The environmental organization I lead was born out of a desire for change—revolutionary change at the time—to the reality that people were living in 1970. To make tap water safe to drink and air safe to breathe. To make lakes swimmable again. To get toxic pesticides out of food and poisonous lead out of gasoline, pipes, and paint. To save fish and wildlife from extinction.

The American environmental movement fought to overturn a status quo that allowed unlimited and unchecked pollution. In its place, we helped create government agencies charged with protecting public health and the environment and with the power to say no to deadly chemicals and damaging projects.

This framework for environmental policy has delivered extraordinary gains over the past half century, from safer food to bald eagles soaring across our skies again. This protective paradigm remains essential to completing unfulfilled work, including delivering clean drinking water for all and tackling the dangerous, unequal, and unjust distribution of pollution and public health risks across our country.

It is also true that the environmental movement faces an additional and difficult new reality: Climate change cannot solely, or even primarily, be solved by laws, policies, and strategies that block bad things from happening.

The planet is warming too fast, and with it billions of people are facing deadlier heat waves, droughts, and floods. Climate change is pushing more plants and animals to the brink of extinction. The most vulnerable people and communities are facing the highest risks and the biggest impacts. And the latest energy price swings from the ongoing Iran war are a stark reminder of the costs and dangers of the world’s continued dependence on oil.

For future generations to thrive on a planet that is livable, secure, and affordable for all, we must make fundamental changes to how we make energy, grow food, design cities, and manage natural and built surroundings. And we need to make these changes at immense speed and scale.

The Constraints of the Status Quo 

To strengthen America’s energy security, bring down and stabilize prices, and reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050—a goal that must be reached to avoid the worst impacts of climate change—the United States must rapidly build more solar, wind, energy storage, transmission, and zero-carbon technologies. Overall, U.S. renewable energy production will need to roughly quadruple in the coming years.

For this low-carbon future, we must also build more affordable and energy-efficient housing and buildings. We need more clean vehicles, public transit, and electric vehicle charging infrastructure. And we need repowered and detoxified industries, climate-smart agriculture, storm-hardened buildings, more room for rivers to flood, and more space for wildlife to move.

For years, NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council) and other environmental organizations have been working to secure this clean energy and climate-adapted future through the policy, legal, and financial tools available within existing institutions and systems.

We fought to pass the largest-ever investment in building clean energy and fighting climate change, the Inflation Reduction Act. We’ve incentivized innovation to make vehicles, power plants, and industries run cleaner and more efficiently. And we helped states set and pursue ambitious clean energy goals.

But the Trump administration is waging a war on clean energy and pollution limits, while increasing the country’s vulnerability to oil price shocks. The current Congress has walked back much of the climate action that the Inflation Reduction Act would have unlocked. And the United States is falling even further behind in the race to deploy the clean energy and infrastructure we need to bring down energy prices and forge a more secure energy future.

In this moment, we must stand up against the current administration’s costly and damaging attacks on clean energy. But to build the things we need now, and in the decades ahead, we also need to recognize and confront the constraints of the ingrained systems and policies holding us back that existed before this administration took power.

To accomplish this, the first question we should ask ourselves is this: What, honestly, is standing in the way of building the things we need for a prosperous, affordable, equitable, and climate-adapted future?

A Rigged System 

In their best-selling book Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson offer one answer to this question. They diagnose environmental laws, permitting, and regulations as primary barriers to building clean energy and housing and cast blame on environmentalists and NIMBYism for stalling progress on projects that would be environmentally beneficial.

It’s a critique that should prompt—and is prompting—self-reflection among climate and environmental advocates.

But it also understates and oversimplifies the real barriers to fulfilling a vision for a clean, affordable, secure, and abundant future. And, like broad-brush, anti-regulatory campaigns that the right has been pushing since the 1980s, it lends itself to simplistic and damaging solutions.

Here is the deeper truth, along with the much bigger problem: The U.S. energy and infrastructure system is rigged to make it easy to build dirty projects and hard to build clean ones. Old, polluting industries maintain dominance by throwing structural and procedural hurdles in front of innovative industries that make life better for people and are friendlier to the environment.

