What I missed last week
My roundup last week was inevitably inadequate in capturing all the great writing on BAAJA. A (still non-exhaustive!) list of some more pieces worth reading includes: A magisterial but highly readable digest of the main …
Permitting Reform
7 blurbs
A bigger, better BAAJA
Wholesale power prices across the U.S. grid on the evening of October 8, via Grid Status . Text for the long-awaited Senate permitting bill dropped last week, and it’s more ambitious, bipartisan, and cleverly drafted tha…
Where is housing slow to build?
Permitting and Total Project Durations by City and Project Type. Source: Evan Soltas Evan Soltas has a big first-of-its-kind paper measuring permitting and construction durations for standardized housing projects across …
A cradle-to-grave infrastructure project tracker
Willow Latham-Proenca: Maybe more Calvino than Borges, but I’d like to be looking at a constellation of new papers following a huge geographic and sectoral expansion of (something like) the Critical Mineral Project datas…
Wildfire smoke's 24,000 hidden deaths a year
We don’t usually talk about permitting reform as a life-or-death issue. But evidence from a new paper suggests that maybe we should, at least where wildfire management is concerned. Min Zhang and coauthors find that wild…
Conservation and abundance are on the same side
Continuing that theme, the weaponization of environmental review as a tactic to delay or block new building has tended to cast the conservation movement as an antagonist to the Abundance Movement. But the same permitting…
How NEPA became a litigation machine
Much of NEPA’s power to slow down project timelines comes from the lawsuits it enables. Litigation doesn’t just slow down projects directly - it also incentivizes agencies to spend time “bulletproofing” their environment…