Public Lands
Chaos on the Public Lands?
Congress has begun applying the Congressional Review Act to federal public lands management plans. The impacts might be significant.
The Congressional Review Act (CRA) creates a streamlined process by which Congress can disapprove rules issued by federal agencies – it is one of the few legislative actions that are exempt from the filibuster in Congress, along with reconciliation legislation. This Congress has been aggressive in using the CRA, perhaps because polarization in Congress has …
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CONTINUE READINGKeeping Coal on Life Support
Trump is doing everything he can to boost coal. And still, the industry is on life support.
The good news for investors is that coal is behaving like much of the non-AI stock market this year. Yet this growth is taking place on a very low baseline, which had slumped well below from Great Recession levels. If investors are to be believed, Trump may be able to keep the coal industry on life support. But it’s still in the ICU.
CONTINUE READINGUCLA Report Offers Framework for Resolving Coastal Conflicts
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Guest contributors Maeve Anderson and Mackay Peltzer write that regulatory updates are needed to ensure California’s coastal planning remains consistent with the intent of the Coastal Act.
California’s iconic coastline is simultaneously a source of pride and tension for the state. As increasingly severe storms, intensified by climate change, accelerate the erosion of beaches and bluffs, the conflict around land use at the coast has also intensified. Nowhere exemplifies this reality better than the City of Pacifica, a popular surfing destination located …
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CONTINUE READINGNightmare on Penn Ave (Part 2)
After a year of Trump 2.0, here’s how things stand.
Eight years ago almost to the day, I wrote a post titled, “One Year and Counting.” I was writing at the end of Trump’s first year in office. And here we are again, one year into a second Trump Administration. Trump’s basically deregulatory strategy has remained largely unchanged. But there are some notable differences in the situations then and now. I closed my 2017 post with this: “One characteristic of the Trump Administration is a ceaseless stream of controversies and dramas. But generally speaking, the amount of actual legal change has been much more limited, because the system is designed to provide checks on administrative and legislative action.” It remains to be seen how well those checks will function this time around.
CONTINUE READINGCreating Lease Certainty
There are some steps Congress could take to increase certainty for energy leases on federal lands, but there will be tradeoffs.
As my prior two posts noted, there are substantial legal authorities that allow an executive to suspend or cancel leases for energy development. In the case of on-shore leases, that power might be extremely broad. And with an Administration that appears to use its powers to pursue political grudges and to push the envelope on …
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CONTINUE READINGCanceling Onshore Leases
The executive may have broad authority to cancel onshore leases, perhaps even without compensation. Congress might want to fix that.
My last post covered the likely power that the Administration has to cancel off-shore leases for wind projects – a power that it probably has, if it was to ever get its act together. But even though the Administration has not yet used it, I think it probably has even broader power to cancel leases …
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CONTINUE READINGCan They Do That?
The feds probably do ultimately have the authority to shut down offshore wind farms – if they ever get their act together.
This week, three different offshore wind projects that were targeted with shutdown orders by the Trump Administration won preliminary injunctions against those orders. Those lawsuits are in response to a blanket order in December from the Trump Administration, issuing stop work orders to all off-shore wind projects in the United States. (For some projects, this …
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CONTINUE READINGOn the theory of permitting certainty
It’s a hard problem to solve. There might be lessons from housing and land-use.
What is being called “permitting certainty” is now a central component of any permitting reform that might pass through this Congress. Permitting certainty is the concept of making it harder for the Executive Branch to capriciously revoke permits based on personal grudges, political vendettas, or other factors that Congress does not wish to be the …
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CONTINUE READINGKick Him In The Tender Parts
Why in the world does New York still have the Donald J. Trump State Park?
You might have missed it, but while most normal Americans were celebrating the New Year, Donald Trump continued his serial ransacking of public spaces and buildings. On New Year’s Eve, the Administration announced the cancelling of leases of three DC golf courses, with the intention of transferring the leases to the Trump Organization. As golf …
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CONTINUE READINGWhat’s So Special About NEPA?
Guest contributors Dinah Bear and Niel Lawrence argue that the National Environmental Policy Act process provides unique and wide-reaching benefits.
Attacks on our federal environmental charter, the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, have escalated from seeking the statute’s truncation to its outright abolition. Increasingly bandied about is the claim that while all well and good when passed in 1969, NEPA is now superfluous because we have a whole series of other laws protecting specific resource and places. This ill-founded contention misses what is unique about NEPA and why we benefit from it, today as much as ever.
NEPA is our one, full-spectrum, nationwide mechanism for getting agencies to use their discretion better. Other, resource-specific,federal environmental laws are prohibitory, setting minimum protective standards as a floor under agency discretion. They provide a basic “thou shalt not” for individual resources and values. NEPA’s focus is on the positive, the field of possibilities, not what agencies have to avoid but rather on how to do best what they can do—over and above those often bare-bones minimums. As applied, if well and conscientiously implemented, NEPA equips and nudges agencies toward decisions that are smart, well-informed, and responsive. In so doing, it confers three critical benefits on the public.
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