The Senate on Monday advanced bipartisan legislation aimed at speeding up permitting reviews for datacenters and other infrastructure projects. This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing The Guardian.

It’s a bill that would make it easier to build big infrastructure projects in America – everything from fossil fuel pipelines to transmission lines that would add more clean energy to the grid. And it would roll back environmental and social protections to achieve this goal. That is why climate advocates are torn over the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs act (Baaja).

The Senate voted on Monday to open debate on Baaja in the first of several procedural votes. Senators voted 73-25 on the cloture motion, which did not result in the bill being passed, but pushed it another step forward.

Trump urged all senators to vote for the 417-page bill, which is sponsored by two Republicans and two Democrats in the Senate, but after last week’s historic “blue wave” elections, some environmental and tribal advocates called on Democratic leadership to pump the brakes.

Earthjustice, the Sierra Club and the ACLU have come out against the bill because it would significantly weaken environmental laws including the National Environmental Policy Act (Nepa) and accelerate the construction of gas pipelines and ICE detention centers.

Indigenous groups held a press conference on Friday calling on senators to vote against Baaja because it would weaken the federal government’s legal obligation to consult tribes on projects that affect them.

“This is such an existential threat to Indian country,” said Mark Macarro, president of the National Congress of American Indians.

Protesters rallied outside Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer’s building on Friday over concerns that the bill could boost datacenters. “It would be highly ironic if, having won an election where datacenter opposition was at the front and center, the first act of Congress was to make it easier to build datacenters,” said Bill McKibben.

Democrats elected in the blue wave will not take their seats until January, so the bill’s proponents still have time to rush it through the Senate, and technically there is time for it to pass in the House before new Congress and go to Trump.

But midterm success for the Democrats is dialing up the political friction. House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, expected to be the House speaker in the new Congress, said the bill “falls short in several areas”, including failing to protect tribal sovereignty, and he would not “rubber-stamp legislation without more constructive involvement with our caucus”.

Earlier on Monday, the bill’s Democratic sponsors, Senators Martin Heinrich and Sheldon Whitehouse, said they had the votes to pass the bill. Heinrich said they had made last-minute changes to ensure tribal consultation, and they believed the bill would favor renewables over fossil fuels. “If we can create an open, competitive level playing field, clean is cheap, and cheap wins in the marketplace,” Heinrich said.

Whitehouse, who wore a tie with wind turbines on it, argued that passing the bill would set the stage for Democrats to work on clean energy policies next year with majorities in the House and Senate. “People should just cool their jets and have a little faith that this is not the end of the story,” he said.

Proponents of Baaja say it is needed because it takes too long to build large projects in America and the bill shortens timelines. It simplifies federal rules for building interstate transmission lines, it narrows what gets reviewed under the National Historic Preservation Act and limits tribal consultation, it limits the use of the Clean Water Act, shortens timelines for the Endangered Species Act, limits how the executive branch can interfere with federal permitting, and makes big changes to Nepa such as changing what requires Nepa review and who has standing to sue.

The fossil fuel industry is backing Baaja. The American Petroleum Institute (API) hailed the bill as “a historic opportunity” and called on congress to “finish permitting reform this year”.

“It creates a very accelerated fast track for gas pipelines,” said Earthjustice Action’s president, Abbie Dillen. “The gas industry is extraordinarily excited about this because they are interested in expanding existing pipeline capacity to get more liquefied natural gas out for export, and to be feeding power-hungry datacenters with gas.”

The bill could help pave the way for the Constitution gas pipeline that Williams Companies is trying to build through New York. The state denied the project’s water quality permit in 2016, but the company has revived the project under the Trump administration. The proposed pipeline could benefit from the bill’s changes to the Clean Water Act.

Baaja could also enable