That first point is incomprehensible to me, "NEPA doesn't slow projects down because it only adds 3 years to timelines", 3 years is a long time?! Although the entire Roosevelt Institute summary of their climate work is about anti-racism so I guess it makes sense if their climate goals are unrelated to the climate
"She points out that the median time for the U.S. Forest Service to prepare an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) — the most rigorous type of NEPA review — is only 2.8 years"
Honestly, I kind of stopped reading once I realized that the author actually believes that "only 2.8 years" is a DEFENSE of NEPA instead of a CONDEMNATION of it. I applaud you for engaging with these authors in good faith, but I sincerely doubt that their arguments were in good faith in the first place.
A vast build out is not needed if we simply replace fossil fuel generators with nuclear power. Only upgrades will be needed.
It would be incredibly cheap and fast if we had rational regulation, which values a life lost to radioactivity the same as a life lost to other pollutants. At the moment a life lost to radioactivity is valued AT LEAST 100 times more. Changing this regulation will cost nothing.
Wouldn’t the reforms needed to build out nuclear be the exact same reforms needed to build out anything else? If anything, wouldn’t those reforms be even harder?
All you need to do is change the safety limit from 1 mSv/year to 1 mSV/day. That is basically a search and replace function. I can do it for free. Suddenly nuclear power would because much cheaper and faster.
You just replace the current power plants with nuclear plants. These emit far less radioactivity that coal plants. No need for more land and no need for more transmission lines.
Of course there will be huge opposition to this but ask people why a life lost to radioactivity is worth 100-5000 times more than a life lost to pollution produced by fossil fuel and renewables?
If people mention disaster refer them to the worst energy disaster - they involve renewables.
If people mention nuclear waste point out that no one has ever been harmed by nuclear waste from nuclear power plants.
When we face a climate crisis it is worth educating people about reality.
The reason people oppose renewables is that they require so much damage to the environment. Changing the rules does not change this damage.
Changing the rules on nuclear reduces the damage to the environment as nuclear power is by far the cleanest form of energy with respect to environmental harm.
Animals and plants have no irrational fear of radioactivity. They thrive in the Chernobyl and Fukushima exclusion zones.
I would say that a number of people oppose ANY new energy project because they believe in (or hope for) some kind of mythical “degrowth” solution. Also, I don’t see where vast arrays of solar panels in areas of vast fields of soybeans or offshore wind farms are so damaging to the environment.
Lastly, here in PA, the utilities are shutting down existing nuclear plants claiming they are too expensive to run. It is hard to see how new ones would be feasible.
Well Friends of the Earth opposed nuclear power at the outset because they worried that abundant cheap electricity would result in over population. And they were funded by oil money.
Nuclear power is inherently cheap. But it can be made unaffordable by ramping up regulatory requirements to unreasonable levels. What is it about Americans that makes them unable to view what other countries have achieved (or failed at) and take that on board?
The high cost of nuclear is entirely self imposed. Ot can be eliminate with a stroke of the pen. All that is needed is to treat the risk of harm for radioactivity on the same basis as other risks, such as air pollution.
At the moment regulations value a life lost to radioactivity from nuclear power and nuclear waste at least 100 and 2500 times more, respectively than life lost to air pollution. This only makes sense if you want to eliminate nuclear power as an affordable source of energy.
"The reason people oppose renewables is that they require so much damage to the environment. Changing the rules does not change this damage."
An orthogonal point to the OPs, though. People seem to weigh the damage that renewables do the environment at somewhere between 10x -100x the factor in comparison to the damage that fossil fuels do to the environment.
It's basically, "You can't build that Solar plant over here because several thousand migratory birds will die, but it is totally ok to keep using that coal factory over there even though the effects of coal are likely to, you know, kill billions if we keep going like this."
