCredit...Jamey StillingsWhen I say it this way, it sounds like such an easy call: The Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act of 2026 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.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. I do not expect, in every case, that that would lead to outcomes I like. But leaving the system unchanged is a guarantee of calamity. The status quo has left us completely unable to build the energy system we need.Still, I don’t want this column to read as more confident about this bill than I really am. It is more than 400 pages, with much of it dedicated to technical changes to other laws. I’ve been unnerved, while reporting this story, by Capitol Hill staff members telling me precisely opposite things about the same provisions. Legislation at this scale rarely plays out exactly as its architects expect. The laws that the act would revise, like the National Environmental Policy Act and the National Historic Preservation Act, work quite differently today than what was expected when they were signed into law in the 1960s and ’70s.But at its core, the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act 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. This is a bill that would remove procedural and legal obstacles to building. It would not decide what gets built. Whether the act is part of a Green New Deal or a natural gas resurgence would depend on what Democrats do next.The single most important climate policy going forward is for Democrats to win elections so that they have the power to set climate policy in the future. 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.The Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act is the joint work of two Senate Democrats, Martin Heinrich and Sheldon Whitehouse, and two Republicans, Mike Lee and Shelley Moore Capito. For Heinrich, of New Mexico, the story of this bill goes back almost two decades, to when he first saw the way that delay and lawsuits could be weaponized even against clean, pro-labor projects.“When I got elected to Congress in 2008,” Heinrich told me, “there was an opportunity to build a clean energy project in New Mexico and connect it to the rest of the country with a 550-mile transmission project. Today it’s in service with roughly $20 billion of economic impact across a couple of different states and one of the largest project labor agreements in the history of the Southwest. But it took us roughly 18 years to permit and build — and the build part was like two years and the permit part was like 16 years. That, to me, is the nut that we’re trying to solve.”The National Environmental Policy Act, for example, originally provided examples of environmental reports that were less than a dozen pages. Now those reports can stretch hundreds or thousands of pages, take years to complete, and invite interminable litigation. That can be deployed to stop bad projects, but it is an obstacle for good ones, too. NEPA, as it is known, does not impose an environmental benefit test on projects. The requirements are purely procedural. Agencies are trying to prevent grounds for a lawsuit or an administrative delay, not prove their project is green. That’s why NEPA, despite its name, can be wielded with equal ferocity against clean and dirty projects alike.The Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act creates a more neutral and swift permitting system, and green energy advocates believe that system would be of particular benefit to their technologies. 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.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.The Rhodium Group tried to estimate the long-term effects of the legislation, and they predicted that, in some scenarios, it would lead to more green energy, a bit more natural gas and thus, lower carbon emissions and lower energy prices than the status quo. But there is a great deal of uncertainty in their estimates, and for an obvious reason: What happens next is less about the text of the bill than about who has power, and what they do with it.I talked to several Democrats who are skeptical of the act, and those conversations always began the same way — with President Trump. Asked whether he would approve new wind turbines on federal land under the bill, he said, “No, I will not approve wind turbines.” When he was informed that approving those turbines was part of the deal, he doubled down: “I know, but I won’t approve it.”It’s hard to argue with the Democrats who think it’s crazy to make a deal with a president who has made it clear that he has no intention of upholding his side of the deal, and has often acted lawlessly to boot. “I cannot support a bill that relies on a handshake promise from the same administration that’s spent the last two years waging a war on new clean energy projects to hold up its end of the bargain, and continues to do so even after negotiating the reform proposal,” Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, said in a statement.But 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, an energy permitting expert at Arnold Ventures (and a former Senate staffer). 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.There are also fears that Trump will use the bill to pillage public lands. The concern here is somewhat complex. The bill does not remove any protections that public lands currently enjoy. The worry, rather, is that there could be an unintended consequence from something that the Democrats wanted.Parts of the bill attempt to ensure something called “permit certainty,” wherein a future (or current) president can’t upend existing permits in a discriminatory manner. The genesis of those sections of the bill is that Trump has done exactly that to wind and solar projects, and Democrats want him to stop.But that’s created a new fear: That Trump would issue all manner of illegal permits to drill on public lands that will then be protected by the bill’s provisions in the future. That is the question that has caused me the most concern while reporting this column. If that’s true, then yes, that’s a huge problem. But the bill’s architects don’t think it’s true. The bill was amended to make it clearer that illegal permits would not stand and were not protected by courts. But