Alaska U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan recently delivered remarks on the Senate floor criticizing the Biden Administration’s new NEPA rules. The National Environmental Policy Act was signed into law in January 1970. It requires federal agencies to assess the environmental effects of their proposed actions prior to making decisions. Sen. Sullivan said that the new NEPA rules have the potential to further delay needed infrastructure, specifically energy infrastructure that could help bring down ever increasing energy prices. Also in the lengthy speech, Sullivan questioned U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry’s role in the creation of these rules.
Sen. Sullivan said:
“When NEPA was originally passed, the EIS, the environmental impact statement, was to take less than a year. It usually took less than a year and was usually a couple hundred pages. Now the average EIS takes 4 to 6 years to complete on any project in America, and it usually costs several millions of dollars. We are killing ourselves as a country in our ability to build or to not build infrastructure projects.”
In addressing our nation’s infrastructure under the Biden Administration, Sullivan said:
“Here is the mystery: After all of this work and the President touting the infrastructure bill and our getting ready to build and having good impacts in terms of natural gas, not just on environment and emissions but in continuing to make us the global leader, the White House set out new rules in April, under NEPA, for infrastructure projects. What did they do? They made the NEPA rules much harder to actually build infrastructure, not just for oil and gas, but it targeted oil and gas. This is for all infrastructure–roads, bridges, ports, renewable projects, LNG projects, natural gas projects. The White House put out new NEPA rules rescinding the Trump administration’s rules, which were quite good and similar to some of the reforms we got in the infrastructure bill, and everybody knows that these White House rules are going to delay infrastructure projects. Why in the heck would we do that as a country? We just passed a big infrastructure bill with permitting reform in it, and somebody over at the White House said: No, let’s make it harder.”
Click below to watch the entire video:
Click here for more information from the White House regarding these new NEPA rules.