Consider how the United States treats different types of energy development. Oil companies can select a parcel of taxpayer-owned public lands and get a green light to drill it in a matter of months. Meanwhile, it typically takes years for a wind project to navigate the bureaucratic mazes it faces, encountering roadblocks that never seem to materialize for the oil industry.

Interstate gas pipelines and electric transmission lines are both forms of linear energy infrastructure. Common sense would suggest that they should undergo similar review and permitting processes. But of the two, only pipelines have a federal agency—the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC)—that has the power to approve the infrastructure. Interstate transmission lines, meanwhile, must go through multiple state and local permitting processes and can be effectively vetoed by any state or local jurisdiction they propose to cross.

Look no further than the largest proposed transmission line in the United States, called the Grain Belt Express. The project, which would move renewable energy from wind-rich areas of Kansas to towns and cities farther east, has faced years of delays because of opposition from politicians in Missouri.

Conservative courts have played an oversize role in tilting the playing field toward polluting industries, systematically weakening environmental laws and transforming statutes that were designed to protect human and environmental health into paper processes that too often deliver neither community protection nor project certainty.

Environmental reviews for complex projects can produce thousands of pages of detailed documentation in environmental impact statements, but they offer no guarantee that public input will be incorporated into the project design, that reasonable steps will be taken to avoid harm to human health or natural systems, or that decision-makers will be held accountable for their choices. It’s a process that can frustrate both communities seeking genuine protection and agencies trying to fulfill their missions. It’s also a process that disproportionately favors polluting industries, which (even as they seek to exempt themselves or further weaken environmental review requirements) have an army of lawyers and deep enough pockets to overpower and outwait any opposition.

The oil, gas, and coal industries fight tooth and nail to block reforms that would level the playing field. They have dismantled clean energy investments while protecting and expanding their own $34 billion in annual federal subsidies. Their allies in Congress have obstructed transmission permitting reforms that would enable renewable energy deployment. They send armies of lobbyists to state utility commission hearings and spread disinformation to turn public sentiment against clean energy projects. Polluting industries spend billions of dollars a year to get the politicians they want elected, to influence their votes, and to stifle public calls for change.

The corrupting impacts are impossible to ignore. Parishes in Louisiana trying to limit cancer-causing pollution from more petrochemical and plastic plants nearby? Denied by their own state government. Neighborhood leaders who want to build more energy-efficient apartments to bring down rent and electric bills? Blocked by zoning restrictions that the wealthy and well connected keep in place. Military communities fighting to get toxic PFAS “forever chemicals” out of their drinking water? Tangled in a web of government bureaucracy.

We have come to a place where regular people find themselves locked out of the decisions affecting their own energy future and health, looking in at a political system that is rigged against them.

A Build-Clean Agenda 

The oil industry and the Koch network are once again pushing Congress to pass a package of bad ideas they are trying to sell as “permitting reform.” Their proposal—which they are backing with millions of dollars in lobbying and slick ad campaigns—would tilt the playing field even further toward polluting industries by slashing environmental and community protections.

The reforms we need to tackle the climate crisis are very different from the ones the oil industry and their allies are proposing and aren’t confined solely to the federal level.

To build clean, fair, and fast, we need comprehensive and systemic reforms that confront, head-on, the system that polluting industries have captured and whose processes they weaponize to block progress. To be successful, these reforms must reprogram how the government works at the national, state, and local levels; clear out deployment barriers for clean energy projects; and make life better and more affordable for people.

These reforms can and should alleviate—not worsen—long-standing economic and racial disparities in how the costs and benefits of energy development and infrastructure are distributed among communities.

These reforms should complement and, wherever possible, enable efforts to slow and reverse the destruction of nature and protect public health from toxic pollutants.

I believe we can build things fast and right.

In the months ahead, NRDC will be developing and releasing a series of papers outlining what we are calling the Build Clean Agenda, focused on three areas of reform.

