Trump to overhaul Nixon environmental law
President Donald Trump plans this week to overhaul a federal law that poor and minority communities around the country have used for generations to delay or stop projects that threaten to pollute their neighborhoods — a law he says needlessly blocks good jobs, industry and public works.
The president’s plan to streamline the National Environmental Policy Act, a bedrock environmental law signed with much fanfare by President Richard Nixon in 1970, would make it easier to build highways, pipelines, chemical plants and other projects that pose environmental risks.
If the final version mirrors a proposal from January, it would force agencies to complete even the most exhaustive environmental reviews within two years and restrict the extent to which they could consider a project’s full impact on the climate.
Trump is scheduled to announce the changes Wednesday in Atlanta, as part of his effort to revive the economy amid the coronavirus pandemic.
But the proposed changes also threaten to rob the public, in particular marginalized communities most affected by such projects, of their ability to impact decisions that could affect their health, according to many activists.
“This is the epitome of environmental racism,” said Angelo Logan, the 53-yearold campaign director for the Los Angeles-based Moving Forward Network, who grew up surrounded by highways, rail yards and industrial plants in nearby Commerce. “The working class, communities of color, will have to suffer the brunt so corporations can make money hand over fist.”
African Americans are 75 percent more likely than non-Hispanic whites to live in communities next to pollution sources — increasing their risks of diabetes, asthma, hypertension and other ailments, studies show.
Nixon signed NEPA on Jan. 1, 1970, saying it was fitting that the policy marked his first official act of a new decade.
“The 1970s absolutely must be the years when America pays its debt to the past by reclaiming the purity of its air, its waters, and our living environment. It is literally now or never,” Nixon said that day.
The White House declined to release details about the final revisions in advance of Wednesday’s event, but spokesman Judd Deere said in an email, “The President will continue to take action to facilitate the great American comeback and to improve the quality of life all Americans.”
A slew of industries, along with some building trades unions, have lobbied to speed up the federal permitting, which they argue has become unnecessarily burdensome. Though it still provides for public comment, Trump’s revisions will restrict how agencies can apply the law with the goal of accelerating approvals.
“We want to make sure we get things right. But it shouldn’t have to take seven years to get a yes or no on a highway project,” said Marty Durbin, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Global Energy Institute. “We do have a process that’s broken, and we need to bring some more reason to the process.”
But activists say NEPA has been instrumental in allowing communities to have some control over what gets built in their backyard.
For 15 years, Logan’s group and others have been fighting a plan to expand Interstate 710, a major northsouth freeway designed in the 1950s that connects Long Beach to central Los Angeles.
An initial proposal would have added six additional lanes to the southern part of the freeway, destroying 660 homes, encroaching on the Los Angeles River and dramatically increasing truck traffic alongside neighborhoods that are majority African American and Latino communities that already have elevated levels of soot in the air.
The highway plan now on the table in Southern California calls for no more than two additional lanes but also includes bike trails and dedicated green space, and it identifies improving air quality and public health as among the multibillion-dollar project’s goals. Activists devised and submitted their alternative plan during comment periods allowed under the law, hiring technical consultants to analyze the government’s 8,000-page draft proposal.
“There was a shift in focus,” Logan said. “Without community engagement and involvement, it would just be a 14-lane freeway right now.”
One of the biggest changes the administration is proposing is eliminating the law’s requirement to examine a project’s cumulative impact, when taken in the context of other sources of pollution in the area.
The revisions would also require that the most complex analyses be completed within two years. And the initial proposal would limit consideration of climate change, saying that the “effects should not be considered significant if they are remote in time, geographically remote, or the product of a lengthy causal chain.”
Under that reasoning, experts have said, officials weighing a proposed coal mine or oil drilling operation would not have to consider whether burning those fossil fuels will contribute to climate change.
In the past few months alone, NEPA-related lawsuits have temporarily halted the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipeline, and helped prompt the sponsors of the Atlantic Coast pipeline to abandon their plans altogether. Groups have also used it to suspend a massive timber sale in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest and to challenge the construction of a new airport terminal at California’s San Bernardino Airport.
The Trump administration has insisted that it plans to maintain the core objectives of NEPA, while eliminating endless delays on worthwhile projects.
“The consequences of the government being stuck in place are far-ranging,” Interior Secretary David Bernhardt told reporters earlier this year, citing the lengthy process to approve new schools on Native American reservations, upgrade visitor centers at national parks and approve requests from ranchers to graze on public lands. “The list goes on and on and on. The reality is that the needless red tape has, over time, lowered the expectations of American exceptionalism and excellence. And that is backwards.”