What They Are Saying: CEQ Issues Proposed Rule to Modernize its NEPA Regulations
The U.S. Department of the Interior cites Director of the Center for Energy and Environment Myron Ebell on NEPA reforms:
Myron Ebell, Director, Center for Energy and Environment, Competitive Enterprise Institute: “The administration’s proposed reforms of NEPA regulations are a big step toward correcting the worst abuses of the environmental permitting process. Over the decades, bad court decisions and bureaucratic laziness have turned NEPA from a sensible tool to consider the environmental impacts of major projects into a weapon used to delay projects to death.
American infrastructure lags other developed countries because getting a NEPA permit and successfully defending it from multiple legal challenges takes many years and often over a decade. In no other country does it regularly take as long to permit an infrastructure project. The same is true of major natural resource projects, which is why, for example, new mines are opened much more often in Canada than in the United States.
We hope the administration will take the next step and propose needed legislative reforms to NEPA for Congress to consider.”