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WSJ: What did Joe Manchin get for his $433 billion?

A tube of anal lube?

The Senate’s new tax-and-spend bill isn’t pretty, but what did deal-maker Joe Manchin get in the bargain? His answer is that Democratic leaders have “committed to advancing a suite of commonsense permitting reforms this fall that will ensure all energy infrastructure, from transmission to pipelines and export facilities, can be efficiently and responsibly built.”

Big if true, as they say. That promise to Mr. Manchin is going to cost Americans $433 billion in spending and $327 billion in taxes. The country desperately needs streamlined permitting for building of all kinds, energy included. The Northeast is a natural-gas bottleneck. Export terminals could fuel European allies and break Vladimir Putin’s leverage. But nobody outside the negotiating room seems to know what specific “reforms” are in play. Mr. Manchin’s office isn’t rushing out answers.

One culprit for permitting sclerosis is the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), a 1970 law that imposes environmental reviews. The Trump Administration put presumptive limits on such studies, while stressing a focus on “reasonably foreseeable” environmental effects. White House data showed that from 2013-17 the average final impact statement took four years and ran 669 pages. Incredible but true outliers included a 12-mile Interstate expansion in Denver: 13 years and 8,951 pages.

The Biden Administration has already reversed some of its predecessor’s NEPA handiwork, with more to come. Did President Biden and Speaker Nancy Pelosi privately agree to undo what the White House is doing? There’s reason to doubt it. Mrs. Pelosi was livid about the Trump changes at the time. “This means more polluters will be right there next to the water supply of our children,” she said. Yet without NEPA revisions, good projects will keep getting stuck in unending delays and lawsuits.

Permitting nightmares are everywhere. To launch some rockets from Texas, this summer SpaceX was ordered by the Federal Aviation Administration to write a “historical context report” on nearby events of the Mexican-American War. Two separate pipelines in recent years have won Supreme Court cases and been canceled anyway. [One of those was The Atlantic Coast Pipeline, which would have brought gas all the wy up the east coast. Environmentalists and the EPA fought it for years, eventually reaching the Supreme Court, which ruled in the pipeline’s would-be operator favor, but, their funds exhausted from the legal battle and the inflation of construction costs during those years, the developers abandoned the project in 2020 before shovel ever bit dirt – Ed]; The Mountain Valley Pipeline, a natural-gas project originating in Mr. Manchin’s West Virginia, is in legal limbo despite being almost 95% complete.

The Democratic Party has a sizable keep-it-in-the-ground caucus bent on killing all fossil-fuel development. Progressives don’t seem to realize that red tape doesn’t spare green plans. The American Wind Energy Association welcomed Mr. Trump’s NEPA reforms. How does Mr. Biden fantasize he can decarbonize the electric grid by 2035, if it takes years to get permission to build anything?