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Playing the Long Game: Expediting Permitting Without Compromising Protections

The Biden Administration’s efforts to promote clean energy have prompted calls for permit reform. A clean energy economy demands a global increase in mineral production, and some suggest environmental standards must be loosened. This premise fails to distinguish among causes of delay in the permitting process, and increased demand for minerals should not overshadow the productive purposes served by permitting. At the same time, there are opportunities to improve permitting without compromising health and safety standards.

87 FR 65622

The Office of Science and Technology Policy seeks input to help inform the framing, development, and eventual use of the first national nature assessment, conducted under the authority of the Global Change Research Act of 1990 and Exec. Order No. 14072 on strengthening the nation’s forests, communities, and local economies.

87 FR 56354

The Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement proposed to revise existing regulations for well control and blowout preventer systems that pertain to oil, gas, and sulfur operations in the outer continental shelf to clarify blowout preventer system requirements and to modify certain specific blowout preventer equipment capability requirements.

87 FR 45739

The Forest Service announced the availability of up to $1 billion in grant funding for the establishment of the Community Wildfire Defense Grant Program as appropriated under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. 

How Environmental Litigation Has Turned Pipelines Into Pipe Dreams

Proposed oil and gas pipelines have faced a myriad of legal challenges in the past several years. Even where pipeline proponents have prevailed, the cost and delay of protracted litigation has often caused cancellation of pipeline projects. In addition, presidential transitions have led to abrupt reversals of pipeline policies, which courts have often reviewed skeptically.

Amending the NEPA Regulations

The Joe Biden Administration has proposed reversing a number of the Donald Trump Administration’s changes to the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) regulations by again requiring federal agencies to evaluate the direct, indirect, and cumulative environmental impacts of projects under environmental review. On April 20, 2022, the first phase of those amendments was finalized, and on April 21, the Environmental Law Institute hosted a panel of experts to explore the changes to NEPA implementation, and how they might impact climate change policy and environmental justice.

87 FR 36487

EPA and the U.S. International Boundary and Water Commission announced and seek comment on a draft programmatic EIS for the proposed United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement Mitigation of Contaminated Transboundary Flows Project. 

87 FR 34234

The Forest Service seeks comment on the framework, focus, and direction of its wildfire crisis implementation plan associated with the Wildfire Crisis Strategy and specific provisions of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. 

87 FR 24851

The president issued Executive Order No. 14072, Strengthening the Nation's Forests, Communities, and Local Economies; among other things, the order directs federal agencies to inventory old-growth and mature forests on federal lands and develop policies to protect them from threats like wildfire and climate change, and to develop a federal goal for meeting agency-specific reforestation targets by 2030.

87 FR 4498

OSM approved an amendment to Missouri's coal mining regulations that reduced the volume of the regulations without reducing the program's requirements under SMCRA.