Addition over Obstruction: A New Governing Principle for Energy Development

During the Cold War, American defense planners did not assume that the future threat environment would resemble the present.¹ The adversary was known but its capabilities were not, and the technological dynamism of the nuclear age meant that the balance of power could shift faster than procurement cycles could respond.² Even those within the defense establishment who argued for restraint were arguing about how much excess was prudent, not whether excess itself was necessary.³ The result was a defense posture that built capacity in excess of immediate need, maintained redundancy across systems, and treated uncertainty as a reason to expand capabilities rather than constrain them.⁴

Our present moment shares many parallels with the Cold War era. Of course, today’s technological race has less to do with nuclear arms and more with AI, reindustrialization, and supply chain competition. And if there is one key input that success in these sectors calls for, it is a more dynamic and responsive American energy system. Indeed, the United States faces a generational surge in electricity demand that will require the rapid deployment of every class of energy infrastructure: generation, pipelines, transmission, storage, and the downstream assets they enable.

In a healthy system, such demand would be viewed as a sign of a growing economy. Yet our political and administrative reality is not up to the challenge. Over decades, our policies and political debates have evolved to treat energy infrastructure as a presumptive imposition rather than as a presumptive good, something to be litigated, delayed, and conditioned on the approval of whichever coalition holds the relevant veto. If U.S. hegemony is to survive the twenty-first century, the status quo cannot stand. In its place, Americans need a new animating principle: energy addition, a governing commitment to building projects at the scale our ambitions demand, disciplined by markets and environmental substance rather than ideological veto. If we want to build anything, we must be able to build everything.

The last two decades have featured an ongoing debate in American politics. On climate grounds, liberals have generally opposed the expansion of fossil fuels and promoted clean energy alternatives. The conservative response to climate has been both fragmented and shifting: some have focused on funding research and development and/or an approach centered on carbon pricing; others have taken a deregulatory tack, with a significant number still skeptical of the underlying premise.

But the emerging reality is deeper than debates over optimal climate policy. Policymakers on either side of the aisle have effectively embraced, to varying degrees, energy obstructionism: the portable use of law, process, litigation, executive discretion, and politics to block or delay new energy assets. As a result, nearly all classes of energy infrastructure necessary to achieve our goals are politically contested, or soon will be. Our nation has built a political environment in which every form of generation and load can be stalled, canceled, or delegitimized, and in which even approvals often fail to deliver finality.

A Theory of Energy Politics

Previous scholarship has hinted at strands of the “addition versus obstruction” debate. Legal scholar and economist Zachary Liscow observed how extreme litigiousness hamstrings government capacity in the context of infrastructure permitting.⁵ Francis Fukuyama coined the term “veto­cracy” to describe the bureaucratic dynamics which prevent government from making decisions in the public interest.⁶ In 2018, energy law specialist James Coleman identified how regulatory barriers impeding the development of natural gas pipelines could soon affect interstate transmission lines as well, a point that has since proved prescient.⁷ Even the verbiage is not new: Energy Secretary Chris Wright characterizes his agenda as one of energy addition (the falsity of that claim notwithstanding, given the administration’s efforts to stymie the deployment of renewable energy projects).⁸ The academic literature, in other words, has aged only too well.

Still, a comprehensive theory of energy politics as a contest between addition and obstruction has been lacking. Energy obstruction has become ideologically portable, and it now operates through several distinct but related mechanisms: selective permission, in which projects are judged according to factional preference rather than systemic need; unsettled approval, in which approvals fail to settle anything authoritatively; and the imprinting of macropolitics onto energy technologies and even individual projects, such that every project is forced to bear the weight of unresolved disputes over climate, markets, and politics generally. The real test of energy addition, then, is not whether one can occasionally pardon a disfavored project. It is whether one is prepared to defend building projects across technologies and fuels as a governing principle.

Outside of the energy industry, however, the principle of energy addition is not a popular one. To varying degrees, liberals are insistent on solely deploying clean resources. Some conservatives have embraced an impoverished analysis wherein intermittent renewables are seen not merely as inferior but rather as parasitic forces on the grid. These developments are recent. During President Obama’s first term, his administration regularly highlighted its efforts to encourage onshore and offshore oil and gas development, and the former president has taken credit for increased production since leaving office.⁹ And for years, the Republican retort to Democratic climate objectives was “all of the above” and “innovation, not elimination.” Today, neither faction rejects energy obstructionism wholesale; their disagreement is not about whether to obstruct, but about what to obstruct.

