Globally, there is a strong interest in investments in zero‑carbon technologies, e.g., in industry and the electricity generation sector, but projects supporting the climate transition are argued to be held back by environmental permitting challenges. For this reason, there are calls for novel regulatory reforms that broaden the scope of environmental permitting, and the underlying legal rules, by assigning a more prominent place for projects' climate benefits, i.e., the carbon dioxide emissions displaced elsewhere in the economy. This commentary argues against such a reform, which could create more problems than it solves. It risks increasing the complexity and the uncertainty of environmental permitting process, e.g., by making it more difficult to evaluate how various legal rules should be applied in the context of individual permit applications. Such a reform also clashes with the anti-anti-environment task of environmental law and permitting. The development of zero‑carbon projects and the protection of environmental harms involve difficult trade-offs, but the main role of environmental permitting is to identify measures that allow these goals to co-exist. The solution to this green versus green dilemma is not to reform the scope of permitting processes, but rather improve the ways in which existing legislation is implemented.

中文翻译：

---

绿色与绿色：反对整体环境许可流程的案例


在全球范围内，人们对零碳技术的投资（例如工业和发电部门）有着浓厚的兴趣，但支持气候转型的项目被认为受到环境许可挑战的阻碍。出于这个原因，有人呼吁进行新的监管改革，通过为项目的气候效益（即二氧化碳排放）分配一个更突出的位置，来扩大环境许可的范围和基本法律规则。本评论反对这样的改革，因为这种改革可能带来的问题多于解决的问题。它有可能增加环境许可程序的复杂性和不确定性，例如，使评估如何在个人许可申请中应用各种法律规则变得更加困难。这样的改革也与环境法和许可的反反环境任务相冲突。零碳项目的开发和保护环境危害涉及艰难的权衡，但环境许可的主要作用是确定允许这些目标共存的措施。解决这种绿色与绿色困境的方法不是改革许可程序的范围，而是改进现有立法的实施方式。