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Last Updated on: 6th March 2025, 11:06 pm
One of the latest actions by the Ogre of the Offal Office is trying to shortcut US environmental laws, a tactic that will likely cause confusion and chaos and slow the process of permitting large oil and gas projects, according to Oil & Gas Watch. Since the inauguration, the current administration has taken aim at the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969. NEPA has often been called the “Magna Carta” of environmental law. On February 25, the administration published an “interim final rule” that seeks to remove regulations implementing NEPA dating back to the Carter Administration.
John Ruple, a legal research professor at the University of Utah and former general counsel for the Council on Environmental Quality, an agency within the White House that advises the President and coordinates the government’s actions under the environmental law, said Trump’s proposed rule change will most affect developers seeking permits from federal agencies. That includes oil and gas companies who want to build pipelines, lease public lands for drilling, or build terminals to export oil or liquified natural gas. “People need to understand that legal obligation to comply with NEPA did not go away,” Ruple said in an email. “What goes away is uniform direction about how to meet those legal obligations.”
And therein lies the sting in the tail of this particular attempt to smash all government regulations so fossil fuel companies can “drill, baby, drill.” The putative president and Republicans have said they want to cut bureaucratic red tape and speed up permitting for big projects, such as pipelines, fuel export terminals, and electricity transmission lines. In a 2018 hearing before the House Natural Resource Committee, which at the time was under the thumb of right-wing extremists, the committee’s staff accused environmental groups of using NEPA as “environmental lawfare.” Chairman Rob Bishop, a Utah Republican, said, “NEPA was never intended to be a weapon for litigants to force delays and denials on all sorts of activities.”
NEPA Went Into Effect In 1970
Signed into law in 1970, NEPA requires federal agencies to study and consider the environmental consequences of their actions. In many cases, the agency must prepare an environmental assessment, a process that can take months. If that assessment finds that the project’s impacts will be “significant,” it must prepare a more extensive environmental impact statement. The agency must include a public comment period at each step in the process to allow the public and interested parties to weigh in. However, hundreds of agency actions fall under a list of “categorial exclusions,” which do not require an environmental assessment.
Rather than streamlining this process, Trump’s proposed NEPA rule change, along with firing and laying off thousands of federal employees, will likely only sow confusion and slow the process down, causing delays for the oil and gas industry and other project developers, legal experts said. “It’s kind of a crazy way to run a country, because uncertainty is nobody’s friend, and certainly not developers,” said Deborah Sivas, director of the Stanford University Environmental Law Clinic. “It’s just a lot to have to figure out what to do now with fewer people probably doing the work.”
Putin’s puppet cannot get rid of NEPA without an act of Congress, nor can he simply waive away the decades of court cases laying out how federal agencies must follow the law. That leaves each federal agency to sort out its own process of how it will comply with the interim order. “Every federal agency must still comply with NEPA and they must now do so without the benefit of common, government-wide direction. Agencies must also take time away from their existing workload to revise their regulations. That isn’t going to get any easier as the Trump Administration goes about reducing the federal workforce,” Ruple said. Kristen Boyles, managing attorney at Earthjustice, said that federal agencies in general want to make “the most defensible decisions they can. That’s what NEPA lets them do by habit, by forcing the use of best science, by forcing them to look at alternatives, by involving the public and being transparent.”
Federal Lands & Waters
Oil and gas projects trigger a NEPA review when they require a federal agency to make a decision or involve federal funding. For example, NEPA applies to a decision to lease federal land or offshore waters for oil and gas drilling, or when the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is asked to approve a natural gas pipeline that crosses state lines. The law also applies to terminals that export LNG and offshore terminals that load oil onto tankers for export. NEPA does not apply to most oil and gas wells drilled on private or state land. It only applies to smaller oil and gas pipelines that do not cross state boundaries if they cross federal land or require a major federal permit because they will affect water bodies or wetlands.
In response to concerns about NEPA reviews taking too long, Congress in 2023 made the most significant changes to the law since it was enacted in 1970. As part of the Fiscal Responsibility Act that raised the debt ceiling, lawmakers implemented time restrictions — two years for an environmental impact statement and one year for a less stringent environmental assessment. They also passed page limits for these documents themselves — 150 pages for an environmental impact statement, or 300 pages for those of “extraordinary complexity.” Environmental assessments now cannot exceed 75 pages. Other changes involved more precise definitions of what kinds of agency decisions trigger a NEPA review and how agencies must cooperate on a joint review.
Predictability & Coherence
Mark Davis, director of the Tulane Center for Environmental Law, said businesses want “predictability and coherence,” rather than “the kind of chaos that’s being induced now. If I’m putting in a pipeline, I want to know what the rule is. I want to know if it’s consistently applied. If I’ve done a bunch of work, I don’t want to find out next week that it was pointless because now there’s a different rule or no rule.”
The rule change will not stop environmental groups and others from petitioning agencies or suing to force agencies to perform more thorough NEPA reviews. Recent examples involve Rio Grande LNG and Texas LNG, two export terminals on the southern tip of Texas. Residents, environmental groups, and the nearby city of Port Isabel have sued FERC over its authorization of the terminals. They argued that FERC’s analysis of the terminals’ greenhouse gas emissions, air pollution, and impact on low income and minority communities was deficient. The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed in August 2021 and required FERC to do an additional analysis but did not overturn FERC’s approval of the terminals. FERC did a supplemental analysis and issued an order essentially re-approving the projects.
The groups then went back to the D.C. Circuit. In August 2024, the court ruled that FERC failed to adequately address environmental justice and air quality issues in response to the previous court decision and overturned FERC’s approval of the terminals. The issue is now back to FERC, which has another chance to prepare a supplemental environmental impact statement and decide whether to re-authorize the terminals. While the litigation delayed FERC’s approval of the projects to require more rigorous study and public input, it did not kill the plans for the terminals. On February 28, NextDecade, the company behind Rio Grande LNG, announced plans for three additional liquefaction units at the proposed terminal, bringing the total to eight. It is considering adding another two units.
“If you win a NEPA case, what you win is remand back to the agency to do better, to do more analysis,” Sivas said. “The only projects they really stop are projects where there was a moment in time where they made economic sense, and then you pass that moment and they don’t anymore.” As usual, the Moron of Mar-A-Loco blithers around like a two-year-old with a full diaper, demanding everyone do what he says. It’s fun to watch him continuously shoot himself in the foot as he has done with his ridiculous tariff tumult. Be careful what you wish for, Donnie. You might just get it.
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