Overnight Energy: Trump moves to rollback bedrock environmental law | Dems, greens blast changes | Trump says ‘nothing’s a hoax’ about climate change | Youth climate group endorses Sanders

by Rebecca Beitsch - 01/09/20 6:16 PM ET

BIG CHANGES FOR NEPA: The White House on Thursday issued sweeping changes to one of the nation’s bedrock environmental laws, allowing greater industry involvement in environmental reviews of projects and diminishing the role climate change plays in those assessments.

The changes target the 50-year-old National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which requires agencies to evaluate how pipelines, highways and some oil and gas development affects the environment and nearby communities.

The law has been a repeated target of President Trump, who has vowed to speed the construction of fossil fuel infrastructure and eliminate barriers to construction projects.

Flanked by industry leaders at Thursday morning press conference, Trump described the measure as a complete overhaul.

“From Day One, my administration has made fixing this regulatory nightmare a top priority. And we want to build new roads, bridges, tunnels, highways bigger, better, faster, and we want to build them at less cost,” he said.

The changes, which will be posted to the Federal Register on Friday, would limit the law’s scope, excluding some projects from undergoing NEPA review, like those that receive little federal funding. It also opens the door for more industry involvement in reviewing the environmental impacts of their projects.

While NEPA serves a noble purpose, it has “paralyzed commonsense decisionmaking for a generation,” Interior Secretary David Bernhardt said on a call to present the proposal, listing a wide range of projects that have been delayed by environmental analyses.

“This is a really, really big proposal. It affects virtually every big decision made by the federal government that affects the environment, and I think it will be the most significant deregulatory proposal you ultimately implement,” Bernhardt told Trump.

The details: The proposal from the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) would no longer require consideration of the “cumulative” effects of new projects. Courts have largely interpreted that as studying how a project might contribute to climate change, say by contributing heat-trapping greenhouse gases, or how it might be influenced by effects of climate change like extreme weather.

Under the changes proposed by the Trump administration, officials would need to consider effects of a project that are “reasonably foreseeable” and show “a reasonably close causal relationship.”

Pushback from greens: Environmentalists say those changes would allow the government to look the other way when projects contribute considerable amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

“Over past decades, courts have said this means not only what’s happening on the postage stamp-sized area around the pipeline or the bridge, but the cumulative impacts on the environmental health and water and communities surrounding the project. That’s what they’re going to try and restrict,” said Christy Goldfuss, who was the managing director of the CEQ for the last two years of the Obama administration.

But ignoring climate change could also have disastrous implications for the projects themselves.

“This is a huge problem when you’re building for the future and building major infrastructure. If you’re not looking at where sea level rise going to be, where our historical flooding habits are changing, what is history of wildfire in this region, then you’re just building to the trends of 50 years ago, and we know the environment is changing so rapidly,” Goldfuss, who is now senior vice president of energy and environment at the Center for American Progress, said.

“We have tools to estimate what the future will look like as a result of climate change and that information should be available to decisionmakers when they spend taxpayer dollars,” she added.

What’s next: The latest guidance faces a 60-day comment period before it can be finalized.

Read much more about the controversial measure here.

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NOPE-A: President Trump’s latest environmental rollback was met with strong resistance from a number of Democratic lawmakers and nearly every major environmental group Thursday, with critics lambasting the administration for seeking to unwind a bedrock environmental law.

Various groups and lawmakers described the proposal as misguided, profoundly irresponsible, unlawful and turning “a blind eye to the climate crisis.”

Supporters of the proposal have hailed it as a modernization of a law blamed for delaying construction projects with unnecessarily lengthy reviews. It’s been widely praised by a broad range of industry groups, from the construction sector to farmers and ranchers to the energy industry.

But environmentalists fear it will hasten the development of climate change and allow businesses to shortcut examination of the environmental impacts of their projects. Because some projects may no longer be required to undergo an assessment, critics say the changes would allow companies to sidestep public scrutiny of their projects.

Democratic lawmakers described the NEPA changes as one of the worst environmental policies from an administration with a long list of rollbacks.

“This move to gut NEPA is one of the worst decisions made by the worst environmental administration in history,” Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.) said in a release.