BUSH ADMINISTRATION USING NEPA TO BENEFIT INDUSTRY, BUT HAMPER NATIVE AMERICANS
Last week the House Resources Committee formed a task force to investigate the implementation of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Critics say the Bush Administration has been inconsistent in its enforcement of the nation's oldest environmental law, streamlining the NEPA process to assist industrial development while strictly enforcing the law when, for example, landless Native American tribes seek to obtain land trusts.
Designed to protect the nation's natural resources and support public participation in government, NEPA requires federal officials to make a careful assessment of potential environmental damage for a proposed project, and offer alternatives when necessary. But an attorney specializing in federal Indian law, speaking to BushGreenwatch under the condition of anonymity, says that "Because the Bush Administration is hostile to the idea of Native Americans gaining more land, they have been hiding behind the NEPA process."
Landless tribes must pay for their own Environmental Assessments (EA), which contributes to a process the attorney called, "slow-rolling." This occurs when the EA is not paid for by the government-- thus decreasing the urgency of the project, and lengthening the review process. After a year or more a tribe is often told it must go back and conduct an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), a costly, time-consuming process that it was not instructed to perform at the outset of its application. These barriers have made efforts to attain land trusts very difficult for landless tribes.
John Dossett, general counsel of the National Congress of American Indians, told BushGreenwatch that an EIS can cost upwards of $800,000, and require an extensive assessment of alternatives to the establishment of a reservation. "Completing an EIS can be very difficult for a tribe. It increases the cost, and demands a list of alternatives that just aren't feasible," Dossett said. "Basically the EIS asks tribes to consider an alternative to living on a reservation-- and NEPA is not meant to do that."
While the federal government has used NEPA to hinder Native American efforts to obtain land, the law has been used the opposite way to benefit industry.Environmental lawyer Douglas Kendall, executive director of the Community Rights Counsel and author of the book, "Redefining Federalism," says the gas industry has been particularly skillful in using NEPA to its advantage. "In the context of developing coal bed methane, industry has been very aggressive in using old, irrelevant NEPA studies to get around the full NEPA process of natural gas extraction," said Kendall. "It is very disturbing that the Interior Department appears to be selectively using NEPA to frustrate landless tribes and at the same time accommodate efforts to extract resources."
During its first two years the Bush Administration was involved in 172 NEPA cases. In 94 of them, the Administration presented arguments aimed at weakening the application of NEPA.
[1]Meanwhile, Rep. Richard Pombo (R-CA) chair of the house committee studying NEPA, has repeatedly criticized NEPA as an overly burdensome process for industry.
SOURCES:
[1] "Weakening the National Environmental Policy Act," Defenders of Wildlife & Vermont Law School,
http://ga3.org/ct/d11Z7nM17zxs/.
Designed to protect the nation's natural resources and support public participation in government, NEPA requires federal officials to make a careful assessment of potential environmental damage for a proposed project, and offer alternatives when necessary. But an attorney specializing in federal Indian law, speaking to BushGreenwatch under the condition of anonymity, says that "Because the Bush Administration is hostile to the idea of Native Americans gaining more land, they have been hiding behind the NEPA process."
Landless tribes must pay for their own Environmental Assessments (EA), which contributes to a process the attorney called, "slow-rolling." This occurs when the EA is not paid for by the government-- thus decreasing the urgency of the project, and lengthening the review process. After a year or more a tribe is often told it must go back and conduct an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), a costly, time-consuming process that it was not instructed to perform at the outset of its application. These barriers have made efforts to attain land trusts very difficult for landless tribes.
John Dossett, general counsel of the National Congress of American Indians, told BushGreenwatch that an EIS can cost upwards of $800,000, and require an extensive assessment of alternatives to the establishment of a reservation. "Completing an EIS can be very difficult for a tribe. It increases the cost, and demands a list of alternatives that just aren't feasible," Dossett said. "Basically the EIS asks tribes to consider an alternative to living on a reservation-- and NEPA is not meant to do that."