An Examination of Energy Obstructionism

The most straightforward form of obstruction is the executive blockade. Soon after his inauguration, President Joe Biden revoked the cross-border permit for the Keystone XL pipeline and ordered the Department of the Interior (DOI) to pause new oil and gas leasing on public lands as well as offshore waters.¹⁰ Later that year, the administration slow-walked compliance with court orders directing them to resume an orderly leasing process.¹¹ The Biden administration also attempted to delay compliance with congressionally mandated offshore oil and gas lease sales included in the Inflation Reduction Act, eventually issuing the smallest five-year plan for Gulf of Mexico resource development in history.¹²

The pattern extended beyond leasing. The Department of Energy chose to pause reviews of new liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminals in early 2024, ostensibly to promulgate an updated assessment of the implications of continued exports for American energy security and global climate change.¹³ Supporters of the pause later leaned on a study by Cornell’s Robert Howarth which claimed that LNG was more emissions-intensive than coal. That study, of course, was “riddled” with basic methodological errors, and DOE’s own report later found relatively small emissions implications for U.S. LNG exports across several projected scenarios.¹⁴

The LNG pause unsurprisingly created a fair bit of public uproar. Less remarked upon, however, is that the Biden administration had been stalling LNG export permits well before the pause, with one analyst concluding that the White House was “evidently sitting on [LNG permits] because of politics.”¹⁵ Of course, it’s true that oil and gas production reached record highs during President Biden’s tenure.¹⁶ But that increased production was primarily the result of increased demand and innovations by producers; if anything, it occurred despite suboptimal policy from the administration.¹⁷

If the Biden White House’s posture toward Keystone XL and LNG illustrated the executive blockade, its treatment of the Willow project exemplified the closely related phenomenon of selective permission. In 2017, ConocoPhillips announced economically viable oil discoveries at the Willow site, located in Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve (NPR-A).¹⁸ The project would produce 180,000 barrels of oil per day at its operational peak and generate billions through property taxes and federally mandated mitigation programs for surrounding areas.¹⁹ The first Trump administration approved the project in 2020, but a federal court vacated the permits the year after. Consequently, the Biden administration was obligated to reassess the project through a supplemental environmental review process. ConocoPhillips engaged in an expansive community engagement effort to garner support for Willow, conducting hundreds of meetings with local residents.²⁰ Alaska’s governor, the state legislature, the then bipartisan congressional delegation, and a number of local governments mobilized in favor of the project.²¹

As the deadline for the administration’s approval of the project approached, however, environmental groups pressured DOI to stop the project, creating a firestorm on TikTok and other social media platforms.²² Interior considered a plan to permit just two drilling pads, substantially less than the proposed five and below the threshold that would make the project economically feasible.²³ After a concerted lobbying effort by the state’s congressional delegation, the Biden administration ultimately approved three drilling pads, the minimum economically viable version of the project.²⁴ The approval also required ConocoPhillips to relinquish rights to roughly sixty-eight thousand acres of existing leases.²⁵ Concurrently, the administration walled off additional Arctic lands and waters from future oil and gas development, including an indefinite withdrawal of roughly 2.8 million nearshore Arctic Ocean acres from future leasing and a proposed rule (later finalized) that barred new leasing in 10.6 million acres of the NPR-A.²⁶

This is what selective permission looks like in practice. A developer can spend years in review and earn support from elected officials, labor, and affected communities and still find that mere survival is the most they can hope for. DOI’s own announcement did not celebrate the merits of the Willow project but rather the acreage surrendered by ConocoPhillips, the pads denied, and the additional Arctic lands and waters placed beyond reach.²⁷ Willow was not rejected, but neither was it affirmatively defended. It was permitted only as a tortured, embarrassing exception to the administration’s broader efforts to restrict new oil and gas development. The analogue in defense procurement would be a Pentagon that approved a weapons system only at the minimum viable scale, publicly apologized for doing so, and then offset the decision by canceling adjacent capabilities. No one would mistake that for a genuine commitment to military preparedness.

The second Trump administration has been no better. The current president was right to declare an energy emergency on his first day in office, marshaling the tools of federal agencies to expedite the permitting and deployment of generation, linear infrastructure, and downstream assets. But the order was quickly followed by a series of directives targeted squarely at growing sources of energy generation in wind and solar.

