Progressives Attack Progress on National Environmental Policy Act

The Houston Courant ^ | March 16, 2020 | B. Vasoli

[The Houston Courant]

American liberals universally bemoan our “crumbling infrastructure.” Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders both do so while campaigning. So did Barack Obama as president. We hear the refrain from the Teamsters and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. CNN, PBS, CNBC, and VICE News echo the phrase. So do HuffPost, the Nation, the Los Angeles Times, the Harvard Business Review, the Guardian, Mother Jones, the Progressive… [author pauses, catches breath]… Jacobin, the New Republic, the Atlantic, the…

Screw it—the point is, the left is on record with concern about the state of America’s transportation systems and other public works. So when President Trump in January announced regulatory changes to expedite federal projects, progressives responded unequivocally… that he must be stopped.

Connecticut Attorney General William Tong (D) said the president is taking a “hack saw to over half a century of environmental protections.” Greenpeace and Environmental Health Sciences both issued statements howling of “environmental racism in action.”

What has them so riled? The Trump administration plans to ease the burden placed on federally funded or permitted projects by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Signed into law by Richard Nixon in 1970, the act initially required a federal agency preparing to undertake an action affecting the environment to study foreseeable impacts and consider countermeasures against those impacts. Later environmental laws would apply these requirements to some non-federal and private projects.

The new rules the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) wants to implement would more clearly define what kind of environmental impacts must be weighed. Current interpretation of NEPA mandates consideration of “direct impacts,” “indirect impacts,” and “cumulative impacts.” American jurists don’t agree about how to define these three terms, so the CEQ wants to ditch them and simply require federal agencies to study “impacts” as the U.S. Supreme Court has defined them. The high court rightly embraces the concept of “close causal connection” or “proximate cause.” In other words, public-works agencies shouldn’t assume the onus to prevent harms their projects won’t play a serious part in creating.

Trump is of course not abolishing NEPA; if he tried, Congress would not cooperate. That’s too bad, given the sound case for repeal.

First, no White House—Republican or Democrat—strenuously applies the statute. When the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 funded nearly 200,000 public-works projects, Obama waived NEPA reviews for over 95 percent of them. If we hush a moment and listen, we hear a rejoinder simmering in dutiful liberals’ minds: the feds should just suck it up and earnestly administer this vital environmental law; what’s stopping them?

Well, this: the roughly 200 projects each year that are too large to avoid full NEPA reviews—known as environmental impact statements, or EISs—run inordinately long. Transportation projects’ EISs took 2.2 years on average in the 1970s, 4.4 years in the 1980s, 5.1 years by the late 1990s, and 6.6 years by 2011. Obama-era efforts to make EISs less onerous still leave them at roughly five years on average today.

Thus the more important reason NEPA should go: The EIS process weakens the economic and safety gains that result from improved infrastructure by delaying projects for years and often saddling them with costly litigation. That 200-project annual figure may sound modest, and it does tend to comprise the most environmentally consequential cases, but naturally those huge projects tend to meet the nation’s most pressing infrastructural needs. And many of the thousands of projects subject to more limited NEPA reviews each year also face long delays. NEPA’s supposed benefit to human well-being cannot nearly match its harm to that well-being via slowed infrastructural progress.

And to assume the law has any benefit at all is overgenerous. NEPA neither bans hazardous practices nor enjoins salubrious ones. It only requires study, and a 2018 report by veteran science journalist Diane Katz, now at the Heritage Foundation, marshals compelling evidence that such research has been selectively heeded and widely flawed in any case.

We are asked to deplore the environmental ill effects of weakening statute that “doesn’t set environmental standards, restrict pollution, or regulate any industry.” Those words don’t appear in a report by Katz or any other right-wing expert; leftist Nation contributor Michelle Chen wrote them earlier this month to defend the law and to denounce Trump’s proposed rule changes affecting it.

Everyone expects environmentalists to litigate against the president’s NEPA policy. They should fail. If Trump’s proposal has a deficiency, it is actually its restraint. But advancing even an inch toward ending NEPA’s is better than nothing.

[ConservativeInPA]

It should be noted that Rat have a different definition of infrastructure than you and I. It includes picking winners and losers, union paybacks, and projects that have zero to traditional infrastructure, which we would call roads.