1) Modernizing laws, policies, and institutions to be more focused on environmental outcomes than process 

A few years ago, University of Michigan professor Nicholas Bagley published a blistering critique of the liberal legal establishment for developing an “instinctive faith in procedure” and failing to question whether administrative processes in government are delivering outcomes effectively. Bagley’s article, titled “The Procedure Fetish,” argued that progressives create procedural hoops for government to jump through out of an anxiety about the consequences of bad decisions but fail to grapple with the consequences of how these hoops might slow or block good decisions.

Bagley’s critique is one that we in the environmental movement should take far more seriously.

Our environmental laws exist for the purpose of protecting the health of our families, neighbors, and communities by delivering real improvements to our environment: better air and water quality; accessible public lands and thriving fish and wildlife; cuts to the carbon pollution that is driving climate change and severe weather events. The administrative processes that guide the implementation of these laws also exist for the primary purpose of delivering these positive outcomes for the public and the environment.

Most do. It’s hard to argue, for example, that companies shouldn’t have to publicly disclose information about releases of toxic chemicals or that a developer shouldn’t be required to consult with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service if its project is likely to harm endangered wildlife. Some, however, do not. We should be willing to rethink and reimagine procedural requirements at all levels of government if they are not effectively advancing positive environmental and public outcomes.

Environmental review processes, for example, should not be the inconsequential and “purely procedural” exercises that the current majority on the U.S. Supreme Court wishes them to be. Our laws should require an agency to mitigate environmental harms and select an environmentally preferable alternative wherever reasonable.

Environmental reviews should be reimagined to be nimbler, simpler, and faster. Human-guided AI can help by rapidly gathering, cross-referencing, and organizing vast amounts of environmental and technical information; this can make it easier for communities, agency experts, and other stakeholders to access basic information about a project, fill in key information gaps, integrate community knowledge, and generate actionable insights that improve projects and decisions. A transparent, faster-moving process that delivers stronger environmental and public health outcomes and a decisive yes or no would serve communities, investors, and ecosystems better than what we have today.

Project reviews that require sign-off from multiple government agencies and several levels of government should also be reformed and improved. The first Trump Administration put into practice a concept called “One Federal Decision,” which required that a lead government agency be named to drive permitting processes for projects that require multiple federal approvals. That idea, which was codified into law in 2023 through bipartisan reforms of the National Environmental Policy Act, should now be expanded to improve vertical coordination and integration of federal, state, and local permitting processes.

For interstate transmission lines, for example, a federal agency such as FERC should lead and coordinate permitting processes and have the authority to pre-empt state and local decision-makers when necessary and when uniform standards are met. For large-scale solar projects on private lands, a state that is trying to reach renewable energy goals should put itself in the driver’s seat of sitting decisions to avoid a hodgepodge of inconsistent local decisions.

We can and should also lean more heavily on the latest science and technology to accelerate and improve the deployment of clean energy and climate-friendly infrastructure in the right places. Vastly improved mapping, data, and analytical capabilities, for example, have enabled the Bureau of Land Management to develop detailed landscape-scale zoning plans for where industrial-scale solar projects should be sited on public lands to maximize efficiency and avoid or minimize impacts on natural and cultural resources. The most recent Western Solar Plan identifies 31 million acres of public lands in the West where solar developers can site projects, knowing that they will have a faster and simpler path to approval.

We should reform laws and policies at the federal and state levels to encourage and enable these types of big picture looks that—aided by the latest science, Indigenous knowledge, and human-guided AI—can help guide and accelerate clean energy infrastructure deployment at scale. Doing so will allow for a better understanding of the overall impact of planned infrastructure on communities and the environment. It will also improve design to avoid or minimize harms and reduce the amount of required individual project review, all while identifying and protecting untouched wild areas.

2) Leveling the playing field for clean energy to lower costs, expand consumer freedom, and advance energy abundance 

Partisan and punitive Beltway politics—not permitting, NIMBYism, or regulatory barriers—have emerged over the first year of President Trump’s second term as the biggest constraint on clean energy growth in the United States.

The Trump Administration has launched an all-out effort to stifle the growth of American clean energy production. It has frozen wind and solar development on public lands. It has revoked construction permits for already-approved offshore wind projects (a move so vindictive that even oil industry executives have been shocked into speaking out against it).

