This week’s ruling that Dominion Energy’s Atlantic Coast Pipeline needs to do a better job of addressing the impact a compression station would have on the historically black town of Union Hill, founded by freed slaves after the Civil War, was a major win for environmental justice. Judge Stephanie Thacker’s ruling, which stated that “environmental justice is not merely a box to be checked,” will require the fracked gas pipeline to go through an additional layer of scrutiny.
The requirement that projects like the pipeline go through an environmental assessment is hardly new, and citizens have been complaining for years about its construction, so this shouldn’t come as a surprise.
But perhaps the company was banking on President Trump to alleviate the need to figure out just how badly a pipeline would harm surrounding communities. After all, the president has promised to roll back such environmental regulations, and after prodding by industry groups last year, he appears poised to take a run at one of the most basic and fundamental rules: the 50-year-old National Environmental Policy Act.
NEPA, as it’s known, was one of the first environmental protections passed into law, and it received overwhelming bipartisan support in Congress. It requires that before the government takes a “major federal action,” it must study the potential environmental, economic, social and health impacts of that policy. It provides an opportunity for the public to weigh in and voice concerns, and ensures that planners are talking with everyone impacted by a project to avoid steamrolling local communities with unwanted projects or burdening certain populations (i.e. black and brown communities) with an undue level of pollution. In essence, it democratizes the policy and development process by requiring transparency from the government and giving the public a place to raise its voice.
Which is probably why Trump’s going after it. Last week, The New York Times reported that the administration is moving to change the rule, and on Monday Reuters reported that the rule change would be formally proposed yesterday (though that didn’t happen, and it might be today). Regardless of what the exact changes are, or when exactly it is officially published, what really matters is November 3rd, 2020.
As Adam Aton at E&E reported yesterday, the lengthy process for changing such a bedrock regulation means that there’s almost no way for the changes to be finalized before the end of Trump’s first administration. And since the inevitable lawsuits to prevent the changes will take months, if not years, to work through the courts and appeals processes, if a Democrat is elected, he or she could toss out Trump’s proposed changes.
Normally, changes to regulations are accompanied by a lengthy factual record that serve as the scientific basis for the change. But the Trump administration isn’t exactly known for its fealty to facts, and the evidence, or lack thereof, presented to justify rule changes in the past have reflected that aversion to reality, which is why the administration has such a dismal success rate in courts. But seeing as how installing unqualified conservative judges is about the only thing this administration has done, the judicial branch won’t likely be the most reliable check on these abuses of executive power.
So while environmental justice is much more than just checking a box in an environmental review, whether or not the federal government has to even do that much may come down to which box voters check in November.
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