"The Trump administration aims to make fossil fuels cheap—so cheap they wouldn’t be worth extracting. “‘Drill, baby, drill’ is nothing short of a myth,” one oil executive has said."
"Last week, the US Department of the Interior announced that it would speed up the approval process for certain fossil fuel projects, proclaiming that environmental analyses that previously would have taken years must now be taken down to, at maximum, a month. While the new procedures are seemingly a gift to the industry, this may actually be terrible news for pipeline developers, drillers, and miners.
“If I were a developer of any of these projects, I would look at this order and smack my forehead,” says Sam Sankar, a senior vice president at Earthjustice, the United States’ biggest environmental nonprofit law organization. “I don’t want my project to be authorized pursuant to these laughable procedures. It won’t hold up in court.”
The new procedures use President Donald Trump’s “national energy emergency,” proclaimed in an executive order in the first week of his presidency, to shorten timelines for federal reviews, including environmental reviews and reviews attached to cultural landmarks. Reviews that take into account a project’s impact on the environment are particularly truncated under this new policy. Processes that would normally take a year, the Department of the Interior says, must now be completed within just two weeks, while those reviews that might last longer than a year must now be done in under a month.
Experts say, however, that the new timelines are so short that they almost certainly run afoul of the bedrock laws involved: the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, the Endangered Species Act, and the National Historic Preservation Act. Mass ongoing layoffs inside the federal government—including at Interior, where The Washington Post reported that a quarter of the agency’s staff may eventually be cut—means that there may soon be far too few staff to handle reviews that would be near impossible to fulfill even in normal circumstances. This leaves any projects that try to break ground under the new timelines open to very easy legal challenges—something that Sankar says is “low-hanging fruit” for people who are impacted by a project and who want to take a developer to court."
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