Effective and Lasting Climate Policy

Climate policy tends to get presented as a binary choice: either you believe in aggressive government action to eliminate fossil fuels as fast as possible, or you’re a climate skeptic standing in the way of progress. That binary doesn’t reflect where most Americans, or most serious energy experts, are.

Why Fossil Fuels Aren’t Going Away on Their Own Timeline

Here is a fact that should inform how we think about this problem: even China, the country investing more aggressively in solar, wind, and battery storage than any other nation on earth, still generates more than half of its electricity from fossil fuels today. That tells us clean electricity hasn’t yet been built out at the scale a modern industrial economy requires, anywhere in the world. It doesn’t let the United States off the hook. We built our economy first and emitted more, cumulatively and per person, than any country on earth to get here, and that history means we have a responsibility to lead on bringing the next generation of clean technology to scale, not an excuse to wait for someone else to solve it first.

It’s worth being precise about what “not ready” means here, because the honest answer is different depending on the sector. For power generation, solar, wind, batteries, and nuclear are all proven technologies. What’s lagging for renewables is deployment pace, particularly long-duration battery storage: PJM, our own regional grid operator, has barely begun to build storage capacity compared to grids like Texas and California, and storage is one of the most important levers, alongside transmission buildout, for turning intermittent generation into dependable capacity. What’s lagging for nuclear in the U.S. specifically is a construction and permitting pipeline that can deliver new plants on time and on budget, something Georgia’s Vogtle project illustrated at real cost, running roughly double its original budget over about 15 years. For a smaller but stubborn slice of the economy — a fifth to a third of global emissions depending on how broadly hard-to-abate sectors are defined, from steel, cement, and chemicals to aviation and shipping — the challenge is different and harder: their emissions come from the chemical processes and material inputs themselves, not just the fuel used to power them, and while pilot-scale projects are advancing, genuinely low-carbon alternatives at scale remain a work in progress. A serious energy plan must be honest about that difference: build out mature clean power as fast as we can and be upfront that the hardest parts of industrial decarbonization don’t yet have a proven, at-scale answer.

Battery chemistry, grid storage, nuclear power, and other technologies are advancing quickly, and I support pushing that progress as hard as we can because a serious energy policy must be built for the world we live in today while actively building the one we need for tomorrow.

Why This Has to Be Bipartisan

None of this is simple, and none of the tradeoffs are easy. Moving too aggressively away from fossil fuels before reliable alternatives exist at scale risks energy price spikes, grid instability, and real economic pain for working families. Moving too slowly risks the consequences of unchecked climate change continuing to compound. Getting that balance right requires genuinely careful, technical, good-faith judgment, not a bill written by one party to satisfy its own base, then reversed by the other party as soon as power changes hands. A bipartisan bill, built by members of both parties who have to actually defend it to their own constituents, is far more likely to land on tradeoffs that can survive a change in political power, and far more likely to get the engineering judgment right rather than the ideological talking point right.

The Permitting Problem: Where Bipartisanship Is Already Happening

Here’s something most voters don’t know: the federal approval process for any major energy project — a new transmission line, a solar farm, a pipeline, a nuclear plant, a geothermal well — is governed by a 1970 law called the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Today, it routinely takes federal agencies four and a half years on average just to complete the environmental review for a major energy project, and legal challenges can add years more on top of that. This slows down everything: clean energy projects and fossil fuel projects alike. It is not a partisan problem. It is an infrastructure problem, and it is hindering our ability to build anything quickly in this country, at exactly the moment electricity demand is surging.

The good news is that permitting reform is one of the few issues in Washington right now where genuine bipartisan work is already happening, and it deserves more attention than it’s getting. The House passed the SPEED Act in December 2025, and several similar bipartisan bills are moving alongside it in both chambers. None of these have been signed into law yet, and as written, they’re built to be strictly technology-neutral: treating a pipeline and a solar farm the same. I don’t think that’s the right goal, and I’m not shy about saying reform should deliberately favor cleaner energy sources rather than pretend every technology is starting from the same place. Fossil fuel infrastructure has decades of built-out pipelines, existing grid connections, and established permitting relationships behind it. Clean energy projects are the newer entrants, and they disproportionately depend on new transmission that doesn’t exist yet. Treating an incumbent with a decades-long head start the same as a newer competitor still building its first connections isn’t neutral in practice, it just locks in the advantage the incumbent already has.

