H.L. Mencken was sadly spot on when he famously opined that “there is always an easy solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.” We are seeing this pattern emerge yet again in response to one of the most critical problems we face today on the climate front: how to rapidly build out the clean energy and transmission infrastructure we need in order to meet our carbon reduction commitments. A bedrock environmental law—the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA)—has become the easy scapegoat for a complex set of problems bedeviling our clean energy buildout. And attacking and weakening NEPA and other federal environmental laws has become the “neat, plausible, and wrong” solution to those problems in the minds of too many.

What everyone can agree on is that we need to build enormously more wind, solar, and other renewable energy sources in order to meet climate goals; and that this is not happening at the pace we need it to. Certainly, there is ongoing progress. Renewable energy generation has become incredibly cost effective, with wind and solar now as cheap or cheaper than fossil fuels. These sources’ capacity is projected to double by 2030, helped along significantly by the climate measures in the Inflation Reduction Act. But if we are going to meet our net zero target, capacity has to not just double but quadruple by 2030. And right now many factors, including and especially our antiquated and too-small electric grid, are standing in the way of that needed buildout. Solar and wind project developers are stymied by a mind-bendingly large backup in the queue to get their projects connected to the electric grid. Currently, there are roughly 2,050 gigawatts of new projects—94.4% of this compromised of renewables and energy storage—waiting for authorization from grid regulators to connect. That number represents more than the combined capacity of all power plants currently operating in the US.

So yes, we have a problem. And yes, some of this has to do with the pace at which we’re approving and bringing into service renewable energy projects and the grid buildout needed to support them. But a lazy leap from that fact to a conclusion that NEPA and other environmentally protective statutes are the source of the delays is neither wise nor supported by the facts on the ground.

Careful analyses of data on the project approval process over the last two decades have concluded that federal environmental laws are very much not the problem. Most recently, law professor David Adelman at University of Texas did an exhaustive assessment that looked at all federal permitting for energy infrastructure between 2010 and 2021 to determine whether the data backs up the frequent assertion that NEPA is a source of yearslong delay and a weapon that lawsuit-happy NIMBY groups relentlessly wield against the green energy buildout.

Turns out it isn’t. A remarkably low percentage of projects that Adelman surveyed—3.9 percent of wind and 3.2 percent of solar—required a comprehensive environmental impact statement under NEPA or an individual authorization under other environmental laws, with essentially all of those in ecologically sensitive environments. Essentially, Adelman concluded, streamlined processes are already built into environmental statutes, and are deployed the vast majority of the time. And amidst thousands of projects over the course of 12 years, lawsuits were remarkably sparse. There were challenges to only 28 wind projects, 8 solar projects, and 14 transmission lines.

Adelman’s results are consistent with multiple past studies of NEPA implementation that have repeatedly concluded that NEPA is not a significant source of delay, with respect to energy projects or any other kind of projects. The non-partisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) has estimated that roughly 95 percent of all NEPA decisions do not involve any substantive environmental review at all because they qualify for categorical exclusions. The non-excluded projects mostly require only relatively brief environmental assessments (EAs)—which the Department of Energy (DOE) estimates at a median cost of $65,000 (in context of the tens to hundreds of millions of dollars that a renewable energy project can cost), and the GAO estimates generally take 12 to 18 months to complete. Recent deep dives into various specific types of permitting by the GAO (looking at hardrock mining), Columbia University (looking at US Forest Service decisions), and the Environmental Law Institute (looking at critical minerals) all concluded more or less the same thing: that approval delays often happen, but not generally because of NEPA.