Photovoltaic solar plants don’t kill birds, they kill desert tortoises and other endangered ground animals. Mirrors heating a fluid in a tower can fry birds that fly into the beams, but those types of solar plants are rare and no longer cost competitive with PV. Wind turbines kill birds. Coal kills thousands over a long period from particulate pollution, but I doubt it will kill billions. Nuclear kills neither birds or humans, maybe some ground dwellers during construction, but that is more true for solar which takes up hundreds of times the land area as nuclear for the same output.
Of course I am exaggerating. I don't think anyone with a sense of humor doubted that.
"Burning fossil fuels increases a future risk by a small amount."
Now who's exaggerating? We've got pretty extensive data on deaths caused by fossil fuels. They are not small. Every year that an *existing* fossil fuel plant continues to operate, it kills people. Those deaths are somehow never on the right side of the ledger when compared against the damage that a new renewable plant may cause on the left side.
"(2) The choice is not between solar PV and coal. Nuclear power is much cleaner than both."
a) this is truly false, that is a non-choice. The NRC has approved... checks notes... zero new nuclear power plants since its inception. Also, I was comparing the costs of building a new plant (which must overcome regulation) with allowing an EXISTING plant to continue operating (which must not).
"the worst energy disaster[s] - they involve renewables."
Citation definitely needed.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it's impossible. But a statement like that, with nothing to back it up, sounds exactly like "Electric cars are worse for the environment", and "Seatbelts kill more people than they save".
Come on. The nuclear power plants would need to be built, hence a build out. Please don't ignore the obvious in order to bring up a different topic.
I do think it's worth being a bit more careful with nuclear given the chance of long tail events, but in general I support revisiting the regulation of nuclear.
Nuclear power can be built on existing power plant sites, so no new land is needed. No new transmission lines are needed either. My understanding was that it was building solar, wind and transmission lines one new sites that was difficult.
Also this is just on the power generation side- there are other parts of the economy that would need to be updated, like buildings and transportation, to meet climate goals
I appreciate that the author on focused on his very narrow realm of "clean energy", but NEPA and CEQA (California's version) make absolutely every project vastly more expensive.
"But progressive advocates of green industrial policy have been stubbornly slow to realize that NEPA stands in the way of their dreams."
The modern Left is full of contradictions: global warming protestors who hate nuclear power; Harvard grads railing against elitism; educated whites demanding that cops abandon minority neighborhoods; anti-Iraq-war protestors who are now Ukraine hawks; a climate czar who regularly flies a private jet. The unifying belief of the left today is the maintenance of the professional managerial class at the expense of everyone else. NEPA is part of that, since it provides lots of make-work for their useless college graduates.
I'm reminded of an old quote by Newt Gingrich, who was a WWII historian before joining Congress: "December 7th 1941 to August 14th, 1945 is less than 4 years. In less than 4 years, we defeated Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan. Today it takes 23 years to add a 5th runway to the Atlanta airport. We are simply not prepared, today, to be a serious country." He gave that speech in 2008; things haven't improved since.
"the U.S. is practically the only country to allow local NIMBYs the opportunity to tie up fully legally compliant projects in court for years over purely procedural requirements. "
Not true. Canada has NEPA beat by several magnitudes, albeit through different mechanisms. The duty to consult indigenous groups in Canada is used as a limitless stalling tactic on legally compliant projects of almost any size. Such groups now include anyone claiming to be Metis with scant evidence, and opposition can be funded by anyone, often foreign interest groups.
Virtually all major new projects are now impossible in Canada: transmission lines, pipelines, mines, roads, reactors. The average delay of replacement projects (e.g. more reactors on an existing site) or smaller but significant projects has stretched beyond a decade. I've been involved in green projects that have been delayed by nearly 30 years, with no end in sight.
The hidden graveyard covers the landscape.
There are exceptions to the above, such as when a government eliminated non-indigenous NIMBY actions for wind and solar projects. But that was a political blunder and ultimately part of an energy/economic disaster, which couldn't be sustained.
One of the rare good things about the climate panic and all the money being shoveled into doing something about it is how at least now some light is being shed on how excessive government regulation is harming the path to progress. We need more energy (as well as more people, technological advancement and infrastructure) and we won’t get much of it with NEPA, NRC and FDA holding back progress as they do now with their enormous regulatory roadblocks.
