Wyoming officials slam proposed changes to NEPA

Top Wyoming officials have called the proposed changes to the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) burdensome and unreasonable in a batch of comment letters sent last week to the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ).

Governor Mark Gordon stated in his comment letter that any revisions to the NEPA regulations should, “Emphasize the important roles of state, county, city, local agency and rural government expertise as vital, contributing partners.”

NEPA is familiar to this community as the process of analyzing the environmental impact of a proposed project that will take place on federal lands, such as the updated management plans for the Black Hills National Forest or the Bureau of Land Management’s land in this area, and also private projects such as mining and drilling on federally owned lands.

The process can take significant time to complete and was blamed in 2016 for causing Rare Element Resources to run out of funding and put on hold its plans to pursue a rare earth mine in the Bear Lodge.

Reforms to the NEPA process were announced by the CEQ in July and touted as changes that would “modernize and accelerate environmental reviews” and encourage early community engagement, accelerate “America’s clean energy future”, strengthen energy security and advance environmental justice.

“These reforms to federal environmental reviews will deliver better decisions, faster permitting, and more community input and local buy-in,” said Brenda Mallory, Chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, in the announcement.

“This rule is a key element of President Biden’s permitting reform agenda that will help us speed the build-out of our clean energy future while reducing pollution and harms in communities that have been left out and left behind for far too long.”

The reforms include clarifications to the roles of lead and cooperating agencies, deadlines and page limits and other requirements to ensure timely and unified reviews. The rule also includes a process for a federal agency to use another agency’s categorical exclusion to unlock faster reviews for projects with few environmental effects.

Wyoming officials, however, have criticized the draft, particularly its emphasis on climate change.

“The Biden Administration is apparently using every opportunity – every government action, whether authorized by Congress or not – to cripple our domestic economy in the name of addressing climate concerns,” Governor Gordon said in a statement. “We are charged with addressing environmental issues responsibly, thoughtfully and honestly and Wyoming takes that responsibility seriously.

“By hobbling innovation and curtailing opportunity here at home, we are not making things better, only incentivizing bad behaviors beyond the reach of these proposed regulations. The shallow intent to punish fossil fuels ignores real cultural and economic impacts to Wyoming and her citizens, as well as other energy producing states. These proposed changes to NEPA are not responsible rulemaking.”

Gordon signed a letter along with 16 other Republican governors to raise concerns about the changes – specifically that they do not meet the stated purpose of increasing efficiency and effectiveness. The letter also suggests that this, “drastically increases the potential for litigation related to NEPA decisions” and will impact management within the states.

Gordon listed specific issues with the proposed changes in his comment letter, particularly the length of time that the NEPA process demands. The proposal does nothing to alleviate this burden, he said, and instead imposes additional requirements that it will likely fall on private applicants to fulfill, increasing the burdens, delays and costs.

He also criticized the, “troubling assumption by the federal government that fossil fuels are bad, renewable energy is good and that focusing on eliminating fossil fuel production is the only way to reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere” and said the changes appear to have the goal of punishing fossil fuels without considering the impact this will have on energy-producing states.

The batch of comment letters submitted by the state also included notes from the Wyoming Oil and Gas Commission, which stated the NEPA process is already “unbelievably burdensome, especially on energy related projects” and said it’s common for reviews to last nearly a decade, which discourages many businesses from even proposing a project.

The commission complained that two major requirements would be added to every NEPA document: climate change and environmental justice.

“It is not possible to add two significant and specific topics to a process that is already known for inefficiency and uncertainty in permitting and suggest that it will ‘provide for an efficient process and regulatory certainty’,” the letter states.

The rule should instead accurately reflect the intent of NEPA, says the letter, which is to balance the need for resources with the environmental consequences of those actions.

Similar concerns were also submitted by the Wyoming Department of Agriculture, Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality and WYDOT.