To be clear about what I’m proposing and what I’m not: I’m not proposing to rewrite NEPA’s substantive standards along partisan lines. I’m proposing a separate, dedicated federal fast lane and funding stream, sitting alongside the existing NEPA process, that specifically targets the biggest bottleneck holding back new clean energy: transmission. Today, the real chokepoint usually isn’t the federal environmental review at all, it’s slow-moving state siting fights and utility interconnection queues that can leave a fully built solar or wind project sitting idle for years, unable to connect to the grid. That’s exactly why federal backstop siting authority matters: it gives the federal government a tool to step in and get interstate transmission built when state and utility-level processes stall, which is the specific, documented obstacle slowing clean energy today. Fossil fuel projects would continue through the same review process and timelines in place today, with no rollback of environmental standards and no new fast lane either. The point of permitting reform should be to help build the energy system we need for the future, not to hand fossil fuel infrastructure an equal seat at the front of the line it’s already in.

What I Support

I support a bipartisan climate bill that:

• Aggressively expands clean and renewable energy — solar, wind, nuclear, geothermal, and next-generation battery storage — wherever it can be deployed at reasonable cost, without compromising grid reliability, and without compromising public safety and health. “Reasonable cost” means real, time-limited, capped incentives that get evaluated and phased down as technologies mature, not open-ended subsidies that lose cost discipline over time. Where a given technology can’t be deployed at reasonable cost, that’s not a reason to subsidize it indefinitely, it’s a signal of a market failure that deserves its own honest, technical discussion of exactly how much we’d spend against exactly how much emissions reduction we’d actually get.
• Acknowledges that fossil fuels will remain part of the energy mix for the foreseeable future and takes a pragmatic, realistic approach to reducing their impact over time, rather than locking in a rigid timeline that ignores real-world engineering and economic constraints.
• Invests in the mineral supply chains and domestic manufacturing capacity that any serious clean energy transition will require. This is a real tradeoff worth being honest about: continuing to rely on oil and gas means continuing to accept higher domestic carbon emissions, while shifting toward clean technology means relying on battery minerals whose supply chains are today largely controlled by other countries, China in particular. I don’t think either side of that tradeoff should be accepted blindly, which is exactly why building up our own domestic mineral supply chains and processing capacity matters: it’s how we lower emissions without simply trading one form of dependence for another.
• Is written and negotiated by members of both parties, so that the tradeoffs it makes reflect a durable consensus rather than a temporary majority and so the resulting policy survives long enough for businesses and families to plan around it.
• Includes real permitting reform, building on the bipartisan momentum already underway in Congress, by funding federal agencies to clear their review backlogs and creating a dedicated federal backstop and fast lane for the transmission lines and clean energy projects stuck for years in state-level siting fights and utility interconnection queues, so approved projects can’t be cancelled by political whiplash after developers have already invested.
• Protects the communities that have carried the heaviest burden from power plants, refineries, and industrial facilities, by preserving full environmental review and community input for new fossil fuel infrastructure and directing dedicated funding toward air and water quality improvements in the frontline neighborhoods most affected.
• Backs all workers affected as the energy mix changes, not just those in extraction, with real transition support: job retraining, wage replacement, and pension protection for workers in power generation, transportation, manufacturing, and supply chains, so the cost of that change doesn’t fall on the workers and families who had no say in it.
• Also addresses issues beyond energy sources including urban sprawl and agricultural and food systems.

Virginians in our district don’t need another climate bill that becomes a political football. They need an honest plan that takes the problem seriously, takes the engineering constraints seriously, and is built to last longer than the next election.