I used the Bluesky equivalent of Threadreader to unfurl @drvolts's important conclusions about the permitting reform bill and climate-forward activists' efforts to block or delay anything with fossil elements: 🧵 I want to make one point about the federal permitting bill. Before I do, I'd just encourage everyone who's interested in the details to listen to this podcast, which covers them ... extensively. There's a lot of complicated stuff in there & the cartoonish portrayals you see online are misleading. What’s up with the new federal permitting reform bill? Some people & groups have decided that the benefits of expedited permitting are not worth the weakening of environmental provisions that the left's lawyers have traditionally used to delay/block FF projects. I disagree, but that's a value judgment everyone must make for themselves. However ... ... permitting reform advocates have largely won the argument about the need (because they're correct, IMO!), so "just block it" isn't going to fly on its own. Thus many of those same people & groups have added: "If we hold out, we can get a better deal later." This is pretty clearly false. And, I would say, it's false in a way that's fairly obvious to anyone who knows how Congress works, so it's hard for me not to view it, at least coming from veteran NGO leaders, as *deliberately* misleading, in a way I find somewhat infuriating. Let's walk through the logic. Permitting reform is inherently a regulatory affair, which means it can't pass through the reconciliation process, which means it needs 60 votes in the Senate. That is, honestly, almost all you need to know. Everything else follows. Currently, there's a *slim* chance of getting to 60. If Democrats do very well in the midterms, as people expect, they *might* get a narrow majority in the Senate. If it's an unprecedented, historic blowout, they maybe get to 52, 53. So they would need a substantial number of GOP votes to pass a bill. Say the Dems put forward a permitting bill without any of the tradeoffs in the current bill -- a bill that was entirely designed to benefit clean energy. Would 8 or 9 Republican senators vote for that bill? No. There is a 0.00% chance of that happening. And if they did, Trump would veto it! What if, through some miracle, Dems got a narrow Senate majority & voted unanimously to reform or kill the filibuster? I'd say there's a 0.1% chance of that happening. If they did, and got unanimous Dem support for a clean-only permitting bill (also extremely unlikely!), Trump would veto it. OK, well what about 2028? Say the Dems win the presidency & majorities in both houses. They'd still need 60 votes in the Senate & still couldn't get them for a clean-only bill. What if they a) win a trifecta, b) kill the filibuster, & c) prioritize permitting over dozens of other urgent things? In that (again, EXTREMELY unlikely) situation -- a trifecta, no filibuster, permitting high on the priority list -- well then, they could do whatever they want, including improving on the bill that's on the table today! In other words, even if you think that's going to happen ... ... wisdom still [counsels] taking the deal that's on the table today, just in case. Unrestrained Dems would be able to roll back whatever changes they didn't like in today's bill. (I would warn, though, that even an unrestrained Dem majority is unlikely to jam throug a clean-only bill.) To summarize, the *best* version of the "better deal later" case involves 3 additional years of the status quo permitting regime (which favors fossil fuels!) followed by a series of total Dem triumphs, a unanimous vote agains the filibuster, & a choice to spend political capital on permitting. Any one of those is extremely unlikely, all of them happening together is vanishingly unlikely, & if they all did happen, Dems could just improve on the current bill. So. "Better deal later" is straight-up misleading. You don't need arcane political knowledge, you just need the ability to count. I would add, [@RepHuffman] @realjaredhuffman.bsky.social knows all this. The leaders of the green groups opposing this bill know all this. They know the idea of a tradeoff-free bill just over the horizon is an illusion. It's false. When they say it, they are misleading their members, their voters. I will refrain, with some effort, from speculating *why* they are doing this. Instead I'll just reiterate: if you believe the consensus of experts in the field that federal permitting is a substantial (& disproportionate) barrier to clean energy buildout, this is the bill. This is the chance. The odds of it passing are low already. (Everywhere I look, left & right, I see people retreating into their tribal bubbles.) But if it doesn't pass, there is not some better bill, free of uncomfortable tradeoffs, over the horizon. There just isn't. People who tell you otherwise are misleading you.