And in passing and signing a massive partisan tax bill in 2025, Congress, and the administration put at risk an estimated half a trillion dollars of private sector investment in clean energy manufacturing, electricity generation, and industrial facilities. The law will cut the growth of new solar, wind, geothermal, and other clean electricity production by more than 50 percent and, by reducing energy choice and access, force American consumers to spend $78-$192 more per year on fuel and energy.

We must do everything we can to limit and reverse the damage from these policy swings by speaking up and holding politicians accountable for the job losses and higher energy bills they are causing.

As we engage in this fight, we must also continue to take every opportunity we have—whether at the federal, state, or local level—to articulate and advance an alternative vision for our energy future. This vision must not only be clean and just but also pro-consumer, pro-jobs, and pro-growth.

In contrast to an administration that is trying to prop up the coal, oil, and gas industries with more subsidies and favors (promising the use of military power, for example, to help U.S. oil companies exploit Venezuela’s reserves), we should enact reforms that level the playing field in energy markets so that technologies can compete and win on their merits. Let’s, for example, pursue state and regional policies that reward utilities for the performance of their grid and the speed at which they can connect new power sources rather than simply rewarding them for their overall output.

Despite the administration’s early attempts to block new transmission lines, we should push forward to accelerate the expansion of the U.S. electric grid to deliver lower-cost power to consumers. Ultimately, the aim should be to at least triple the capacity of the grid over the next 25 years. Tech companies—which know that renewable energy is the fastest and cheapest new source of power to meet AI demand growth—have a vested interest in fixing and expanding the grid and cutting the interconnection backlog for new power sources. Some tech companies are even paying to improve the efficiency of existing transmission lines so they can deliver the power needed for the companies’ data centers.

Rather than canceling investments in clean energy innovation and manufacturing—as we are seeing happen—we ought to strengthen American supply chains by onshoring the clean energy industry, investing in workforce development for millions of good-paying jobs, and advancing the next generation of technologies.

The environmental movement, for example, should also be front and center in ensuring that the necessary mining and processing of the raw materials for electric batteries and solar cells are done in the best ways and in the right places. Having a healthy, well-regulated, and more sustainable mining sector in the United States—powered by good-paying union jobs and robust safeguards and benefits for local communities—would be far better than the current system that pushes mineral extraction into countries that have the weakest environmental, community, and worker protections.

Additionally, we must engage in even the most difficult discussions about technological deployment. My organization, for example, has been skeptical about the expansion of nuclear power production because of its high costs, the risk of accidents, and the environmental and public health impacts of producing and disposing of nuclear fuel. We remain clear-eyed about these challenges while taking an approach that reflects the urgency and scale of the climate crisis and considers advancements in nuclear technologies.

NRDC, for example, recently weighed in to support an early step in the regulatory process toward restarting the Duane Arnold nuclear plant in Iowa to help meet growing power demand, including from AI and cloud data centers, with carbon-free energy. If the final proposal clears rigorous environmental and safety reviews by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, it could mark the first instances of NRDC supporting the reopening of a nuclear plant.

The truth is, it’s difficult to forecast a scenario in which the United States or any other country can cut carbon pollution fast enough without deploying more nuclear power, other zero-carbon technologies (like enhanced geothermal systems and clean hydrogen), and some carbon removal technologies.

The complexities of these technologies demand exactly the type of scientific and environmental expertise that NRDC can offer. We can study and evaluate their risks, understand and reduce their costs, and work with frontline and justice organizations to establish strong safeguards to help ensure that communities are benefited by them instead of harmed. Rather than slashing environmental protections—as the current administration is doing—we must build confidence and create certainty for emerging and growing industries by setting clear and high standards that help avoid the mistakes of the past.

Overall, the U.S. energy strategy we need envisions a government that is using all of its tools—policy, regulatory, and financial—to enable companies to build innovation pipelines and their manufacturing base, to offer consumers a better and more affordable choice of energy, and to set and enforce clear and high standards for safety, health, and building things right.

3) Building projects that make life better for people and communities 

Renewable energy projects, transit investments, and clean and affordable housing are the kind of infrastructure that makes life more affordable, creates good-paying jobs, and provides opportunities for local businesses to grow.