The arguments defending NEPA are so transparently horrible, I'm going to automatically assume anything produced by the Roosevelt Institute to be suspicious.
A good essay. Truly strange times we live in, that it's the progressives trying to build outrage against government red tape and get it ripped down so the energy industry can get to work. I wonder what, if anything, there is to learn from how the legacy energy industries have fought that bureaucracy?
I would also wonder whether any of the conceptual ideas for fixing things, tossed out in the last few paragraphs, have made their way to some sort of legislative proposal that is working to build attention and consensus.
Call me crazy, but maybe we should have thought about this before we signed up for $540bn? All the trees will burn before the Forest Service finishes all of these reviews.
But the Senate knew NEPA would be the problem when voting on the IRA and Manchin’s amendment to include NEPA reform was rejected by the other Democrats, so it’s kind of crazy for them to appropriate all that spending knowing the projects it funded will mostly tied up in courts for many years. Dysfunctional government as to be expected from past performance.
The level of dysfunction in NEPA is actually disgusting. I fervently hope we get it overhauled soon.
On that note, anyone have thoughts on how it could be reformed? Would it be Congressional legislation? Is this something we should be writing to our House and Senate representatives about?
The article proposes several options in the closing paragraphs. I did not, however, see some sort of consolidated proposal sponsored by a coalition that is trying to build consensus and get it done, so I'd welcome learning about one.
Ah, this article reminds me of the time I had NEPA used by a competitor to try and keep me from driving on a dirt road. Once. Behind a dump truck. At an active quarry.
Reform it. I can almost guarantee that the number of projects that get strangled out by bureaucracy and weaponization of the bureaucracy before they even start the multi-year clock for a review is probably orders of magnitude larger.
It seems like keeping NEPA might actually have some benefits - it keeps the discussions in federal courts. If you remove it, and if states replace it, then you're left with the fun issue that the planned energy transition largely means building out wind and solar farms plus associated transmission capacity in "red" states and regions to serve "blue" ones. That seems likely to be contentious regardless of NEPA, but at least NEPA keeps the discussion at a higher level of the political system.
Though maybe some thought and empathy should be given to *why* people don't want these projects near them.
Also, if the worry is about building inter-regional transmission capacity from Midwestern wind farms to Northeastern cities (for example), maybe we might consider changing some of the policies that keep hollowing out places in the Midwest and exacerbating the population shifts that render so much long-distance transmission capacity necessary in the first place.
the "hollowing out" is due to the fact that (A) people like living in cities, especially big, prosperous ones, and (B) our economy no longer requires 90%+ of people to be involved in agriculture.
That’s true, and I don’t know which policies Peaches was referring to. But many people that don’t like living in big cities, especially expensive dysfunctional ones. Like the 90% of agricultural jobs that aren’t needed, I’d say a large percentage of jobs no longer need to be in cities, which is why NYC and SF downtown business districts are hollowing out. Suburbs are were many people are happiest and where many jobs are located. For example, Silicon Valley is one big suburb.
I didn't think I'd have to defend a tangent like that, but let me rephrase:
To the extent there is a problem with population migration patterns in the US (which itself is arguable), it is FAR beyond the capacity of any discussion of environmental review, infrastructure construction, or even a presidential administration, to do anything meaningful about it.
And likewise an economics blog that was just trying to comment about the former. Though, to be fair, I do think Noah answering the question of "is migration and depopulation a big problem?" could be a very interesting read.
The guest post had a strong focus on permitting for long-distance transmission lines, which are largely needed because of that mismatch. And I truly don't believe the mismatch is a law of nature determined by a phenomenon of labor productivity in agriculture that mostly predated the population shifts I'm referring to, either, but instead that it is a result of much more recent policy decisions. But arguing on the internet is rarely productive and I'm worried that's what this has become.
