AI is also a useful tool that offers a lot of potential to untangle the permitting thickets that make it difficult to build the infrastructure necessary for the energy transition...
Look at the Colorado River situation to see how it's affected the US already. Now that hasn't really impacted consumers per say other than through indirect water conservation and higher consumer grocery prices (slightly not a primary driver on the latter). But it's a massive deal that will ripple out more and more in the coming years.
I developed these in collaboration with some civic minded tech and government data folks back in 2018. Open for updates based on ODI, DOGE, Tech Force etc etc.
Reading through this discussion and speaking from professional experience I have to say that the real challenge isn’t just specific bans, it’s the administrative cost and the inertia of a permitting paradigm designed in the 1960s and 70s. We’re still managing complexity with relics of a regulatory architecture built for a different era — one with paper files, siloed agencies, and a bias toward “check-the-box” compliance rather than real world outcomes.
That’s why so many solutions feel like de facto bans: not because the environmental goal isn’t valid, but because the cost of compliance in time, paperwork, and legal risk creates a barrier that only well-resourced actors can navigate. The real economic deadweight loss isn’t always in the policy text — it’s in the thousands of hours and tens of thousands of dollars spent just to prove you did the minimum.
There’s enormous opportunity right now with data tools and AI agents for qualitative assessment. We don’t have to keep defaulting to rigid checklists that presume every context is the same. With modern sensors, realtime monitoring, and AI that can synthesize qualitative evidence with quantitative data, we can finally shift toward performance-based permits that look at actual impacts rather than adherence to outdated procedural triggers.
Imagine a system where:
Sensors and connected data streams show real emissions or ecological outcomes,
AI agents help translate diverse evidence into risk profiles,
Permits adapt based on performance instead of fixed thresholds divorced from context.
That’s not just a tech fantasy — that’s a pathway to reducing administrative drag while improving environmental protection. The status quo isn’t sustainable environmentally or economically. If we cling to 20th-century process dogma, we’ll keep seeing well-intentioned policies backfire into de facto bans, regulatory bottlenecks, and inequitable access to compliance.
Note that these indicators are looking at the drought monitor which just tracks soil moisture. There are active efforts underway to develop more comprehensive looks at precip and storage (snow, ground, reservoir etc)
File under big if true though perhaps an area where the hype has outrunned reality.
"Their prototype battery uses a novel combination of lithium and sodium, generating enough energy to power a lightbulb, as an initial proof of concept.
Researchers acknowledge that the chemistry has yet to be fully proven, and might not work at a larger scale. They say it’s nonetheless a promising development in the quest for alternatives to traditional lithium-ion batteries, which are widely used but have drawbacks such as scarcity, cost, environmental impact and safety."
https://www.geekwire.com/2024/microsoft-and-pnnl-make-a-bett...