While the federal government has used NEPA to hinder Native American efforts to obtain land, the law has been used the opposite way to benefit industry.Environmental lawyer Douglas Kendall, executive director of the Community Rights Counsel and author of the book, "Redefining Federalism," says the gas industry has been particularly skillful in using NEPA to its advantage. "In the context of developing coal bed methane, industry has been very aggressive in using old, irrelevant NEPA studies to get around the full NEPA process of natural gas extraction," said Kendall. "It is very disturbing that the Interior Department appears to be selectively using NEPA to frustrate landless tribes and at the same time accommodate efforts to extract resources."
During its first two years the Bush Administration was involved in 172 NEPA cases. In 94 of them, the Administration presented arguments aimed at weakening the application of NEPA.
[1]Meanwhile, Rep. Richard Pombo (R-CA) chair of the house committee studying NEPA, has repeatedly criticized NEPA as an overly burdensome process for industry.
SOURCES:
[1] "Weakening the National Environmental Policy Act," Defenders of Wildlife & Vermont Law School,
http://ga3.org/ct/d11Z7nM17zxs/.
posted by T. Scott Brineman at 11:22 AM
1 Comments:
NEPA process has spun out of control
Luke Russell
Special to The Spokesman-Review
April 27, 2005
E arth Day is the annual occasion for thoughtful reflections on how far we've come in cleaning up our environment and what remains to be done to make it better.
But as we think about improving our environmental performance in the days ahead, let's also think about improving our costly and frustrating process for assessing the environmental impacts of major projects. Today that process, called NEPA after the National Environmental Policy Act, is badly broken.
To understand why, recall what was right about NEPA's original purpose. Enacted by Congress in 1970, the year of our first Earth Day, NEPA was the product of the infant green movement. Back then, before the nation had strong laws to protect the environment, NEPA served a simple but useful purpose – it required federal agencies to consider the environmental consequences of major decisions before approving them. To accomplish this new task, EPA gave us the environmental impact statement (EIS), a useful tool for weighing the potential harm a project could inflict on the environment against its potential economic rewards.
My firsthand experience with NEPA began as an environmental coordinator in the early 1980s. In those days, the EIS for a mining project typically took about 18 months to prepare and cost between $250,000 and $300,000.
Two decades later, NEPA today has grown into a monster, devouring millions of dollars and years of time needlessly on redundant studies, conflicting requirements and wasteful litigation.
Consider my company's experience obtaining NEPA approval in 1992 for a gold mine in Alaska. By then the cost of the EIS had ballooned to $11 million. By the time various federal agencies approved the project, the gold market declined so much the project became uneconomical. Five years later, my company retooled the project to make it profitable for prevailing market conditions. This required a "supplemental" EIS at a cost of $6 million for additional engineering and environmental studies in the same area.
By 1997 the price of gold had dropped further, forcing us again to scale back our project – and spend an additional $4 million in feasibility studies and another $1.7 million for a second supplemental EIS.
Behind these escalating costs and mind-numbing delays for additional studies is the real problem: NEPA requires federal agencies to evaluate all significant environmental impacts, but doesn't define what "significant" means. Nor does it impose deadlines for evaluating the EIS. The result is a process that invites abuse.
Federal managers naturally fear lawsuits from obstructionists who raise trivial or arbitrary objections to slow or defeat development. So they define "significant" impacts so broadly that no proposed action, however minor, is excluded from NEPA evaluation. NEPA also allows obstructionists, as well as other federal agencies, to weigh in with objections late in the process, forcing further delays and higher costs.
This "paralysis by analysis" is especially harmful to a Western industry like mining that relies heavily on federal land. Since 1980, the number of plans for new mining projects filed with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management has fallen steeply, irrespective of volatile market conditions. The entire region's economy is throttled when projects never materialize and jobs are sent offshore.
We can protect the environment without harming our economy. Fixing the broken NEPA process is one sure way to protect both.
http://www.spokesmanreview.com/opinion/story.asp?ID=66493
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