Anyway, this all started with an aside to my main point - that removing NEPA might just be making room for state governments to put their hands in. And those state governments might be less favorable to these sorts of projects than the federal court system.
Sorry if I came across argumentative, wasn't my intention. Thanks for the substantive reply.
I would genuinely be interested what those policy decisions are that you have in mind. From my perspective, a lot of the shift is an inability of those metro areas to educate, or attract and retain, people skilled in the sorts of disciplines that are growing fast and paying well. From that flows the benefits to local budgets, infrastructure funding, and much else that makes those metro areas attractive places to live and stay and raise families. But I live in Pittsburgh, which has some local assets that, say, Toledo or Fort Wayne do not. So I may be missing some key pieces.
Anyway, it seems to me like the proposal is not to "remove" NEPA, but rather, modify it so that it can't be used as a cudgel or an unreasonable delay. Define "major" projects, narrowly and sensibly. Eliminate the private cause-of-action except under extraordinary circumstances. Lay out exactly what is expected of agencies, so they don't have to put out an average of 1600 pages just to approve a project. etc. I think we likely agree that those modifications would be good, but that removing it entirely would create a power vacuum filled (much more poorly or venally) by the states themselves.
That first point is incomprehensible to me, "NEPA doesn't slow projects down because it only adds 3 years to timelines", 3 years is a long time?! Although the entire Roosevelt Institute summary of their climate work is about anti-racism so I guess it makes sense if their climate goals are unrelated to the climate
"She points out that the median time for the U.S. Forest Service to prepare an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) — the most rigorous type of NEPA review — is only 2.8 years"
Honestly, I kind of stopped reading once I realized that the author actually believes that "only 2.8 years" is a DEFENSE of NEPA instead of a CONDEMNATION of it. I applaud you for engaging with these authors in good faith, but I sincerely doubt that their arguments were in good faith in the first place.
If you'd continued reading, you'd find the piece criticized the author for exactly the same point.
A vast build out is not needed if we simply replace fossil fuel generators with nuclear power. Only upgrades will be needed.
It would be incredibly cheap and fast if we had rational regulation, which values a life lost to radioactivity the same as a life lost to other pollutants. At the moment a life lost to radioactivity is valued AT LEAST 100 times more. Changing this regulation will cost nothing.
Wouldn’t the reforms needed to build out nuclear be the exact same reforms needed to build out anything else? If anything, wouldn’t those reforms be even harder?
All you need to do is change the safety limit from 1 mSv/year to 1 mSV/day. That is basically a search and replace function. I can do it for free. Suddenly nuclear power would because much cheaper and faster.
You just replace the current power plants with nuclear plants. These emit far less radioactivity that coal plants. No need for more land and no need for more transmission lines.
Of course there will be huge opposition to this but ask people why a life lost to radioactivity is worth 100-5000 times more than a life lost to pollution produced by fossil fuel and renewables?
If people mention disaster refer them to the worst energy disaster - they involve renewables.
If people mention nuclear waste point out that no one has ever been harmed by nuclear waste from nuclear power plants.
When we face a climate crisis it is worth educating people about reality.
https://open.substack.com/pub/jackdevanney/p/the-case-for-1-msv-per-day?r=7g2hn&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
I don't foresee increasing radiation limits 365x being as easy as editing a word document
The reason people oppose renewables is that they require so much damage to the environment. Changing the rules does not change this damage.
Changing the rules on nuclear reduces the damage to the environment as nuclear power is by far the cleanest form of energy with respect to environmental harm.
Animals and plants have no irrational fear of radioactivity. They thrive in the Chernobyl and Fukushima exclusion zones.
I would say that a number of people oppose ANY new energy project because they believe in (or hope for) some kind of mythical “degrowth” solution. Also, I don’t see where vast arrays of solar panels in areas of vast fields of soybeans or offshore wind farms are so damaging to the environment.
Lastly, here in PA, the utilities are shutting down existing nuclear plants claiming they are too expensive to run. It is hard to see how new ones would be feasible.
