Braxton Taylor
From a public lands perspective, the new administration is tough to keep up with.
Notably this week, Secretary of Interior Doug Burgum has opted not to release the agency’s plan for cutting regulations and scaling up energy production on 500 million acres of land. Senators Martin Heinrich and Jared Huffman on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee have pressed him for answers but are yet to receive anything in return.
The plan was mandated per Burgum’s Secretarial Order 3418, Unleashing American Energy. “One week after the deadline, that action plan remains undisclosed to the public and Congress. This delay suggests an attempt to evade Congressional oversight, public scrutiny, and accountability,” the senators wrote in a letter.
While the senators wait for answers to their questions, the Trump administration has offered a few clues about how it plans to follow through on the president’s executive orders. On the policy side, an interim rule published to the federal register last week seeks to roll back the way the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) is enforced. Specifically, the rule removes a set of regulations produced by the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) that have provided consistency and guidance in how NEPA is enforced since 1978.
NEPA itself is a relatively high-level law that mandates three things: that agencies disclose the impacts of proposed projects, that they engage the public, and that they consider alternatives. CEQ’s role, however, is a little more complicated. Ronni Flannery, a senior attorney at The Wilderness Society, explains: “NEPA—the statute—is very high level and aspirational. It doesn’t contain much detail on the environmental review process, which is why the CEQ exists—to provide consistency and clarity on how to comply with the law. The purpose is to promote environmental protection and sound decision-making and involve the public.”
The new rule, however, cuts out all CEQ regulations, which for years have provided a framework for agencies to follow when planning any number of things. For example, conducting a timber sale, scoping for a solar farm, or building a trail or road. “There’s going to be a lot of uncertainty and likely a lot of litigation around what the 80-some federal agencies have to do,” Flannery said. “The CEQ regulations had been a unifying force, where agencies knew, that’s where we go to figure out how to comply with NEPA. And now those will no longer exist. It could lead to a lot of confusion and delay.”
In theory, anyway. The rule would streamline approval for all kinds of public land projects—those the outdoor community might oppose but also those that align with multi-use management and do not have a population-level impact on wildlife and habitat.
For years, environmental groups have used NEPA to pause or roadblock all kinds of projects. Recently, for example, two local nonprofits forced a logging project on the Kootenai National Forest back to the drawing board because they failed to consider the impacts of illegal roads on the forest in their project analysis—a violation of NEPA, according to the plaintiffs.
A National Forest Supervisor on a different western forest, who spoke to MeatEater but wished to remain anonymous, thinks there’s room to streamline the process. “NEPA has been abused,” he said. “Advocacy groups do important work in our country, but in Montana and that region in particular, they sue on every single project—and that’s part of why we’re here. But it’s been effective for them. The more layers you add, and all those CEQ regulations—if they catch a missing one or think you’ve misinterpreted one, it’s grounds for the project to be rescinded and we’re back to the drawing board.”
Still, he says, it’s walking a fine line. NEPA was likely intended for bigger projects, like mining or dam-building, but over the years, it’s morphed into quite the burden. According to another source, on some national forests, it requires so much personnel time to wade through something like a small timber sale that the forest actually loses money on the sale.
“NEPA is a very simple, succinct law, but over years and years of litigation and with the amount of regulations—whether it’s CEQ regulations or the agencies’ regulations—it’s just backed up. So is there some benefit to this?” asks the forest supervisor. “Maybe. But can it go too far? Oh yeah, it can, and then we’ll lose the trust of the public completely.”
In addition to the CEQ rollback, agencies will not be allowed to analyze environmental justice or social cost of greenhouse gases emitted from proposed projects—like torching a slash-pile or conducting a controlled burn—which, according to the forest supervisor, are unquantifiable but have been required by the regulations until now.
Overall, the rollbacks set the stage for pushing projects through more efficiently—likely oil and gas development. “When we’re talking about public lands, intact wildlife habitat, and clean water, those are all natural resources that NEPA was in part intended to help safeguard,” Flannery said. “This administration, obviously, has very different priorities, and it’s going to be harder for the public to engage and really know what’s happening.”
The new regulations are set to take effect on April 11.
Read the full article here