Wednesday, January 15, 2020

NEPA Under Fire

Trumpilini marches on despite his trial in the Senate for high crimes and misdemeanors. His attempt to dismantle environmental protection in the US has reached a new low with his attack on a fundamental law: NEPA.  The National Environmental Protection Act is a groundbreaking statutory scheme that has been successful in protecting habitats and iconic landscapes.  Other countries have emulated it as part of their environmental protection efforts.  Yet the tinted tyrant wants to gut its central requirement: preparation of environmental impact statements for federal development projects. His proposed changes would limit the range of projects needing an impact study and impose strict deadlines for drafting one.  The changes would also eliminate the need to analyze cumulative impacts such as planet warming consequences of more greenhouse gases. He publicly announced his attack on the law standing in front of two construction workers wearing hard hats last Thursday.  Since taking office he has proposed 95 environmental law rollbacks.  Nearly seventy lawsuits have been filed against his disruptive actions that have been successful just four times according to the New York University Law School.

Nothing compares to what Trumpillini is doing to environmetal protection in this country, exceeding even Ronald 'Raygun' in his zeal to dismantle statutes that have been in existence since Tricky Dick. The National Environmental Protection Act was signed into law by Richard Nixon after the heavily polluted Cuyahoga River in Ohio caught fire, and a tanker spilled three million gallons of crude off the coast of Santa Barbara, Calif., in 1969. Whether the proposed changes would hold up in court is doubtful according to law experts.  NEPA requires all environmental impactsof a federal project be assessed, and that statutory requirement cannot be changed by presidential fiat.