My Predictions and the Chaos Heading up The Hill

If you thought that the last two years have been off-the-hook, hang on to your hats; the traffic in chaos is just beginning. In the next 60 days of the “Lame Duck” congress, the corporatists will rush through a whole passel of nasty bills while the executive branch runs interference with their particular brand of Mad Hatter Tea-Party antics, the likes of which have never been seen before.

Starting this morning, behind the distraction of a snot-fight between the President and the Whitehouse Press Corps, some bills were submitted to the legislative calendar that are really problematic. HR 4239, which is an oil-industry wish-list to open up our public commons to unfettered drilling.

The bill includes handing the exclusive authority of our Federal Lands over to oil-friendly states such as Utah, Wyoming, and Montana. These states are not subject to the National Environmental Policy Act and other critical Federal regulations. The bill further states that the Bureau of Land Management will be prohibited from regulating hydraulic fracturing operations, and eliminates the need for Federal drilling permits on 57 million acres of public land.

Cradled in HR 4239 is HR 3133, which eviscerates the Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA), and transfers the authority to manage the MMPA out of NOAA and over to the Department of Interior. The bill “streamlines” Incidental Harassment Authorizations (IHAs) for the “taking” of marine mammals – requiring no mitigation, allowing scientists only 15 days to determine impacts, automatically authorizing IHAs if they are not acted upon within a tight time-line, … you get the picture.

But there is a lot more excitement in the wings, which I suspect will be dropped on us as we attempt to hack our way through the clutter. Over the last two years we (and many, many others) have provided comments on the Offshore Leasing Plan, the opening up Parks and Sanctuaries to industry, the proposed revisions to the National Environmental Policy Act, the proposed revisions to the Endangered Species Act, the proposed reductions to the National Parks and Monuments.

Under the National Environmental Policy Act, the agencies are required to synthesize all of the public comments and issue a final ruling (or Final Environmental Impact Statement) incorporating or addressing the public comments, and justifying why their course of action is the best option for America. But given how the DOI handled the public comments to their Parks and Monuments plan (redacting any comments that suggested that there were any economic benefits from other than extractive industries), it is likely that all of these decisions and rulings will not reflect the public’s wishes.

And if this might sound overwhelming enough, also in the queue are the IHAs for the Mid-Atlantic seismic surveys, which we, along with our other conservation colleagues have been holding at bay for four years(!).

My suspicions are that behind the pandemonium of a congressional tussle over the Mueller investigations and who knows what other rudeness, all of these documents will be released in the second week of December – in the midst of Chanukah, and right before the Christmas holidays. All probably with only a 30-day public review period.

So as I was saying; hang on to your hats.