My, how things change – mostly
There were a lot of clever shenanigans from the previous administration, like the appointment of agency secretaries who had made careers of attacking those very agencies, or eviscerating key environmental laws like the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) and the Endangered Species Act, and coming up with annoying work-arounds like appointing “Acting” agency executives who would not pass muster through any Senate review required of permanent Cabinet appointments.
But there was some relief. Due in part to the incredibly sloppy work of theses disrupters, a high percentage of their proposals were struck down in court. And thanks to the persistence and focused footwork of those of us working on the Atlantic Seismic Survey proposal, in the end, the surveys were never run (YEA!).
But damage was done. The Environmental Protection Agency’s library of environmental and regulatory guidelines was decimated (which may take a decade to repair), and vulnerabilities in executive procedures, agency structures, and regulatory oversight were revealed and exploited.
But the current Administration has wasted no time trying to iron this out, and they have a lot of smart folks working on it. Plans for Arctic oil leasing (which didn’t escape the Outer Continental Shelf oil-grab) were dropped and the bizarre revisions to The Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 were scrapped.
And advancing a more encouraging proposal, the multi-agency, bi-partisan “Conserving and Restoring America the Beautiful” plan to “restore the lands and waters upon which we all depend, and that bind us together as Americans” may become the diadem of the Administration’s conservation efforts. Reading through the report, it is hard to see why anyone might object. Clearly there are some smart people working on this also.
There are other reasons to be encouraged, but in an odd twist of policy legerdemain, any plans for the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) to reconsider or rescind the previous administration’s changes to NEPA are, for the time being, on the back burner.
Given that NEPA is the mechanism through which all environmental regulations are set into motion, I initially found this confusing. But on further reflection, it may make sense.
The rationale behind the previous administration’s revision was that with all of the requirements for public comments – expressing concerns for environmental, social, cultural, and economic impacts, projects would often take many years to approve. The previous administration wanted to ram through an infrastructure plan that would have locked us in to fossil fuels for the next 30 years. Opening their plan up to public review could have thwarted their efforts.
The CEQ delay on reconsidering the NEPA changes may be picking up the sling of the previous administration for an equivalent purpose – to accelerate their proposed infrastructure plans. As the saying goes, “what is good for the goose is good for the gander.” The limitations placed on public comments in NEPA as it currently stands would hamper fossil fuel interests piling up impossible roadblocks to any infrastructure plan that does not economically favor them.
Fortunately it seems like the folks in the current Administration have the interests of saving the planet in mind, not the interests of the oil industry.
There appears to be some smart people working on this as well.