Advocates of the clean energy buildout should embrace the value of designing and delivering projects that improve lives in nearby communities. This starts with companies and government agencies engaging early with people who live and work nearby in the vision and design for a project—listening, discussing, and then considering and incorporating feedback and ideas.

How can harm to communities and natural areas be avoided or minimized? And how can a project advance the needs and priorities of people living nearby?

In some places, that may mean a clean energy company provides clean and affordable energy back into the community, cleans up a polluted site nearby, protects a sensitive wildlife habitat, or shares royalty payments. In other places, that may mean hiring locally.

To help deliver good-paying local jobs, for example, NRDC has worked with clean energy companies in Ohio on agreements to use union labor on their projects. Not only is that the right thing to do for workers, but it has enabled companies to build local support for permit applications and get faster, more frequent approvals.

Government policies and institutions should encourage and enable these kinds of early, collaborative discussions between companies and communities. Community benefits agreements—in which a project developer formally outlines its commitments to residents—is one tool that has proven effective in facilitating project development and ensuring people who live near a project that may reshape their neighborhoods can also share in its benefits.

It is also important to recognize and respond to the growing impact of disinformation campaigns run by fossil fuel industry front groups that false claims and conspiracy theories about clean energy to sow distrust, fear, and opposition in communities across the country.

These cynical efforts are creating new barriers to clean energy construction. One in five counties in the United States has enacted a ban or heavy restriction on solar projects, wind projects, or both. And we are seeing a flood of bills being introduced in state legislatures that would make it harder to build renewable energy and transmission projects.

The best way to fight back against these fossil fuel disinformation campaigns is through grassroots, neighbor-to-neighbor organizing. For all of us in the environmental movement who know our future depends on getting things built, we need to make our voices heard at public utility commission meetings, county commission meetings, and everywhere else a clean project is up for discussion.

Urgency and Opportunity 

Every week, a new disaster reminds us that the failure to build our clean energy future and adapt our world to a changing climate carries real and escalating human costs. Whenever a transmission line, geothermal plant, or nature restoration project stalls, the pain and cost of future disasters go up. Delays carry undeniable consequences. Yet I have unflinching faith in our collective capacity to step on the accelerator. There are two reasons for this.

First: The economics of clean energy make it unstoppable.

Since 2010, the cost of solar power has fallen 90 percent and is now roughly half the cost of fossil fuel options. Even when paired with battery storage, which allows solar to deliver power even when the sun isn’t shining, the advantage holds: Solar plus storage is now cheaper than building new coal and can go toe-to-toe with new gas generation in many markets.

Globally, investment trends reflect the same economics: In 2025, clean energy is projected to attract roughly twice as much capital as coal, oil, and gas combined. Market forces favor clean over dirty.

Second: Political demand for the type of reforms we need to make is growing.

Oil price spikes from foreign wars and surging utility bills from power-hungry AI companies are fueling consumer anger and demands for change. In gubernatorial and local elections held in the past year, voters have been making it known that they want affordable, and abundant energy and a government that is helping to deliver it.

And we are beginning to see policies shift. Virginia and New Jersey are taking action to bring renewable energy online faster and to lower utility bills. Michigan passed legislation to reform clean energy permitting. California has been wrestling with how to change its environmental review requirements. The National Governors Association and the Western Governors’ Association have both launched infrastructure and transmission modernization initiatives.

We are entering a new era of reform.

It is time to transform how government works, how energy and infrastructure systems work, and yes, how the environmental movement works to enable us to create change faster.

To secure abundant, renewable, and affordable energy here at home. To deliver the clean water, clean air, and healthy food that everyone needs. To protect and foster thriving fish and wildlife populations. To adapt more quickly to emerging threats to communities and the natural world. To protect the most vulnerable from pollution and environmental disruption. To build a government that is more responsive to people’s needs. And, most importantly, to give everyone an opportunity to live a healthy, prosperous, and meaningful life.

This cleaner, fairer, and more secure future is within reach but only if we have the courage, character, and flexibility to pursue changes that are big and bold enough to meet the moment.