Well Friends of the Earth opposed nuclear power at the outset because they worried that abundant cheap electricity would result in over population. And they were funded by oil money.
Nuclear power is inherently cheap. But it can be made unaffordable by ramping up regulatory requirements to unreasonable levels. What is it about Americans that makes them unable to view what other countries have achieved (or failed at) and take that on board?
The high cost of nuclear is entirely self imposed. Ot can be eliminate with a stroke of the pen. All that is needed is to treat the risk of harm for radioactivity on the same basis as other risks, such as air pollution.
At the moment regulations value a life lost to radioactivity from nuclear power and nuclear waste at least 100 and 2500 times more, respectively than life lost to air pollution. This only makes sense if you want to eliminate nuclear power as an affordable source of energy.
"The reason people oppose renewables is that they require so much damage to the environment. Changing the rules does not change this damage."
An orthogonal point to the OPs, though. People seem to weigh the damage that renewables do the environment at somewhere between 10x -100x the factor in comparison to the damage that fossil fuels do to the environment.
It's basically, "You can't build that Solar plant over here because several thousand migratory birds will die, but it is totally ok to keep using that coal factory over there even though the effects of coal are likely to, you know, kill billions if we keep going like this."
Photovoltaic solar plants don’t kill birds, they kill desert tortoises and other endangered ground animals. Mirrors heating a fluid in a tower can fry birds that fly into the beams, but those types of solar plants are rare and no longer cost competitive with PV. Wind turbines kill birds. Coal kills thousands over a long period from particulate pollution, but I doubt it will kill billions. Nuclear kills neither birds or humans, maybe some ground dwellers during construction, but that is more true for solar which takes up hundreds of times the land area as nuclear for the same output.
No solar site has killed an endangered tortoise. They moved some out of active construction sites (like they do for other non-solar projects also).
But once built they tend to thrive there, with minimal accommodations.
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2020/01/13/a-desert-solar-farm-can-actually-improve-desert-tortoise-habitat/
I think you are exaggerating just a touch.
(1) Solar PV in open land damages the local environment immediately. Burning fossil fuels increases a future risk by a small amount.
(2) The choice is not between solar PV and coal. Nuclear power is much cleaner than both.
Of course I am exaggerating. I don't think anyone with a sense of humor doubted that.
"Burning fossil fuels increases a future risk by a small amount."
Now who's exaggerating? We've got pretty extensive data on deaths caused by fossil fuels. They are not small. Every year that an *existing* fossil fuel plant continues to operate, it kills people. Those deaths are somehow never on the right side of the ledger when compared against the damage that a new renewable plant may cause on the left side.
"(2) The choice is not between solar PV and coal. Nuclear power is much cleaner than both."
a) this is truly false, that is a non-choice. The NRC has approved... checks notes... zero new nuclear power plants since its inception. Also, I was comparing the costs of building a new plant (which must overcome regulation) with allowing an EXISTING plant to continue operating (which must not).
"the worst energy disaster[s] - they involve renewables."
Citation definitely needed.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it's impossible. But a statement like that, with nothing to back it up, sounds exactly like "Electric cars are worse for the environment", and "Seatbelts kill more people than they save".
https://thoughtscapism.com/2019/04/11/what-about-chernobyl-worlds-deadliest-energy-accidents-in-perspective/
Come on. The nuclear power plants would need to be built, hence a build out. Please don't ignore the obvious in order to bring up a different topic.
I do think it's worth being a bit more careful with nuclear given the chance of long tail events, but in general I support revisiting the regulation of nuclear.
Nuclear power can be built on existing power plant sites, so no new land is needed. No new transmission lines are needed either. My understanding was that it was building solar, wind and transmission lines one new sites that was difficult.
Also this is just on the power generation side- there are other parts of the economy that would need to be updated, like buildings and transportation, to meet climate goals
I appreciate that the author on focused on his very narrow realm of "clean energy", but NEPA and CEQA (California's version) make absolutely every project vastly more expensive.