Indeed, on the same day, the president signed an order withdrawing all tracts on the Outer Continental Shelf from offshore wind leasing.²⁸ DOI has repeatedly issued stop-work orders against offshore wind projects, more recently justified by entirely specious national security claims.²⁹ The Department has weaponized voluntary remand despite opposition from project sponsors, requesting that courts return permits for offshore wind projects to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management for further environmental review.³⁰ And on July 15, 2025, DOI promulgated a directive ostensibly intended to end “preferential treatment” for onshore wind and solar projects seeking permits on public lands.³¹ In practice, the order has become the lynchpin of the administration’s anti-renewables strategy, empowering agencies to bog down wind and solar projects in permitting delays long before any formal denial is required.³²

The administration has even begun to mobilize previously routine permits and usually ancillary agencies: the Department of Transportation is enforcing a “mandatory distance requirement” for all wind facilities sited near railroads and highways and the Federal Aviation Administration has signaled that “a once-routine FAA height clearance required for almost every wind turbine could now become a hurdle for the entire sector.”³³ These efforts have been condemned by Republican elected officials at the federal and state levels and spurred the introduction of bipartisan “permit certainty” legislation, such as the freedom Act, meant to limit the executive branch’s ability to target disfavored energy projects.³⁴ The administration’s actions show that obstruction does not belong to the environmental Left or the populist Right; it is a governing repertoire that can be redeployed wherever a coalition decides a project class has become politically intolerable.

More recently, the administration has begun approving a handful of solar projects previously hamstrung by the July 15 Interior directive.³⁵ Those approvals are aimed, at least in part, at reviving prospects for a bipartisan congressional permitting deal: the Democratic ranking members of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources and Environment and Public Works Committees disengaged from talks after the administration’s spate of attacks on renewable projects.³⁶ While the thaw in solar permitting is for now in the administration’s narrow political interest, it is too early to tell if it signals a broader shift in its energy strategy. A few strategically timed approvals do not constitute energy addition. Unless the White House meaningfully resumes permitting of renewables at scale or accepts statutory constraints like those proposed in the freedom Act, it is simply practicing the same selective permission tactics of the Biden administration.

Obstruction Nation

Executive action is only one expression of the problem. The same obstructionist logic appears across the wider permitting and siting process, nowhere more clearly than in linear infrastructure. Because linear infrastructure projects cross jurisdictions, concentrate local burdens, and distribute benefits widely, they require some combination of support from the federal government, states, localities, landowners, and regulators. That makes “pipes and wires” uniquely vulnerable to death by a thousand cuts: even isolated opposition at any point along the route can imperil the larger enterprise. Such projects are also judged through the politics of the assets they serve: for example, transmission lines tied to data centers. America already builds far too little interstate transmission and pipeline infrastructure.³⁷ If recent fights over Dakota Access and Keystone are any guide, the much larger buildout now demanded by load growth and reindustrialization will be even more contentious. Indeed, recent projects already offer a preview of that kind of politics.³⁸

In 2019, Williams Companies won federal approval for the Northeast Supply Enhancement (NESE) pipeline, an expansion of existing gas delivery infrastructure intended to move substantial new volumes of natural gas into the New York City region.³⁹ That same year, however, New York state government denied the project’s Clean Water Act Section 401 water quality certification and denied it again in 2020.⁴⁰ Williams ultimately canceled both NESE and another proposed pipeline, known as Constitution.⁴¹

Late last year, amid political pressure over regional energy prices, New York reversed course and approved a revived version of NESE.⁴² Environmental groups quickly sued the NESE approval, while Constitution’s renewed state permitting effort collapsed after agencies issued repeated notices deeming the application incomplete.⁴³ New York also later moved to oppose Constitution’s separate effort to have FERC reissue the federal certificate and override state authority.⁴⁴

The revealing point in this story is not simply that NESE was delayed. It is that no stage of the process ever produced genuine finality. Federal approval did not settle the matter. State denial did not end it. Lapse did not bury it. For a moment, New York’s turnaround appeared to resolve the approval of NESE but then opened a new cycle of uncertainty around Constitution. Projects tied to persistent regional affordability and reliability concerns could still spend years cycling between approval, denial, lapse, and return, with every formal decision proving to be provisional. One might call this unsettled approval.

Of course, the United States has built a great deal of oil, gas, and renewable infrastructure, even as the tactics used to impede deployment have grown more aggressive in recent years. More concerning are the classes of projects that are only beginning to get built, or that remain too nascent to be commercialized.

