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Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are calling for faster permitting of energy projects. Hawaii Senator Brian Schatz has said permitting reform “is essential for our climate goals.” Schatz worked with West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin on permitting reform legislation that Manchin tried and failed to tack onto must-pass government funding legislation last month.
The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) serves as an umbrella, or organizing structure, for compliance with other laws, like the Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act, and helps agencies coordinate their permitting processes for projects on federal lands and waters. The Manchin-Schatz deal would have would have shortened the timelines agencies have to review projects for NEPA compliance.
That poses some potential issues, according to University of Utah Associate Professor of Law Jamie Pleune, who joined the Center for Western Priorities’ podcast recently to talk about her research on NEPA permitting. “There’s very good evidence from the [University of Utah’s Wallace] Stegner Center that when a decision is rushed out the door and is later required to be supplemented, it does cause significant delays that take much longer than it would have taken just to make the right decision in the first place,” Pleune said.
This spring, Pleune and her colleagues published an analysis of over 41,000 U.S. Forest Service NEPA decisions, which found that most permitting processes are quite efficient, with only a handful of projects facing major delays. It found that in cases in which there are delays, most are due to either agency staffing and expertise issues or bad project design — not red tape.
“This indicates that the delays are not caused by the regulatory or statutory requirements of NEPA. But they are caused by things that are happening during the NEPA process,” Pleune said. “Distinguishing between those two things is very important, because if it’s not the language of the statute or the regulations that’s causing the problem, then changing that isn’t going to solve the problem.” To learn more about Pleune's evidence-based look at environmental reviews, listen to the podcast episode or read a blog summary on Westwise.
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When the Colorado River compact was established a century ago, tribes were not signatories because we weren’t considered to be citizens of the United States. We need to be part of that conversation now.”
