Landmark Bill Will Create ’24-Second Shot Clock’ To Unleash American Industry, Experts Say

Public policy experts petitioned Congress to pass a bipartisan permitting reform bill at the Daily Caller Live’s “Breaking The Permitting Bottleneck” panel Tuesday morning.

Ted Ellis, Director of Energy at the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), and Ben Lieberman, Senior Fellow of Energy and Environment at the American Enterprise Institute, spoke with Daily Caller White House correspondent Ashley Brasfield about the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act, which the Senate advanced Monday. The bill seeks to expedite the permitting process for construction projects in the U.S.

“I like the idea of a shot clock. I watched an NBA game the other day and the NBA has a 24-second shot clock. I don’t know if that’s enough time for the permitting process, but I like the idea of a shot clock. [The permitting process] shouldn’t be dragging on for 5, 10 or even 30 years,” Lieberman told the panel.

The permitting reform and infrastructure bill seeks to reduce the statute of limitations for when objections to construction projects can be filed. Currently, projects face obstacles years after capital has been invested in them, increasing the likelihood they are canned altogether.

“An example of projects delayed equals project canceled is the Atlantic Coast Pipeline,” Ellis explained. “The Atlantic Coast Pipeline was a pipeline that was mile-long natural gas pipeline that was supposed to flow from West Virginia to North Carolina, and it was supposed to produce something like 17,000 jobs over the course of the several years that it was going to be developed. But because of activist litigation and permitting uncertainty, the timeline kept slipping.”

“The cost was moving from $5 billion to $8 billion. Eventually the project developers won at the Supreme Court, seven-two, but after that much delay and after the cost ballooned that much, they decided less than three weeks after the case was decided that they would have to cancel the project because it just simply became uneconomical,” he added.

Ellis wrote about the pipeline in a Nov. 6 op-ed for the Daily Caller News Foundation he co-authored with AFPI Vice Chair for Energy & Environment Policy Oliver McPherson-Smith.

“The opportunity is in making it easier to build in America: ensuring that projects receive timely approvals and have reasonable certainty that their work won’t be stopped or their issued permit overturned,” Ellis and McPherson-Smith wrote. “The proposed Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP) shows how the current environment has gone awry.”

Reducing obstacles in front of construction projects would decrease costs and subsequently the cost of living, the panelist said.

“Permitting reform is about the cost of living; it’s becoming fundamentally too expensive to build things in this country, and that’s a civilizational issue,” Ellis said at the panel.

He emphasized that the permitting reform bill is not about rolling back protections over public land, but restoring the protections to what they were originally intended to be.

“You know, when you think about what the bill is actually doing, it’s not rolling back protections, things that we really want to protect, like historic sites and the natural environment, clean air, clean water. It’s taking the definition of harm and making it something more recognizable for the average American,” Ellis said.

The bipartisan bill also codifies President Donald Trump’s “Ratepayer Protection Pledge,” ensuring that data center developers pay for their own electricity. The Senate on Monday advanced the legislation 73-25, with almost unanimous support from Republicans and the backing of more than 20 Democrats.

The post Landmark Bill Will Create ’24-Second Shot Clock’ To Unleash American Industry, Experts Say was first published by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service which makes its content available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. Please support their efforts.