Lankford Moves to Stop Biden’s Excessive Permitting Delays on US Energy & Mineral Production

WASHINGTON, DC – Senator James Lankford (R-OK), a member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, today voted to overturn a Biden Administration rule that has added excessive environmental analyses to federal energy project permitting under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The Biden Administration’s new rule essentially gives a free pass to federal regulators to drag out the review process for US energy or mineral projects. The rule gives federal regulators free rein to push Biden’s progressive anti-traditional energy, climate-change agenda, rather than giving project’s environmental impact a fair, legal look.

“This Biden Administration’s NEPA permitting rule is nothing more than an arbitrary thumbs-down to US energy or mineral projects,” said Lankford. “This rule makes a mockery of the process by pushing an extremist political agenda instead of functional environmental protections. It needs to be stopped.” 

Lankford continues to cite that 24 percent of US oil and gas comes from federal lands and water, so federal permitting that stalls or halts energy and mineral projects on federal lands has a large impact on domestic energy and mineral supplies. Lankford continues to press in Energy Committee hearings that Biden’s purposefully glacial pace of considering environmental impacts and their related permits is one of the factors that is halting domestic supply and driving prices up on Oklahomans. He recently introduced the Transparency and Honesty in Energy Regulations Act, a bill to prohibit the federal government from using the flawed social cost of carbon, social cost of methane, social cost of nitrous oxide, or the social cost of any other greenhouse gas metrics in the rulemaking process. Lankford stood up to FERC for its ongoing push to stifle and even stop US energy production because of Biden’s lock-step with climate-change extremists.

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