"But progressive advocates of green industrial policy have been stubbornly slow to realize that NEPA stands in the way of their dreams."
The modern Left is full of contradictions: global warming protestors who hate nuclear power; Harvard grads railing against elitism; educated whites demanding that cops abandon minority neighborhoods; anti-Iraq-war protestors who are now Ukraine hawks; a climate czar who regularly flies a private jet. The unifying belief of the left today is the maintenance of the professional managerial class at the expense of everyone else. NEPA is part of that, since it provides lots of make-work for their useless college graduates.
I'm reminded of an old quote by Newt Gingrich, who was a WWII historian before joining Congress: "December 7th 1941 to August 14th, 1945 is less than 4 years. In less than 4 years, we defeated Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan. Today it takes 23 years to add a 5th runway to the Atlanta airport. We are simply not prepared, today, to be a serious country." He gave that speech in 2008; things haven't improved since.
"the U.S. is practically the only country to allow local NIMBYs the opportunity to tie up fully legally compliant projects in court for years over purely procedural requirements. "
Not true. Canada has NEPA beat by several magnitudes, albeit through different mechanisms. The duty to consult indigenous groups in Canada is used as a limitless stalling tactic on legally compliant projects of almost any size. Such groups now include anyone claiming to be Metis with scant evidence, and opposition can be funded by anyone, often foreign interest groups.
Virtually all major new projects are now impossible in Canada: transmission lines, pipelines, mines, roads, reactors. The average delay of replacement projects (e.g. more reactors on an existing site) or smaller but significant projects has stretched beyond a decade. I've been involved in green projects that have been delayed by nearly 30 years, with no end in sight.
The hidden graveyard covers the landscape.
There are exceptions to the above, such as when a government eliminated non-indigenous NIMBY actions for wind and solar projects. But that was a political blunder and ultimately part of an energy/economic disaster, which couldn't be sustained.
One of the rare good things about the climate panic and all the money being shoveled into doing something about it is how at least now some light is being shed on how excessive government regulation is harming the path to progress. We need more energy (as well as more people, technological advancement and infrastructure) and we won’t get much of it with NEPA, NRC and FDA holding back progress as they do now with their enormous regulatory roadblocks.
The arguments defending NEPA are so transparently horrible, I'm going to automatically assume anything produced by the Roosevelt Institute to be suspicious.
A good essay. Truly strange times we live in, that it's the progressives trying to build outrage against government red tape and get it ripped down so the energy industry can get to work. I wonder what, if anything, there is to learn from how the legacy energy industries have fought that bureaucracy?
I would also wonder whether any of the conceptual ideas for fixing things, tossed out in the last few paragraphs, have made their way to some sort of legislative proposal that is working to build attention and consensus.
Call me crazy, but maybe we should have thought about this before we signed up for $540bn? All the trees will burn before the Forest Service finishes all of these reviews.
you're crazy. That something is hard and has some barriers to cross or problems to solve is not a reason to not attempt it at all.
But the Senate knew NEPA would be the problem when voting on the IRA and Manchin’s amendment to include NEPA reform was rejected by the other Democrats, so it’s kind of crazy for them to appropriate all that spending knowing the projects it funded will mostly tied up in courts for many years. Dysfunctional government as to be expected from past performance.
The level of dysfunction in NEPA is actually disgusting. I fervently hope we get it overhauled soon.
On that note, anyone have thoughts on how it could be reformed? Would it be Congressional legislation? Is this something we should be writing to our House and Senate representatives about?
The article proposes several options in the closing paragraphs. I did not, however, see some sort of consolidated proposal sponsored by a coalition that is trying to build consensus and get it done, so I'd welcome learning about one.
Ah, this article reminds me of the time I had NEPA used by a competitor to try and keep me from driving on a dirt road. Once. Behind a dump truck. At an active quarry.
Reform it. I can almost guarantee that the number of projects that get strangled out by bureaucracy and weaponization of the bureaucracy before they even start the multi-year clock for a review is probably orders of magnitude larger.
