The federal government is designed to consist of three co-equal branches: legislative, executive, and judicial. To achieve good governance, lawmakers must enact sensible policies, presidential administrations must administer those policies effectively, and judges must adjudicate the laws.

However, real life doesn’t always play out like a Schoolhouse Rock civics lesson.

Consider NEPA, the National Environmental Policy Act. 

NEPA took effect in 1970 at a time when environmental degradation was running rampant. The federal government was instructed “to use all practicable means and measures, including financial and technical assistance, in a manner calculated to foster and promote the general welfare, to create and maintain conditions under which man and nature can exist in productive harmony, and fulfill the social, economic, and other requirements of present and future generations of Americans.”

But over the generations since, the law has evolved in unexpected ways. Instead of simply protecting the environment, it is today used to block virtually any project that seeks to improve the environment. If you want to build a solar array, a wind farm, or a power line to move clean electricity across the country, NEPA will be used to stymie your efforts. 

It now takes more than four years to complete an Environmental Impact Statement, the most comprehensive environmental review under NEPA. By the time the process is finished, the statement itself may be outdated. This ties worthwhile projects up in red tape and slows the development of everything from highways to solar arrays.

As it was being interpreted, NEPA forced managers to consider any potential environmental outcomes that their project might yield. To build a pipeline, you had to consider any possible drilling that might occur years down the road, because that would also have economic impacts. As Tanner Avery of the Frontier Institute described, “Imagine that before mowing your lawn, you had to study how the noise might affect your neighbor’s dog, how shorter grass could influence property values, how blade wear might affect global steel demand, and how clippings could worsen erosion. Miss a detail? You could be sued until you study it all.”

This brings us back to our civics lesson. The Supreme Court recently played its part in fixing NEPA. It issued a unanimous ruling in Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County. In the court’s decision, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote that NEPA “has transformed from a modest procedural requirement into a blunt and haphazard tool employed by project opponents…to try to stop or at least slow down new infrastructure and construction projects.” 

Under the decision, courts will not be empowered to “micromanage those agency choices so long as they fall within a broad zone of reasonableness.” That’s a great start: it helps get NEPA back to protecting the environment. But lawmakers now need to step in and play their civic part by recognizing the importance of building clean energy projects here in the U.S. The sort of clean energy projects that have been stopped far too often by NEPA policies.

As any reasonable person understands, the conversation in the United States is always about how to have the cleanest possible energy. Any project we build here—a solar farm, a wind turbine, a natural gas pipeline—is better for the environment than a similar project in another country is likely to be. 

As an example, note how quickly America has been shuttering coal-fired power plants because natural gas was more economically viable. Output from these plants peaked in 2011 and has been plunging ever since. “Based on current announcements and IEEFA research, we expect operating coal capacity to continue its steady decline for the remainder of the decade, pushing the total down to about 115,000 MW in 2030,” the Institute for Energy Economics & Financial Analysis writes. “That means in 2030, 63.8% of the peak total—203,000 MW of coal-fired capacity—will have been closed.” The result of the shale revolution is that America is a global leader in energy production, but also in emissions reductions. 

Compare that with China, which is rushing to open ever more of these dirtier plants. The Chinese “began building 94.5 gigawatts (GW) of new coal-power capacity and resumed 3.3GW of suspended projects in 2024, the highest level of construction in the past 10 years,” according to a pair of think tanks that study global energy output. 

Of course, none of those Chinese projects could have cleared NEPA, or even any reasonable environmental review. They didn’t have to. That’s the point.

The Supreme Court just put the U.S. on a better path. Lawmakers should move us even further along by repealing NEPA entirely and empowering clean energy entrepreneurs to build better projects.

The views and opinions expressed are those of the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of C3.