Foes to sue feds for undermining environmental protections

ATLANTA, GA. – Grassroots organizations vowed to take the federal government to court over U.S. President Donald Trump’s July 15 announcement here of rules changes shattering the bedrock environmental law that tribes and constituents have used to fend off fracking, oil pipelines and mining in treaty territory.
Hailing the finalization of comprehensive changes to rules under the National Environmental Protection Act, NEPA, Trump said, “Today’s action is part of my Administration’s fierce commitment to slashing the web of needless bureaucracy that is holding back our citizens. I’ve been wanting to do this from day one.”
Damning the reforms’ implications for native nations, Lisa DeVille, vice-chair of Indian reservation-based grassroots Ft. Berthold Protectors of Water and Earth Rights (POWER), from Mandaree, North Dakota, replied:
“Black, indigenous, and people of color’s communities bear the disproportionate burden of toxic pollution in their neighborhoods, and as a result, are dying from Covid-19 at higher rates,” she said.
An enrolled member of the Mandan Hidatsa & Arikara (MHA) Nation, aka the Three Confederated Tribes, she represented native sentiment in a joint statement issued by foes of the rules changes from across the United States
“My family and I live on my ancestral land in the center of the Bakken oil field, and the last thing my family needs right now is even less protection from the dangerous impacts of this development,” she said.
“NEPA is one of the few laws that require environmental analysis on the reservation and consideration of the disproportionate impacts of development on indigenous people,” she noted.
“We all deserve to breathe clean air, but the Trump Administration is proposing to eliminate protections against environmental racism that occurs from oil and gas development near my home.”
At a time when people across the country “are focused on a global health crisis, the injustices of Covid-19, and systemic racism that disproportionately harms Black and brown communities, this action is putting Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI), and multiracial communities at greater risk,” Greenlatinos national network declared.
Concurring with Ft. Berthold Power and Greenlatinos were grassroots constituents of the umbrella network Western Organization of Resource Councils. Barbara Vasquez, Oil and Gas Team chair complained, “The Administration’s priorities are crystal clear–rubber stamp polluting projects and pump toxins into the air and water while a crisis rages unchecked. We need the protection of thorough environmental and public health review now more than ever,” she said.
“We will sue,” said Brian Sweeney, communications director for the Western Environmental Law Center.
“We have consistently defeated this Administration’s relentless, vicious dismantling of safeguards for people and the environment, and we will do so again with this final rule,” said the center’s Susan Jane Brown. “A thriving economy is not at odds with worker protections and a healthy environment – it depends on both.”
The White House cast the reform as “modernization”, saying, “For the first time in 40 years, President Donald J. Trump is taking action to right-size the federal government’s environmental review process.”
The industry-backed move constitutes a remake of the regulations under the National Environmental Policy Act, sometimes called the “magna carta” of environmental protections. Congress passed the act nearly unanimously, and former U.S. President Richard Nixon signed it into law on Jan. 1, 1970.
The Trump version is a product of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, the president’s inner circle of advisors on NEPA.
“By streamlining infrastructure approvals, we’ll further expand America’s unprecedented economic boom,” Trump said.
Major companies and executives, including Chevron and Exxon Mobil, which contributed more than $1.4 million to Trump’s campaigns and inauguration have heavily lobbied his administration on NEPA reform. Many have projects pending review under the law that would be accelerated through the new changes, according to the non-partisan watchdog group Accountable U.S.
The reform reduces public participation by establishing time limits of two years for completing environmental impact statements and one year for environmental assessments. The new language rolls back requirements for considering cumulative and climate effects of projects that need federal permit approval. It also shrinks the pool of projects subject to public review.
The new rules appear “to be an attempt to narrow the scope of NEPA analysis and potentially eliminates the need to assess climate change in NEPA reviews,” said environmental law specialist Thaddeus Lightfoot, a partner at the international law firm Dorsey & Whitney, who analyzed the CEQ’s final changes.
The changes include holding impact statements’ size down to 300 pages and minimizing the allowable scope of lawsuits over them. The new rules also explicitly allow a project applicant to prepare its own environmental impact statement, and they remove the prohibition on hiring contractors that have conflicts of interest, such as financial ties to the applicant.
“Together, these commonsense reforms will slash unnecessary government bureaucracy and accelerate important infrastructure projects all across the nation,” a White House Fact Sheet said.
The Fact Sheet takes cues from a 2015 report by the non-partisan non-profit Common Good, founded and chaired by Philip K. Howard, a self-declared “radical centrist”, lawyer and author of Try Common Sense.
“The regulations restore the original goal of NEPA as an informational tool for policy choices, not an action-forcing mechanism allowing judges to overrule executive choices that comply with underlying statutes,” Common Good said.
The national non-profit Center for Biological Diversity argued however, “Data collected by federal agencies show that NEPA works well and as intended, despite unproven rhetoric by right-wing industry groups regarding project delays.”
The NEPA process “has been vital in raising concerns about environmentally destructive projects, including the Keystone XL Pipeline,” it said.
“NEPA’s dismantling is a win for corruption, a win for polluters, and a win for those that profit off the destruction of our planet,” said the center’s Government Affairs Director Brett Hartl. “Everyone else loses.”
According to Accountable U.S. its research led Bloomberg news media to reveal that “a top official in Trump’s Council on Environmental Quality who has been a key player in the effort to overhaul NEPA, is married to an industry lobbyist who lobbied CEQ on NEPA.”
The Oglala Sioux Tribe has been using NEPA’s environmental impact statement process for more than a decade to challenge Canadian corporations’ plans to expand uranium mining in the underground water tables at Crow Butte in Nebraska and at Dewey-Burdock in the Black Hills, upstream from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in unceded 1868 Ft. Laramie Treaty territory.