Don't Worry About the Vase
NEPA, the National Environmental Policy Act, has increasingly been a disaster, paralyzing America’s ability to build or do physical things of all kinds. This increasingly includes green energy projects like solar and wind, as well as the infrastructure necessary to connect them to the grid.
A wise law would do a cost-benefit analysis, and ask: Is this project net helpful or harmful to the Earth, and does that consideration outweigh other economic and social benefits?
NEPA instead asks: Did you file all the proper paperwork, taking into account an absurd and growing list of detailed considerations and procedures? Can someone sue you, claiming you missed something or handled some detail inexactly, holding up your project indefinitely? Is there any tiny thing that should act as a veto point? And the courts continuously make it easier to halt a project, and impose ever-expanding requirements on any attempt to do almost anything at all. No amount of benefit to the Earth, under NEPA makes up for even the slightest bit of potential technical harm. So we sit back, and the planet boils.
Current reform efforts can be helpful on the margin. Granting various categorical exceptions, statutes of limitations and other restrictions on NEPA can in practice mitigate some of the damage. But as long as we have a lawsuit-based, technical-violation-veto-point method of determining what is allowed to proceed, the core problems are only going to get worse.