Americans seem to support infrastructure they do not actually have to see. As grid expert Daniel Palken recently noted, every technology we have not yet learned to deploy at scale tends to appear widely popular; controversy arrives when construction does.⁴⁵ Nuclear energy is the obvious example. The second half of the twentieth century saw the first nuclear renaissance, but even before the Three Mile Island accident, the technology had already begun to wane in popularity among Americans.⁴⁶ Apparent consensus, or simply the absence of organized opposition, does not imply a politics of energy addition.

The emerging carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) industry has historically commanded bipartisan support—Democrats for its emissions reduction potential, Republicans for its ability to keep American oil and gas competitive in a decarbonizing economy.

Due to advantageous geological attributes and the state’s status as an oil and gas powerhouse, Louisiana is considered one of the most promising locations for CCUS investment.⁴⁷ Indeed, the state of Louisiana applied for Class VI underground injection well primacy in 2021, which promised to expedite the permitting of carbon capture infrastructure by devolving regulatory processes from the EPA to states.⁴⁸ Since being granted primacy in late 2023, however, efforts to deploy carbon capture in Louisiana have been engulfed by a political firestorm. Once a supporter of CCUS, Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry signed a moratorium on new applications for Class VI permits, leaving the fate of dozens of active applications uncertain.⁴⁹ Several localities have adopted resolutions opposing CCUS development, including the city of New Orleans, Livingston Parish, and Allen Parish, whose ordinance was withdrawn after ExxonMobil filed suit.⁵⁰ Governor Landry has privately promised deference to parishes that oppose CCUS.⁵¹ The Louisiana State Legislature has already taken steps to stifle the buildout of CCUS infrastructure; in addition, it is considering completely eliminating eminent domain for CCUS infrastructure and granting parishes increased authority to block projects.⁵²

The backlash to CCUS in Louisiana was not driven by a single ideological faction or an industrial calamity but by a novel coalition of environmental justice advocates, populist conservatives, and seemingly apolitical landowners. The rationale for environmental activists, namely opposition to any technology that might extend the relevance of the oil and gas industry, is relatively obvious.⁵³ The conservatives and landowners see CCUS as a racket driven by elites.

A local activist told media that “we value our God, our family, our land and our water. And CCS, this scam being forced on us, attacks three of the most important things to us . . . our family, our land and our water.”⁵⁴ A Facebook group that serves as a grassroots organizing hub of sorts for the anti-CCUS movement in Louisiana is littered with daily posts that connect the technology to vague conspiracies.⁵⁵ It seems clear that this coalition will be unsatisfied with anything short of a total ban: Governor Landry’s moratorium was castigated as a weak half-measure, one that was “deceptively sly” and “blatantly unconstitutional.”⁵⁶

The events in Louisiana suggest that energy politics are shifting and recombining in ways that can engulf any technology. The next obstructive coalition may not resemble the last one at all.

The Doctrine of Energy Addition

Selective permission, unsettled approval, and the imprinting of macropolitics onto every energy project are self-reinforcing mechanisms. A system that conditions buildout on factional approval cannot be stabilized because the coalitions that confer approval are fluid and increasingly volatile. A system that cannot produce durable final decisions cannot convert approvals into steel in the ground. And a system in which every project becomes a proxy for broader ideological conflict will struggle to evaluate infrastructure on its own terms. In short, our current political and administrative system is not capable of delivering the wartime-style buildout the country requires; it will approve some projects, stall others, reverse itself under pressure, and subject the rest to years of recursive contestation. In other words, the United States is on track to fail.

To reverse course, we must commit to energy addition as governing doctrine. Energy addition should be understood as a question of preparedness. Just as Cold War–era defense planners recognized that the right response to uncertainty is overpreparedness, America must build energy infrastructure in anticipation of demand, not in response to crisis. A country that builds just enough to meet present need will, almost by definition, find itself short of capacity when conditions change. The costs of modest overbuilding (e.g., surplus capacity, lower utilization, temporarily idle assets, marginally higher physical footprint) are manageable; the costs of underbuilding (scarcity, volatility, and forgone industrial output or technological development) are not.