It seems like keeping NEPA might actually have some benefits - it keeps the discussions in federal courts. If you remove it, and if states replace it, then you're left with the fun issue that the planned energy transition largely means building out wind and solar farms plus associated transmission capacity in "red" states and regions to serve "blue" ones. That seems likely to be contentious regardless of NEPA, but at least NEPA keeps the discussion at a higher level of the political system.
Though maybe some thought and empathy should be given to *why* people don't want these projects near them.
Also, if the worry is about building inter-regional transmission capacity from Midwestern wind farms to Northeastern cities (for example), maybe we might consider changing some of the policies that keep hollowing out places in the Midwest and exacerbating the population shifts that render so much long-distance transmission capacity necessary in the first place.
the "hollowing out" is due to the fact that (A) people like living in cities, especially big, prosperous ones, and (B) our economy no longer requires 90%+ of people to be involved in agriculture.
That’s true, and I don’t know which policies Peaches was referring to. But many people that don’t like living in big cities, especially expensive dysfunctional ones. Like the 90% of agricultural jobs that aren’t needed, I’d say a large percentage of jobs no longer need to be in cities, which is why NYC and SF downtown business districts are hollowing out. Suburbs are were many people are happiest and where many jobs are located. For example, Silicon Valley is one big suburb.
There actually was (and still is) a great deal of activity in the Midwest other than agriculture. And even more than a few cities :)
We're not talking about a law of nature here, just a response to recent decades' economic conditions.
I didn't think I'd have to defend a tangent like that, but let me rephrase:
To the extent there is a problem with population migration patterns in the US (which itself is arguable), it is FAR beyond the capacity of any discussion of environmental review, infrastructure construction, or even a presidential administration, to do anything meaningful about it.
And likewise an economics blog that was just trying to comment about the former. Though, to be fair, I do think Noah answering the question of "is migration and depopulation a big problem?" could be a very interesting read.
The guest post had a strong focus on permitting for long-distance transmission lines, which are largely needed because of that mismatch. And I truly don't believe the mismatch is a law of nature determined by a phenomenon of labor productivity in agriculture that mostly predated the population shifts I'm referring to, either, but instead that it is a result of much more recent policy decisions. But arguing on the internet is rarely productive and I'm worried that's what this has become.
Anyway, this all started with an aside to my main point - that removing NEPA might just be making room for state governments to put their hands in. And those state governments might be less favorable to these sorts of projects than the federal court system.
Sorry if I came across argumentative, wasn't my intention. Thanks for the substantive reply.
I would genuinely be interested what those policy decisions are that you have in mind. From my perspective, a lot of the shift is an inability of those metro areas to educate, or attract and retain, people skilled in the sorts of disciplines that are growing fast and paying well. From that flows the benefits to local budgets, infrastructure funding, and much else that makes those metro areas attractive places to live and stay and raise families. But I live in Pittsburgh, which has some local assets that, say, Toledo or Fort Wayne do not. So I may be missing some key pieces.
Anyway, it seems to me like the proposal is not to "remove" NEPA, but rather, modify it so that it can't be used as a cudgel or an unreasonable delay. Define "major" projects, narrowly and sensibly. Eliminate the private cause-of-action except under extraordinary circumstances. Lay out exactly what is expected of agencies, so they don't have to put out an average of 1600 pages just to approve a project. etc. I think we likely agree that those modifications would be good, but that removing it entirely would create a power vacuum filled (much more poorly or venally) by the states themselves.
Cheers.
Good article.
Robert Bryce has a renewable rejection database that shows NEPA and NIMBY ‘success’ stories.
https://robertbryce.com/renewable-rejection-database/
Who runs NEPA - where does the funding come from? What is its allegiance?
What is the alternative to NEPA? Carbon impact review?
I don’t think NEPA has funding - it is an unfunded mandate on all major projects.
NEPA is a policy, the National Environmental Policy Act. It's administered by the EPA.