Trump Administration Cripples Law Crucial to Environmental Justice In Colorado
When the Trump administration proposed sweeping changes to one of the nation’s bedrock environmental laws, it held the first of just two public hearings in Denver, mid-winter — and ignored the many conservationists, tribal activists and other Coloradans who showed up to express their strong opposition.
The ability of citizens to formally oppose infrastructure and extraction projects that may harm them is exactly what President Donald Trump sought to curtail in revisions to the rules implementing the National Environmental Policy Act, which were finalized July 15.
The theory behind gutting NEPA is as clear as it is appalling. In this administration’s vision of an America that has returned to “greatness,” the next oil pipeline that’s planned to run through your nearest drinking water source should be fast-tracked. Public commentary should be kept to a minimum, and environmental impact studies should be waived.
Few of the Trump administration’s endless attacks on environmental rules are more perverse than this NEPA revision. The 50-year-old statute has ensured that the public has the right to know how oil pipelines, chemical plants and other massively polluting projects will affect them.
Across the U.S., NEPA has been a powerful tool for communities unwilling to risk their health and safety in the name of “job creation” or some illusion of shared corporate wealth.
That’s particularly true in Colorado, where NEPA reviews have effectively stopped destructive proposals like the U.S. Forest Service’s plan in 1989 to clearcut aspen groves in the Grand Mesa, Uncompahgre and Gunnison national forests. Just this May, NEPA resulted in the Forest Service trimming acres and road miles of a proposed logging project in the Gunnison National Forest in response to public engagement.
Look at the national picture. In the span of 24 hours this month, three massive and dangerous pipeline projects — Keystone XL, Dakota Access pipeline and the Atlantic Coast pipeline — were halted as the result of legal challenges that invoked NEPA provisions.
Dozens of tribal and indigenous groups joined with environmental organizations in the lawsuits against these pipelines. Polluting projects like oil pipelines have long been placed in areas that disproportionately harm people of color and low-income communities.
And NEPA has always served as an important tool in fighting such injustice — until now.
In the case of Keystone XL, a federal judge ruled that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ use of a special construction permit didn’t properly examine potential environmental damage to the waterways the pipeline would cross. For example, a spill affecting the Ogallala Aquifer would potentially contaminate the drinking water relied on by some 80% of the population of the Great Plains.
These are the supposed burdens that the Trump administration and its oil industry allies seek to eliminate by hobbling NEPA. If public commentary periods are squashed, then people like the residents of the Standing Rock Indian Reservation will be muzzled, unable to formally voice opposition to an unwanted project pushing a river of crude oil through sacred land.
We’ve already seen what happens when big projects are exempted from environmental review. Though the catalyst for NEPA was the 1969 blowout and oil spill at a platform off the Santa Barbara coast, by 1981, the Interior Department excluded oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico from NEPA review. BP’s Deepwater Horizon was one such excluded project.
When that oil rig exploded in 2010, it killed 11 people and caused the worst oil spill in U.S. history.
NEPA has long stood as one of the nation’s most democratic environmental laws. It empowered the public to expose flaws in potentially destructive projects before they were able to cause widespread harm. We can’t allow let this administration cripple this law to silence us.
Nothing great will come to a nation that pushes for profit at the expense of our health, clean air and clean water.
Allison Melton is a Colorado-based staff attorney in the public lands program at the Center for Biological Diversity.
