Trump announced the implementation of the recently revised regulations in Georgia at the UPS Hapeville Airport Hub, which will benefit from an accelerated review of a highway expansion project that will allow downtown operations to be more efficient.
Trump claimed that “mountains and mountains of bureaucracy” slowed down the approval and development of infrastructure projects, but added that “all that ends today.”
“Today’s action completely streamlines the environmental review process under the 1969 National Environmental Policy Act. We are cutting the federal permitting schedule … for a major project of up to 20 years or more … up to two years or less. ” Trump said, then added, “At the same time, we will maintain the environmental protections of the United States’ gold standard.”
Management says the change will speed up the process for approving the environmental reviews required for large infrastructure projects.
“You spend three, four, five years on the environmental review before starting work. That’s a problem,” said Environmental Protection Agency administrator Andrew Wheeler in an interview with Gray TV.
Environmental advocacy groups see the policy change as yet another example of the Trump administration dismantling important conservation safety guards that protect the environment and public health from contamination.
The change “dramatically reduces environmental reviews for thousands of federal agency projects across the country, a move that will weaken safeguards for air, water, wildlife and public lands,” said the Center for Biological Diversity, an advocacy group, in a statement in response to the decision. .
NEPA, enacted in 1970 by President Richard Nixon, is considered one of the fundamental environmental laws formed at the beginning of the modern environmental movement. Reversing this policy “may be the greatest gift to polluters in the past 40 years,” according to Brett Hartl, director of government affairs for the Center for Biological Diversity.
“The Trump administration is turning the clock back to when the rivers caught fire, our air was inhalable and our most beloved wildlife was spiraling towards extinction. The fundamental law of the modern environmental movement has become a rubber stamp to enrich for-profit corporations, and we doubt that the courts will defend it, “Hartl said in a statement.
Environmental advocacy groups such as the National Resource Defense Council Inc. and the Sierra Club believe that the change will harm minority communities more than others.
“NEPA gives voice to communities whose health and safety would be threatened by destructive projects, and it is despicable that the Trump administration is trying to silence them,” Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune said in a statement. “As the country faces a global pandemic and grapples with persistent racial injustice, the last thing communities need is an attack on this fundamental civil and environmental rights law.”
But Mike Sommers, president and chief executive officer of the American Petroleum Institute, which represents the United States’ oil and natural gas industry, said in a statement that regulatory changes are “essential to America’s energy leadership and environmental progress. “By providing more certainty to drive, we not only need a modernized pipeline infrastructure to supply cleaner fuels, but roads, bridges and renewable energy.”
The changes, he said, “will help accelerate the nation’s economic recovery and advance energy infrastructure while necessary environmental reviews continue.”
CNN’s Betsy Klein contributed to this report.
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