That outlook implies a more presumptive approach to infrastructure development. Most energy infrastructure developed in competitive markets should be treated as prima facie permissible. Projects should not have to run through an obstacle course of suspicion before they can earn the right to exist. In the event that environmental impacts are prohibitive, projects can be denied, but the overwhelming posture should be toward mitigation (without extortion) and eventual approval.⁵⁷ This will also require “trusting the bureaucrats” to conduct rigorous analysis, to surface real substantive concerns, and to issue authoritative decisions.⁵⁸ Even government experts will make mistakes. But that is not an argument for proliferating a thousand procedural veto points in which every permit becomes an invitation to delay, reopen, and politicize. It is an argument for clearer law, more competent administration, and faster substantive judgment.

A presumptive approach to energy deployment should not be equated to a blind faith in markets for all aspects of energy policy. The tax policies and loan authorities enacted in the Inflation Reduction Act and preserved in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, for example, are driving the deployment of critical next-generation technologies such as nuclear and geothermal energy, and these measures should be maintained or strengthened. Buildout of interstate transmission will require a more active, muscular role for the federal government. But it is important to remember that these are not questions for the environmental review process. Once a society has adopted the rules under which projects are to be evaluated, permitting should concern itself with no more or less than whether those rules have been satisfied.

A doctrine of energy addition will require that we subordinate the macropolitics that now attach themselves to every project. If construction is made contingent on resolution of extant debates, it will not happen. The system must instead be able to proceed in spite of persistent disagreement, applying the rules of the road even when the broader politics remain unsettled. Those debates will continue. Infrastructure must be built anyway.

The Choice Ahead

The deployment of data centers is the most immediate test of whether energy addition can be made to work. Whatever one’s views of AI itself (and indeed, not all data centers are AI data centers), data centers are an incredible opportunity for the energy system.⁵⁹ Hyperscalers are willing to spend once unimaginable amounts of money on power generation, linear infrastructure, and innovative technologies if they can satisfy their thirst for electricity. Data centers have also exposed the inadequacy of the U.S. energy system in ways that could spur reform, while themselves often serving as a benefit to ratepayers by spreading out the fixed costs of the grid.⁶⁰

But data centers could merely be the next victim of our stagnant energy politics. The enormous electricity demands of data centers are most often conceptualized not as an opportunity for innovation and reform but as a burden on ratepayers, all in service of furthering the development of a potentially dangerous product.

The divisions over data centers seem to worsen with each passing month, in no small part due to the ineptitude of corporate ambassadors for artificial intelligence.⁶¹ And unfortunately, data centers are uniquely vulnerable to the tactics of energy obstructionism. They require not one class of infrastructure, but several at once: generation, transmission, cooling systems, and often entirely new interconnection and load-serving arrangements. Each of those inputs can be delayed, litigated, or politicized. Selective permission and unsettled approval could still produce high-profile projects while failing to allow the repeatable, market-wide buildout that real American AI leadership would require.

The data center buildout can inherit the politics of artificial intelligence, the politics of rising electricity prices, the politics of natural gas, and the politics of land use all at once. In so doing, they could very well push strange bedfellows into coalitions of opposition, drawing together ever-shifting groups who share little except a desire to stop the project in front of them.

It is difficult to imagine that a grassroots groundswell will demand energy addition at every level of government, and in so doing spur policymakers into action. That sequencing will likely have to be reversed. Policymakers must move first, trusting that voters who want lower electricity bills, communities that want investment, and industries that want certainty will follow, or at least not show up to the permitting hearing in opposition.

In other words, if reliability and affordability can be ensured even as data centers and factories are deployed at scale, indifference is a form of success. A public that is not organized against the energy system is a public that has implicitly consented to its expansion. The political debates will continue—they always do—but there is a meaningful difference between a debate that is happening and one that is actively impeding construction. And if voters do notice, if the benefits become concrete enough to reward the politicians who delivered them, that is a bonus. The core bet is simpler: that a doctrine of energy addition, held consistently, produces results visible enough to survive the next election cycle and the one after that.

Energy and energy-intensive assets are prerequisites to American technological and industrial leadership, which is now threatened by foreign adversaries as well as internal incoherence. In the face of this reality, we could resign ourselves to obstructionism, trading our national prosperity for the ephemeral whims of crank coalitions and the short-term satisfaction of restricting what our political opponents support. But we should embrace an unfamiliar outlook, one grounded in the principle of energy addition, and give ourselves a fighting chance at addressing the great economic and environmental challenges that will not wait for our collective sclerosis.

This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume X, Number 2 (Summer 2026): 50–61.

Notes