NEPA

The Assault on NEPA: A Threat Assessment

National Environmental Policy Act

NEPA is under multiple attacks. Which are the most serious?

NEPA, the law governing environmental impact statements, is under concerted assault from Congress, the White House, and the Supreme Court.  As we will see, the Supreme Court’s recent decision in the Seven County Infrastructure Case is probably the biggest problem.  Notably, the debate over NEPA has taken place without much hard data about its effectiveness or costs, so everyone seems free to make their own assumptions.

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Data Center Permitting: A Roadmap     

AI is fueling a surge in data center construction. Here’s what you need to know.

Data Centers have significant environmental footprints, which is going to raise several permitting issues except for those using clean energy sources. The permitting issue are mapped out in this post. The Trump Administration is clearly going to do its best to free the industry from environmental limits. We’ll see how successful that is going to be.

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Listing Trump’s Environment and Energy Executive Orders

I’m counting 35 so far. But I wouldn’t be shocked to learn that I’d missed something.

I’ve put together a list of all the Trump 2.0 executive orders that I could identify dealing with environment or energy.  Just to keep you reading, I should tell you that the most important ones are near the end. Whatever you might say about Trump, no one can question his zeal for eliminating environmental protections.

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Another Attempt to Measure NEPA’s Impact

This most recent report is better, but still has significant flaws

The Breakthrough Institute has produced another report on litigation under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), building on a report it prepared earlier, which I sharply criticized in this prior blog post.  The updated report is a mixed bag: It doesn’t solve many of the methodological issues I identified in the earlier blogpost; it does …

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Shortchanging the Environment While Making NEPA More Chaotic

Trump replaced a coherent set of rules governing the executive branch with a welter of agency-specific regulations.

In one of Trump’s first executive orders, he eliminated a centralized system that Jimmy Carter initially set up to issue regulations governing environmental impact statements.  Instead, he called on each agency to issue its own regulations, which seems to have caused the predictable amount of confusion.  There seems to be little rhyme or reason in the variations 

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Major permitting reform will (likely) be bipartisan

Senate parliamentarian shoots down effort to use “pay to play” to avoid judicial review of NEPA

Several weeks ago I wrote about an effort by House Republicans to use reconciliation, a process which avoids the Senate filibuster, for a “pay to play” proposal to gut NEPA.  The proposal would have allowed sponsors of projects going through NEPA review to pay an extra fee and avoid judicial review of the NEPA review.  …

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Pay to Play

The reconciliation bill has a new approach to try and change substantive law

I posted earlier about a provision in the House reconciliation bill that attempts to effectively repeal NEPA by allowing sponsors of projects to pay a fee to avoid any judicial review of NEPA documents.  That provision is not unique, and indeed it looks like House Republicans are trying to develop a new tool to use …

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Reconciliation and public lands

Most changes would be to the leasing process for oil and gas development and reflect a partisan response to ping-pong governance

As the Senate takes up the House’s version of the reconciliation bill, I wanted to briefly summarize the main provisions that relate to public lands – in part so readers can be aware of the state of play as to what might (or might not) come to pass in the Senate.  The bill as passed …

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Abundance and the Seven County case

The Court’s decision will facilitate fossil fuel projects much more than clean energy

I’ve seen some posts on the social media site formally known as Twitter arguing that the Seven County case is a win for an abundance-focused policy – in that it will facilitate more construction of infrastructure by eliminating or reducing environmental reviews.  I think that statement is somewhat accurate in general.  But I think it is …

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Implications of the Seven County Decision

Possible limitations on NEPA analysis for climate effects and indirect effects

This is the third in our series of posts on the Seven County case.  The first post was here, summarizing the key points of the opinion.  The second post is here, providing our assessment of the analysis in the opinion.  In this third post, we discuss the implications of the case for what have been …

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