President Trump has proposed major changes to decades-old environmental regulations. The proposal would overhaul how the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, is implemented, meaning many big projects like highways and pipelines would no longer require a federal assessment of environmental impact.Pat Parenteau, an environmental law professor at Vermont Law School and an expert on NEPA, joined VPR's Mitch Wertlieb to talk about what would change under the proposal, and what the chances are that the changes will make it through legal challenges.
Parenteau stressed the importance and foundational nature of the law.
“It’s a 50-year-old law, ushered in the whole environmental movement in the United States, and it created the opportunity to adopt a whole range of laws that we now take for granted: Clean air, clean water, endangered species and many, many more," Parenteau said.
Parenteau believes the proposed changes pose a real threat to the law's intended goals.
"These changes are all about fast-tracking more and more fossil fuel infrastructure at the very moment in time that the science is saying, 'We cannot keep doing that.'" — Pat Parenteau, Vermont Law School
“It’s a devastating blow to the core values that NEPA is designed to advance," he said. "These changes are all about fast-tracking more and more fossil fuel infrastructure at the very moment in time that the science is saying, 'We cannot keep doing that.'"
The Trump administration is hoping the Supreme Court will be more sympathetic than lower courts have been to rolling back NEPA regulations, but Parenteau thinks the outcome is far from guaranteed if the proposal is challenged.
"You can be surprised by what justices might do," he said. "Because the way conservative justices view the power of the federal government, they view that power very skeptically, when it’s used to advance environmental goals, as well as retreat from environmental goals, to change policies willy-nilly, if you will, without good strong justification. So I think some of the Trump administration folks that are counting on votes from these justices may be surprised by the time some of these cases get there.”
