It appears the Biden administration is, yet again, shooting itself in the foot. As soon as this week, the Environmental Protection Agency is set to unveil new rules requiring natural gas plants to install carbon capture technology at their facilities. Biden’s own EPA, however, is actively holding back the very technology it feels the need to mandate.

If things don’t change, the new rule is unlikely to achieve much. In fact, if anything, the administration is currently the largest obstacle to its own climate goals. Carbon capture and sequestration technology — capturing carbon emissions and storing them underground — is essential to tackling climate change, but its implementation has been hindered for years by the regulatory inertia of the EPA.

In order to store captured emissions underground at scale, companies need space where they can do this, at so-called carbon capture injection wells, or Class VI injection wells. The EPA has, for some inexplicable reason, been slow-rolling the approval of these wells. In an effort to circumvent this regulatory nightmare, states have sought to secure their own permitting authority, known as “primacy,” to expedite the process. Yet here, too, applications have been gathering dust at the EPA’s offices. If the goal is reducing emissions and tackling climate change — a self-professed priority for the administration — then none of this makes any sense.

Indeed, the backlog has caused delays in new climate investments worth billions of dollars. There are currently more than 70 outstanding Class VI permit applications across eight states. As in any industry, unnecessary delays create uncertainty for businesses and discourage them from investing further. For every additional day that companies have to wait, that’s one less day of reducing emissions.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change , the United Nations’s premier scientific body on climate change, the world has no chance of meeting its climate goals without carbon capture technology. Indeed, while we need to reduce future emissions from energy production, we also need to remove existing emissions from the past. Only carbon capture technology is capable of doing both and, as such, plays a critical role in tackling climate change.

Fortunately, an elegant solution exists. By granting states the authority to bestow these permits themselves, we can decentralize decision-making and vastly expedite the rollout of carbon capture technology across the United States. However, this requires special approval from the EPA.

So far, North Dakota and Wyoming are the only states that have been granted primacy, and both came under the Trump administration. North Dakota has attracted key projects and investments, including $250 million for the largest carbon capture project in the world, expected to operationalize by early 2024.

Arizona, Louisiana, Texas, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania have applications pending , while many more states have expressed interest. So far, the Biden administration has not approved a single new state for primacy, despite repeatedly touting its climate record.

There is growing bipartisan and cross-sectional frustration over the situation, including energy companies , environmental groups , Republican lawmakers, and also many Democrats. Consider, for example, the Democratic governor of Louisiana, who has frequently criticized the EPA for its slow progress. Over a dozen Louisiana business and trade organizations have submitted a letter to the EPA urging the approval of the state's Class VI primacy application, which has been pending since April 2021. At the federal level, Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and John Barrasso (R-WY) grilled the EPA in a recent committee hearing and called for faster permitting.

Ultimately, the delay in permitting Class VI injection wells contradicts the Biden administration's own stated support for carbon capture technology. Not only does it hurt efforts to reduce emissions and tackle climate change, but it also stifles what could be a budding clean energy industry right here in the U.S. Companies investing in carbon capture technology in the U.S. need certainty that their investments will not be held up by a slow regulatory process, or they’ll simply invest elsewhere.

Christopher Barnard ( @ChrisBarnardDL ) is the vice president of external affairs at the American Conservation Coalition.