How much has Earth Day cost us?
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/editorials/how-much-has-earth-day-cost-us
“The cost of housing is higher, the cost of energy is higher, and people sit longer in traffic (emitting more pollutants) because of NEPA. Former President Donald Trump instituted new rules to help streamline the NEPA process. This week, President Joe Biden undid the reforms. This is just one more reason why, if Biden wants to know why the cost of energy is going up, he needs to look in the mirror.”
Rachel Carson died before the first Earth Day in 1970, but her book Silent Spring is widely acknowledged to have inspired the modern environmental movement that pushed for its creation. Carson did not actually call for an end to all use of the pesticide DDT, but the movement she spawned definitely caused the decline of DDT use in fighting malaria — a policy that has led to the deaths of millions worldwide.
Everyone benefits when scientists like Carson do the hard work of identifying substances that cause people harm. Unfortunately, activists often take this information too far, ignoring the benefits that many chemicals provide to humanity.
Neither of these laws is perfect, but they have undoubtedly contributed to the United States having the world’s cleanest air and water. And the implementation of these laws is almost assuredly imperfect, but at least they require cost-benefit calculations that can be challenged and examined, not simply taken on blind faith.
Unfortunately, not all of our nation’s environmental laws are so carefully designed. Even some on the Left are beginning to recognize this.
The same year Earth Day was created, the National Environmental Policy Act became law. It sounds like a decent idea: Every project funded by the federal government that has significant environmental effects should first undergo an environmental assessment. That assessment must identify all environmental harms caused by the project and reasonable alternatives that would have a smaller impact on the environment.
This sounds nice. Why shouldn’t federal agencies be forced to assess the environmental harm caused by their actions and consider reasonable alternatives? The problem is that the implementation of this law includes a citizen lawsuit provision. This empowers activist groups to delay or block every infrastructure project in the country that takes even a cent of federal funding.
This means that any time the federal government funds a road or a bridge or a dam, environmental activists can delay the project for years. The average NEPA environmental impact statement takes 4 1/2 years to complete and runs 575 pages. If an environmental group finds even one thing wrong with the statement, it can send the entire project back to the drawing board.
The state of California recently suffered through a case involving their state version of NEPA, the California Environmental Quality Act. When the University of California tried to expand the size of the freshman class at its Berkeley campus, an environmental group sued, saying the university failed to consider the environmental effects of housing more students in the city.
The environmental group won an order halting the expansion of Berkeley’s freshman in a lower court, a decision that was affirmed by the state Supreme Court. It took a special law passed by the California legislature exempting development plans of public universities from CEQA to allow Berkeley to proceed with its plan.
This exemption should help California’s public universities, but what about all the new homes and apartment buildings that have been blocked or delayed by CEQA and NEPA? What about all the roads, bridges, and energy projects that don’t exist today because of these shortsighted laws?
The cost of housing is higher, the cost of energy is higher, and people sit longer in traffic (emitting more pollutants) because of NEPA. Former President Donald Trump instituted new rules to help streamline the NEPA process. This week, President Joe Biden undid the reforms. This is just one more reason why, if Biden wants to know why the cost of energy is going up, he needs to look in the mirror.
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