In the coming weeks, the Trump administration is poised to make some major changes to how much—or more likely, how little—environmental review and public input is required for federal projects, including for roads and bridges, oil and gas development, and pipeline construction.
Construction of the border wall is not required to meet the requirements established by the Endangered Species Act, National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act or any of more than 37 federal laws meant to help protect the environment.
As the agency responsible for permitting interstate natural gas pipelines and electric transmission, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) is the gatekeeper of America’s transition to a carbon-free future — a future desperately needed, given the dire warnings the global scientific community has issued concerning climate change. Which is why it is so astonishing that the agency does not even consider the climate impacts of the projects that it approves.
The Trump administration today announced plans to gut long-standing protections against logging and road-building in the Tongass National Forest, a cherished old-growth temperate rainforest in Southeast Alaska and homelands of the Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian people.
How Trump agencies’ NEPA reviews lowball climate impacts.