“Passed in 1969, NEPA requires federal agencies to study the environmental impacts of actions they take, whether that’s funding a new highway or approving a new pipeline. Over the decades, the burden imposed by NEPA has grown: The environmental reviews it mandates take years on average to complete and can run hundreds if not thousands of pages.
Donald Trump’s administration tried to streamline things a bit by limiting the environmental effects that agencies had to examine and by putting definitive time and page limits on NEPA reviews.
Even those marginal changes, implemented in September 2020, proved controversial with many environmentalists. Their concerns have resonated with the Biden administration.
“The basic community safeguards we are proposing to restore would help ensure that American infrastructure gets built right the first time, and delivers real benefits—not harms—to people who live nearby,” said CEQ Chair Brenda Mallory on Thursday.
The proposed rule published by the CEQ in the Federal Register would make a number of changes.
Most significantly, it would restore requirements that agencies’ NEPA reviews take into account the indirect and cumulative effects of projects.”
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“Environmentalist groups have generally praised these changes.”
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“Other NEPA experts are more critical, arguing that this is an ineffective and potentially counterproductive way to address climate change.
“All it does is create a little more paperwork,” says Eli Dourado, a senior research fellow at Utah State University’s Center for Growth and Opportunity. “Given the need to build a lot of infrastructure and new technologies and physical stuff in the world, NEPA is probably on net harming our response to climate change.”
Indeed, NEPA has slowed down a number of projects that environmentalists would typically support for their emission-reducing potential.
The U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s 2019 decision to perform a cumulative impact analysis under NEPA of a massive wind farm being constructed off the coast of Massachusetts has significantly delayed that project.
It will likewise take years for the federal government to perform a NEPA-mandated review of a plan to charge drivers a toll to enter lower Manhattan. Environmentalists and transit advocates have generally praised that congestion pricing plan for its potential to reduce carbon emissions and to raise money for public transit. The tolls were supposed to be up and running in January 2021. The need to perform an environmental assessment for the project will mean that it now won’t start until 2023 at the earliest.
All the additional green investments the Biden administration and Democrats in Congress want to fund with their $1 trillion infrastructure bill and $3.5 trillion Build Back Better legislation could run into a similar fate.
“It’s making some of the infrastructure projects they want to do radically more expensive,” says Neil Chilson, a senior research fellow at Stand Together. He says the regulatory changes will also empower the nation’s NIMBYs to slow down projects they dislike.”
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“By expanding the number of effects that have to be considered in the NEPA process, the Biden administration is giving project opponents more room to claim that an environmental review is insufficient.
Federal agencies and private project sponsors, in turn, will have to spend more time preparing litigation-proof environmental documents to preempt these complaints, says Chilson.
That could be particularly damaging for solar plants that are proposed to be constructed on public lands in the American west, and which have attracted fierce opposition from local groups concerned about their impact on endangered species and recreational lands.”
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“CEQ has said that reversing those Trump-era tweaks is only the first phase of its planned rulemaking. In a second phase, the administration says, it plans to make more substantive changes that create “efficient and effective environmental reviews.”
That leaves open the possibility that we’ll get more productive reforms later on, says Dourado.”