America is trying to build the largest energy infrastructure overhaul since the New Deal — new transmission lines, solar farms, battery storage, the works — and it's getting murdered by a paperwork process that was designed to stop a highway from bulldozing a wetland. We trace how NEPA, the National Environmental Policy Act, went from a four-page statute into a litigation weapon that now lets anyone, for any reason, freeze critical infrastructure for a decade, and why the people most hurt by that delay are rarely the people filing the lawsuits. This is a story about how procedure becomes power when nobody's watching.