A massive infrastructure bill moving through the U.S. Congress could make it easier to push through new fossil fuel projects, including controversial pipelines, with reduced public input, experts and advocates warned ahead of a make-or-break vote.
House Democrats were laboring toward potential passage of the $1.2 trillion bill this week as they try to send the legislation to U.S. President Joe Biden’s desk for signature.
But language in the bill meant to streamline the federal permitting process could short-circuit key tenets of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), making it more difficult to file and win legal challenges to block projects, critics say.
“(It) would perpetuate historic environmental injustices and the racism the Biden administration was purportedly tackling” in its climate policies, said Karen Sokol, a professor at Loyola University New Orleans College of Law.
Among other provisions, the bill paves the way to exclude certain natural gas and oil projects from the standard review process and imposes new time limits on federal environmental reviews of major projects.
Proponents say such measures cut down on red tape in an often unwieldly federal bureaucracy.
“We can do things in a more efficient amount of time – build more things and obviously protect the environment and put people to work at the same time,” said Thomas Aiello with the National Taxpayers Union, a nonprofit lobbying group.
Under the legislation, lead agencies are supposed to target two years as a time frame to complete the environmental review process for some projects and limit some parts their assessments on anticipated environmental impact to 200 pages or fewer.
The administration of former President Donald Trump said in a 2020 report that the average length of an environmental impact statement conducted by the Federal Highway Administration was 742 pages and took an average of 7.37 years to complete.
But green groups said the effort to speed up decisions, which the Trump administration prioritized, undercuts environmental protections.
“We’re all for more effective and efficient environmental review, but not at the expense of just getting a pass,” said Sharon Buccino, a lawyer and environmental review expert with the Natural Resources Defense Council, a nonprofit advocacy group.
The bill restores elements of an order Trump enacted – and which Biden moved to rescind right after taking office – that sought to consolidate the federal environmental review process.
Trump’s executive order, for example, put a 90-day deadline on authorization decisions for major projects once an agency review was finished.
“The bill really allows speed to trump protection,” Buccino said.
Source: Reuters