Vice President Kamala Harris is embracing a surprising election strategy: elevating the technocratic subject of permitting reform into a pillar of her presidential campaign.
The Harris campaign last Thursday released an economic policy blueprint that calls for a double-barreled approach to hastening the renewable energy transition: more federal subsidies, combined with easier permitting rules.
That follows a major speech Harris gave Wednesday spotlighting the role federal permitting plays in areas such as housing supply and manufacturing investment. It’s there she promised to “cut red tape and get things moving faster.”
“The simple truth is, in America, it takes too long and it costs too much to build,” Harris said at the Economic Club of Pittsburgh. “Whether it’s a new housing development, a new factory, or a new bridge, projects take too long to go from concept to reality. It happens in blue states, it happens in red states, and it’s a national problem.”
The vice president said she would work with business executives and community leaders to shorten the permitting process.
That marks another turn toward the center for Harris. She already has disavowed her 2019 call for a fracking ban and in general has distanced herself from the other climate policies of her previous presidential campaign, such as banning offshore drilling and single-use plastics.
Permitting reform has historically alarmed environmentalists, including environmental justice advocates who see the permitting process — and the litigation it can spawn — as one of their best defenses against heaping more burdens onto communities that already experience high cumulative impacts of pollution and climate change.
Harris’ turn on the issue illustrates how much the political and economic landscape has changed since her last campaign, when the then-senator from California instead sought to add new layers to federal permitting.
In 2020, after circulating draft text for about a year, Harris and New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York sponsored the “Climate Equity Act.”
Aimed at elevating frontline communities in the permitting process, the bill would have required federal regulations and investments to undergo additional climate and environmental justice analyses, including expanded opportunities for public comment and judicial review.
Harris cast the “Climate Equity Act” as a step toward bringing “a Green New Deal closer to reality.”
“It is not enough to simply cut emissions and end our reliance on fossil fuels,” Harris said at the time. “We must ensure that communities already contending with unsafe drinking water, toxic air, and lack of economic opportunity are not left behind.”
On Wednesday, Harris instead framed federal permitting as holding back the U.S. economy.
“China is not moving slowly. They’re not. And we can’t afford to, either,” the vice president said. “The Empire State Building, you know how long it took to build that? One year. The Pentagon, you know how long that took? 16 months.”
“No one can tell me we can’t build quickly in our country. I’ve got empirical evidence,” she said.
The Harris campaign did not respond to questions about whether the vice president still supports the “Climate Equity Act,” which did not advance and has not been reintroduced during the last two Congresses.
Her new policy blueprint, though, notes that the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act included a funding boost to speed up the permitting process. It also says Harris “helped finalize” a rule aimed at streamlining federal permits, and that she “pushed to increase the number of projects that qualify for the simplest form of environmental review so that agencies can expedite projects that will lower costs without harming the environment.”
Harris’ turnabout on permitting echoes some other greens who are softening their positions now that the Inflation Reduction Act has spurred a rush of clean energy investment. With federal tax credits flowing to solar and wind projects, the permitting process has emerged as a bottleneck to the energy transition.
Lena Moffitt, executive director of the climate policy and advocacy group Evergreen Action, hailed Harris’ economic plan as a boon for clean energy deployment, especially in the manufacturing sector.
“Her commonsense efforts to cut red tape across multiple sectors are vital to accelerating the expansion of clean, affordable energy and lower household energy costs while creating millions of good-paying union jobs,” Moffitt said in a statement.
Permitting reform remains fraught for climate hawks. Two recent efforts to relax permitting rules — a bipartisan Senate bill spearheaded in part by West Virginia independent Sen. Joe Manchin, and a recently passed bill to exempt some semiconductor plants from environmental reviews — have split Democrats as well as their allies.
But when it comes to Harris’ permitting reforms, even the most progressive groups have given her cover. One reason is her plan doesn’t spell out exactly what permitting changes she would seek. The other is that they think those fights can wait until after the election.
“It’s really hard to figure out exactly how to dramatically expand renewable energy,” said Saul Levin, campaigns and political director for the Green New Deal Network. But, he added, there’s no comparison between Harris’ proposals and those of former President Donald Trump.
“Are we going to allow Project 2025 to move forward, leading to the deaths and suffering of millions of people?” he asked, referring to the conservative blueprint for a second Trump administration. “Our plan is to win, and then have a really robust discussion and push her as much as possible.”
That view was echoed by the Sunrise Movement, which praised Harris’ economic proposals as a “big step towards lowering prices, expanding green energy production, and creating green, union jobs.
“It importantly recognizes that good climate policy must be woven into every policy, from housing to education to energy,” said Stevie O’Hanlon, the group’s communications director.
“Let’s be clear: This plan isn’t as bold as science demands,” O’Hanlon said. “We have just six years to act to ensure a livable planet for our generation. We need more. On Nov. 6, we’ll be there demanding that. But, in the meantime, we will focus on defeating Donald Trump.”
