What the evidence says
The claims collected here on environmental review and permitting delay are qualitative and associational rather than quantified. No source in this set reports a delay duration, a cost figure, or a rate — the evidence establishes that permitting and approval processes are cited as obstacles, not how large those obstacles are.
One line of evidence concerns carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) projects: poor communication and lack of transparency with affected communities increase opposition to these projects, and that opposition is reported to delay their approval. The claim, drawn from a 2026 review in Risk Analysis, attributes this to two cited prior studies (Hall 2024 and Kaifang et al. 2024) but does not itself quantify how much delay results or how large the increase in opposition is.
A second line of evidence, from a cross-sectional survey of municipalities and the New Hampshire Department of Transportation (NHDOT), reports that permitting and regulatory requirements are commonly cited as barriers to road-stream crossing management — the maintenance and upgrade of infrastructure where roads cross streams. This finding is associational: it identifies permitting as a barrier category that respondents raised, without measuring how much time or cost that barrier adds.
The same survey also reports that fragmented approval processes spanning state and federal agencies introduce uncertainty and administrative burden, and that this fragmentation is associated with municipalities and agencies being discouraged from pursuing infrastructure upgrades proactively. Again, this is a stakeholder-reported association from qualitative content analysis, not a measured before/after or treatment/control comparison, and no outcome is quantified.
Across all three claims, the evidence agrees on direction — permitting and regulatory complexity are consistently reported as a friction that discourages or delays action — but says nothing about magnitude. Expected coverage of this topic, such as measured delay length, cost of delay, or comparison of outcomes under different permitting regimes, is absent from the current sources.