Reinventing NEPA
What do we really want NEPA to do? And what’s the best way to do it?
NEPA has been weakened by Congress, the White House, and the Supreme Court. It’s attacked by both the oil renewables industry. Imagining reform legislation from Congress is difficult, but it’s worth imagining, if only as a thought experiment, how we could do better. I would suggest we start by asking what we can expect NEPA to accomplish after fifty years of judicial decisions and agency practice – and whether there are better ways of accomplishing those things...
CONTINUE READINGImmigration Law is Environmental Law
The recent ICE raid on a Hyundai-LG plant in Georgia highlights a problem in our visa system — and our politics.
Three weeks ago, federal and state agents conducted an immigration raid at a multi-billion-dollar Hyundai-LG battery plant under construction in Ellabell, Georgia and detained some 475 workers. About 300 of these workers were South Korean citizens. 14 were from China, Japan, and Indonesia. Another 145 were from Mexico and other Latin American countries. As has become common in such ICE operations, the raid involved masked men and firearms in an aggressive show of forc...
CONTINUE READINGIn His Own Words: The Unitary Executive Explains Science Stuff to Us
Inside the government, the war on science seems to be over, and ignorance has won.
If the whole executive branch is just an extension of the President, government science equates to presidential thinking. The idea of the unitary executive theory, at least as understood by this Administration, is that everyone in the government is the President’s sock puppet. This tends not to work so well when issues like vaccination safety, atmospheric physics, and epidemiology are involved. I wrote earlier this week about the war on science. In the past coup...
CONTINUE READINGNew York Climate Weak
The Drain is a weekly roundup of environmental and climate news from Legal Planet.
Now is the time for courage. Now is not the time to pull punches or pull speakers. We need more speech — not enforced silence. That’s why I'm not a big fan of shutting down campus speakers, even those who might spread climate obstruction. Like Vicki Hollub, the CEO of Occidental Petroleum, who was being interviewed this month as part of Harvard’s Climate Action Week when protestors disrupted the event. I think there is a way to meaningfully interview corpora...
CONTINUE READINGPermitting reform in the Trump Administration
It’s hard to do a deal when one side can’t be trusted to keep their side of the bargain
There’s more chatter about permitting reform again in Congress. I’m supportive of the concept, and thought the deal on the table at the end of the Biden Administration was probably worth doing. So there are now bipartisan efforts to amend NEPA, and also to do a broader permitting reform bill. I’ll leave specific analyses of those pieces of legislation to other posts. Here, I want to highlight a fundamental problem that any deal for permitting reform will fa...
CONTINUE READINGSPEED bump?
Recent proposal for NEPA reform in House of Representatives is sweeping and perhaps counterproductive
The House of Representatives recently held a hearing on the SPEED Act, a proposal for NEPA reform advanced by Representatives Westerman (R-Arkansas) and Golden (D-Maine). While the public announcement by the majority for the bill is that it is simply “commonsense upgrades,” a close review indicates that it would produce potentially dramatic changes to NEPA, effectively wipe out agency incentives to comply with NEPA, eliminate judicial review of NEPA, and (if it doe...
CONTINUE READINGNew CARB Chair, New CARB Mandate
Lauren Sanchez has been named to the state's most important climate job.
About 15 years ago, when presenting about California's then-new climate change law AB32, I used to show a slide with six words on it — "Why Mary Nichols Rules the World"— along with a huge photo of Mary. The slide let me talk about the enormous authority and discretion bestowed by AB32 on one agency, the California Air Resources Board. The 2006 legislation set fairly ambitious climate goals and essentially told ARB to go figure out how to meet those goals, targetin...
CONTINUE READINGThe War on Science: Week 35
Every week we get more reports about the Administration’s anti-science campaign.
It was just another week in the government’s war on science. Rather than editorialize about what’s going on, I thought it would be more useful just to relay what has come out in news reports over the last week. The facts really speak for themselves. ITEM. On Saturday, we learned that EPA’s water division had told its scientists to pause publication of papers in scientific journals pending a “review.” The order came from political appointees. There’s li...
CONTINUE READINGThe perils of federal abundance legislation
Political polarization at the federal level is a steep obstacle to any major abundance reforms
I recently wrote an assessment of the ROAD Act, a bill in the US Senate that would do some (mild) changes to NEPA and develop some guidelines and incentives for state and local governments to amend their zoning to facilitate more housing production. While the ROAD Act may be fine policy, one question is whether it is a good political choice, in the long run, to move abundance-related policy reform to the federal level. Advocates for reform of state and local land-us...
CONTINUE READINGLet’s All Play The Zoning Game!
SB 79 passes, but could there be a huge loophole in it?
Well, there’s the reason why the last election I ever won was for chalkboard monitor in the second grade. Last Friday, the California Senate passed the Assembly’s version of SB 79 (Wiener), which mandates higher densities and height restrictions within a half-mile of high-quality transit stops (with diminishing densities and heights the farther one goes from the stop). I said last week that I saw no reason why the Legislature should move on this bill now: it w...
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