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White House Seeks to Remove Environmental Requirements for Infrastructure Projects
There's intelligence involved with identifying problems and solutions. But what if someone sees a problem, overstates its size, and proposes a terrible solution? Then you have another way the Trump White House is causing great harm to our nation.
The White House has drafted a proposal to scale back environmental requirements in an effort to make it easier to construct roads, bridges and pipelines across the country....
....change things such as how officials decide a pipeline route, how a proposed border wall with Mexico would be built and whether the National Park Service could object to a development that would impair tourists’ views from scenic parks such as the Grand Canyon.
The administration claims they simply want to make the process of rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure more efficient. If only it were that simple.
Although we are not experts on these specific environmental regulations, it's not difficult to imagine that there are many layers of approvals to infrastructure work that could stand to be streamlined. But that's not what's being proposed here.
....the proposal outlined in the document would gut key environmental protections in laws dating to the 1970s, such as the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act.
Keith Benes, an environmental consultant who played a key role in overseeing TransCanada’s permit application for the Keystone XL pipeline as a State Department attorney and adviser, said... the document highlights some significant problems in the current system. But in almost every instance, he noted, it simply eliminates a legal requirement that delays federal approval for projects. “It’s not, ‘Let’s streamline it or make it more effective,” Benes said. “It’s just, ‘Let’s get rid of that.’ ”
Here's a few examples of what the plan includes:
1) ....expand the government’s ability to have private firms pay for the federal environmental reviews of their own projects.
2) ....make it much easier for federal agencies to declare that certain projects have no significant impact on the environment and don’t require further study. Such declarations — known as “categorical exclusions” — are already widely used, easing the approval of many highway projects and others....[but new would be to] allow federal agencies to piggyback on other agencies’ decisions about the kinds of projects that should be exempt from deeper environmental study to “reduce duplication and unnecessary environmental analysis.” The proposal would exempt any of these rulings from judicial review under the Administrative Procedure Act, a law outside groups often use to challenge regulatory rollbacks.
3) ....limits the extent to which the EPA can weigh in or block a project from going forward. In doing so, it could allow one particularly aggressive, pro-development corner of the federal bureaucracy to set a standard for the government as a whole.
4) ....eliminate the EPA’s ability to evaluate another agency’s Environmental Impact Statement, a power that it invoked during the Obama administration’s first term to stall approval of the Keystone XL pipeline.
5) ....aims to “eliminate duplicative oversight” by abolishing the EPA’s authority to “veto” a project on the grounds that it poses too grave a risk under the Clean Water Act.
6) ....give the interior secretary the authority to approve rights of way for natural gas pipelines to cross national park lands, a move that currently requires congressional authorization.