multiple environmental groups and Democratic offices still fear the possibility. Further amendments, like one that’s been offered by Senator Cory Booker, stating this even more sharply would be welcome.That said, if Trump were going to be president for another decade, I would be less eager to see this legislation pass. But it will be future presidential administrations that most benefit from the bill, as many of the new rules and new capacities the act envisions will take years to write and implement.A conversation I had with Brian Deese, the director of the National Economic Council under President Joe Biden, drove this home for me. When I asked him what difference the act would have made to the green energy infrastructure push under the Biden administration, he told me that “almost everything would have been different.” But it would have depended on when the act would have passed. “If we had passed something like this bill alongside the Inflation Reduction Act, it would have been good,” he said. “If we passed it two years before the I.R.A., it would have been game changing.”That, to me, is the single best argument for the act. 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.Others fear that we are too far down a calamitous climate path to allow new natural gas to be built, and that the surge in A.I. data center construction makes the legislation more dangerous than it might have been a few years ago. But I don’t see a scenario in which new demand for energy would not be met. The data center build-out might be stopped by communities organizing against their construction. But once they are approved and built, they are going to be powered.The problem, right now, is that we cannot meet enough new demand — whether from data centers or electric vehicles or heat pumps or anything else — with renewables. What the act might make possible is the construction of an energy grid where there is enough renewable power to meet new demand. In the absence of that energy system, new demand would be met by fossil fuels. And the absence of that system describes our reality today.“The gas build-out we’re seeing today is symptomatic of our inability to build enough electricity infrastructure,” Jane Flegal, a senior fellow at the Searchlight Institute, told me. “The reason there is so much gas build-out is there’s a sudden surge in demand for electricity and our system for siting and permitting renewables and building transmission lines is totally broken. This bill will go a very long way to fixing that.” (It’s also worth noting that the bill includes a provision forcing new data centers to swallow the transmission costs they impose on the grid, rather than making ratepayers foot part of the bill, as often happens now.)While reporting on BAAJA, I talked to Bill McKibben, a climate writer and activist I greatly respect. The bill, he told me, “is plenty good enough for people in the clean energy industry, as they can live with and prosper under a regime where you’re steadily increasing the amount of clean energy, even if you’re increasing, or at least not quickly decreasing, the amount of fossil energy.” But he’s looking for something much more decisive, something that does not pose the risk of building more fossil fuel capacity.McKibben’s theory is that the building El Niño and the war in Iran might unlock a political consensus to move far beyond fossil fuels in the near future. I don’t know if he’s right, but if he is, then BAAJA looks, to me, more like a risk worth taking. 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.The Senate vote to move forward on the bill was telling. Among Democrats from states that went for Kamala Harris by 10 points or more, the vote was 2-to-1 against it; among Democrats representing more purple or red states, it was 2-to-1 in favor. Something Senator Chuck Schumer said to me last week has been ringing in my ears: “If affordability doesn’t prevail, we’re in trouble,” he told me. “We cannot impose on people what we think is important. We have to listen to what’s important to them and then deliver.” (Schumer voted to advance the bill.)Some Democrats want to wait for the new Congress to be seated so they can renegotiate this bill to gain more leverage and extract better terms. That makes sense in theory, but most analysts I talk to think it would fail in practice. This bill was a bipartisan project from the start. Whitehouse, one of its architects, is perhaps the most relentless climate voice in the Democratic caucus. And it’s hard to imagine the conditions for deal making improving when Democrats begin investigating Trump and his administration and family in earnest and as Stephen Miller settles into his new role as White House chief of staff. We are entering an era of renewed partisan collision, not a renaissance of bipartisan deal making.“ The folks that argue that there’s going to be some mythical negotiation in the future, I think that’s just absolute lunacy,” Representative Josh Harder, a California Democrat who is a chairman of the Build America Caucus, told me. To Harder, it’s a mistake to present this bill as a painful compromise: “ It’s so rare in Congress that you have an opportunity to strengthen the economy and accelerate growth, create jobs, reduce climate emissions and lower prices for consumers all at the same time. We’ve got to pass this.”What the incoming Democratic majorities will have is more strength to implement the bill well. They hold power of the purse over the federal agencies that would oversee the law; they will have investigative power they can use to unearth why various projects are approved or denied; they will have governors’ mansions and state legislatures that give them influence over what goes forward in the states — including, notably, data centers.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.Ezra Klein joined Opinion in 2021. He is the host of the podcast “The Ezra Klein Show” and the author of “Why We’re Polarized” and, with Derek Thompson, “Abundance.” Previously, he was the founder, editor in chief and then editor at large of Vox. Before that, he was a columnist and editor at The Washington Post, where he founded and led the Wonkblog vertical. He is on Threads. Related ContentAdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENT