Editorial Board
Want Green Energy? Cut Red Tape
Burdensome regulations are impeding clean-energy projects nationwide. The U.S. won’t reach its climate goals unless that changes.
Faster, please.
Photographer: Bing Guan/Bloomberg
No one can doubt President Joe Biden’s commitment to clean energy. Unfortunately, his agenda faces a challenge rarely mentioned by climate activists: excessive regulation.
A report from the National Academies of Sciences found that if the U.S. wants to reach net-zero emissions by midcentury, it will need to roughly double the share of electricity it produces from non-carbon sources by 2030. Reaching even that goal — which could well prove insufficient to the challenge — would require building wind and solar installations at a historically unprecedented pace.