While much of the media and the American public was focused in the Iran attack this week, President Donald Trump announced significant changes to the nation’s landmark environmental law.
The changes would make it easier for federal agencies to approve infrastructure projects without jumping through needless hoops set by green justice bureaucrats.
Many of the White House’s proposed changes to the 50-year-old National Environmental Policy Act have been supported by business groups that contend the law has delayed or blocked projects like laying out oil pipelines and building dams and mines, among other things….If the proposals are enacted, it would be the first overhaul of NEPA in more than 40 years.The plan, released by the White House Council on Environmental Quality, would no longer require any form of federal environmental review of construction projects that lack substantial government funding. The change would also widen the category of projects that will be exempt from NEPA regulations.“We want to build new roads, bridges, tunnels, highways, bigger, better fast and we want to build them at less cost,” President Donald Trump said at the White House on Thursday.
In the four decades since NEPA was established, there have been enormous changes in construction techniques, materials, innovative inventions, and more environmentally sound processes that have been developed. Common sense would dictate a review and update of regulations and requirements.
Mary Neumayr, chair of the Council on Environmental Quality, reviewed the nature of the intended changes.
Neumayr said the proposal is “simplifying the definition of environmental effects and clarifying that effects must be reasonably foreseeable and require a reasonably close causal relationship to the proposed annuity.”The impacts of increased greenhouse gas emissions and the climate crisis, however, can be a longer-term issue and the length of anticipated impacts can affect whether a project is approved or not.The proposal “would not exclude the consideration of greenhouse gas emissions in NEPA analyses,” Neumayr said, but the Obama-era ruled had required it.
Nonetheless, environmentalists persist in whining about the proposal and claiming that it will create a Trump-caused disaster.
Environmentalists say those changes would allow the government to look the other way when projects contribute considerable amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.“Over past decades, courts have said this means not only what’s happening on the postage stamp-sized area around the pipeline or the bridge, but the cumulative impacts on the environmental health and water and communities surrounding the project. That’s what they’re going to try and restrict,” said Christy Goldfuss, who was the managing director of the CEQ for the last two years of the Obama administration….“We have tools to estimate what the future will look like as a result of climate change and that information should be available to decisionmakers when they spend taxpayer dollars,” she added.
So, Goldfuss wants us to base complex construction and infrastructure decisions of unreliable models that have proven to be as accurate as Ouija boards.
She isn’t the only pearl-clutcher, either.
In conclusion, the only climate change I foresee is the flooding that will come from the copious amounts of liberal tears being shed over Trump’s many victories.
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