April 2017
The White House Council on Environmental Quality withdraws its guidance on the consideration greenhouse gas emissions for environmental reviews.
Earlier this year, the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) released a draft rule severely rolling back the implementing regulations for the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) the week of January 6, 2020.
Make no mistake. This one of the most severe attacks on our environment, public health, and right to public participation we have yet to see from the Trump administration.
CEQ’s NEPA regulations ensure that the public is given the opportunity to participate in decisions that impact their lives and that government agencies take a hard look at the environmental, public health, and economic impacts of proposed actions as a basis for making informed, science-based decisions.
Although both legislative and administrative attacks on NEPA are by no means new, the scope of this potential rollback is without precedent. Many agencies, most prominently the Department of Interior, have moved forward with proposed rollbacks to their own agency-specific NEPA regulations, but CEQ’s NEPA implementing regulations provide a hard backstop; that is, every agency must still meet minimum standards as required by CEQ. CEQ’s regulatory reform process carries the potential to roll back NEPA across every federal agency at once.
Rolling back NEPA’s implementing procedures is not about “modernizing” environmental permitting, it’s a thinly veiled attempt to make it easier to rubberstamp projects for corporate polluters, entrench the Trump administration’s denial of climate science and severely restrict public input in federal decision-making.
NEPA success stories are as numerous as they are varied – from the construction of the 3.5-mile Hoover Dam Bypass and the redevelopment of the country’s largest Brownfield site in Atlanta to the continued preservation of Giant Sequoia National Monument and El Yunque National Forest – thanks to this law, hundreds of millions of Americans have participated in important federal decisions.
The strength and flexibility of NEPA and its implementing regulations are one of the reasons it is the United States’ most widely imitated law, with over 160 other countries adopting laws modeled after NEPA. Once again, the Trump administration is proposing to retreat from policies where the U.S. was once a leader.
Industry groups and their friends in Washington, DC want to undermine NEPA because it’s a powerful tool for our communities to exercise their right to participate in important government decisions. We can’t let that happen.
Citizens are only likely to have 60 days to submit a comment urging the Trump administration to protect NEPA. Please sign the petition below!
The right of citizens to meaningfully weigh in on federal decisions impacting their communities is the most important guarantee of the current CEQ regulations. Limiting the ability of the public to speak out about federal projects happening in their backyards will make it easier for massive corporations to force through projects without community support.
The consideration of project alternatives is often called “the heart of the environmental impact statement.” Consideration of a range of project alternatives often results in the identification of easily implemented mitigation measures and saves taxpayer money and makes a project more likely to be approved. This proposal would change this requirement.
The draft rule is expected to establish two-year time limits for environmental impact statements (EISs) and one-year limits for environmental assessments (EAs) regardless of project complexity or controversy.
NEPA provides an adaptive framework empowering federal agencies to address the climate impacts of their actions. The Trump administration, however, has aggressively undermined climate action. By eliminating cumulative impact analysis, this proposal is putting taxpayer dollars and communities at risk by allowing agencies to fund projects that are less resilient to severe drought, stronger hurricanes, and more severe weather.
Private corporations would be allowed to prepare their own environmental impact statements “under the supervision of an agency,” thus eliminating objective analyses about the environmental and related social and economic effects of their proposal. Furthermore, federal contractors would no longer need to disclose conflicts of interests or financial stakes in the projects they are reviewing.
The draft rule is seeks to redefine the term “major federal action” to reduce the number of federal actions subject to environmental review and public input. That means the impacts of many federal actions that previously would have been subject to public disclosure and environmental review will now be shrouded in secrecy.
NEPA reviews are one of the primary ways the federal government considers the frequently disproportionate impacts the siting large-scale, highly disruptive projects and facilities have on people of color, indigenous people, and poor and immigrant populations. Core to disproportionate impact analysis is the consideration of cumulative impacts which result from past, present, and reasonably foreseeable future actions in a project area. The current proposal explicitly eliminates the requirement to consider such impacts.
Analysis of impacts associated with a proposal to mine, drill, or log would be limited to those deemed to have “a reasonably close causal relationship to the proposed action,” with no analysis of indirect or cumulative effects that are considered to be “remote in time, geographically remote, or the product of a lengthy causal chain” (i.e., climate change).
The White House Council on Environmental Quality withdraws its guidance on the consideration greenhouse gas emissions for environmental reviews.
The Department of the Interior limits the length and scope of environmental reviews on public lands.
President Trump issues Executive Order 13807 shortening the timeline for environmental reviews and instructing federal agencies to revise their NEPA implementing procedures.
President Trump nominates climate denier Kathleen Hartnett White to lead the White House Council on Environmental Quality.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) narrows consideration and disclosure of greenhouse gas emissions for pipeline projects.
The White House Council on Environmental Quality issues an Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPRM) opening up NEPA to potentially serious revisions.
The Forest Service announces plans to revise its regulations governing mining and oil and gas exploration.
President Trump signs two Executive Orders expediting the permitting process for risky oil and gas pipelines, limiting states’ decision-making power on such projects.
The White House releases new climate guidance for environmental reviews eliminating requirements to analyze long-term climate impacts of federal projects. The so-called climate guidance fails to mention the phrase “climate change.”
The White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) announces sweeping rollbacks to the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), seeking to rubberstamp dangerous and toxic federal projects, cut public out of government decision-making, and further entrench federal climate denial.