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 the technology to fully replace fossil fuels at the scale a modern industrial economy requires isn’t quite there yet, 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.

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 because of AI data centers, reshored manufacturing, and electrification.

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. At a moment when electricity demand is surging and the clean energy industry is the one facing the worst project delays, technology-neutral reform mostly locks in the fossil fuel industry’s existing advantage rather than closing the gap. I would amend these bills to tilt permitting reform deliberately toward clean energy: fund federal agencies to clear their review backlogs, and fix the single biggest bottleneck holding back new clean energy specifically — transmission. Today, a solar or wind project can be fully built and ready to generate power, only to sit stalled for years waiting on a transmission line to connect it to the grid. I support federal backstop siting authority and dedicated funding to get interstate transmission lines built faster, and a dedicated fast-track review lane for new clean energy generation and transmission projects. Fossil fuel projects would continue through the same review process and timelines in place today — no rollback of environmental standards, but 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.

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.
• Acknowledges that fossil fuels will remain part of the energy mix for the foreseeable future and takes a pragmatic, technology-neutral 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, so we’re not trading dependence on oil for dependence on foreign-controlled battery minerals.
• 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 fast lane for the transmission lines and clean energy projects stuck waiting years to connect to the grid, so approved projects can’t be cancelled by political whiplash after developers have already invested.
• Protects the communities that have carried the heaviest burden of pollution 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 the workers who built our energy industry with real transition support — job retraining, wage replacement, and pension protection — for coal, oil, and gas workers as the energy mix changes, 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.