- NEPA is a procedural requirement for any project with federal involvement to do an environmental impact review before starting construction.
- NEPA reviews often take several years to complete and can be used as a weapon by activist groups to delay or cancel projects they don’t like.
- Op-eds have argued that NEPA allows excessive community input and is un-democratic, and that progressives are doing themselves a disservice by opposing Joe Manchin’s proposed permitting reforms.
- Abolishing NEPA and replacing it with other procedures for enforcing environmental law has been suggested, though no guidance has been given on how to do that.
- NEPA is a federal law that requires environmental reviews for certain projects, but it often delays projects that would improve environmental quality.
- Think tanks have proposed various reforms to NEPA, such as extending favorable treatment to renewable energy projects, limiting judicial review, and creating special “corridors” with reduced permitting requirements.
- Defenders of NEPA argue that it is necessary to protect the environment, and that delays are often due to other environmental regulations or lack of bureaucratic capacity.
- They also suggest that NEPA can be a tool for speeding up decisions by coordinating information sharing between agencies.
- NEPA is seen as a major obstacle to rapid deep decarbonization of the US economy.
- Reforms to NEPA have been proposed, such as increasing agency staffing, using programmatic Environmental Impact Statements, allowing more renewable projects to use Environment Assessments and Categorical Exclusions, imposing time limits on some NEPA reviews, and requiring agencies to consider the positive environmental effects of a construction project.
- James W. Coleman suggests that Congress should step in to restore a balance between making reviews more predictable and timelier while maintaining their rigor, and that energy projects should receive expedited review in the D.C. Circuit, with permits eventually being immunized from invalidation under NEPA if they are forced to wait an unreasonable length of time.
Click HERE for original. Published December 9, 2022
