EPA Mounts A New Strike On States’ Rights, This Time To Boost Pipeline Companies
The Environmental Protection Agency finalized a rule on Monday restricting states’ authority over Clean Water Act permits for fossil fuel pipelines and other infrastructure projects.
The new rule, first proposed last August, sets a strict one-year deadline for states and tribes to certify or deny permits to build pipelines. It also narrows the scope of what effects states can consider when assessing proposals to water quality alone, prohibiting regulators from factoring in a project’s impacts on climate change.
In a half-hour call with reporters on Monday afternoon, EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler accused states of “holding energy infrastructure projects hostage” and “trapping projects in a bureaucratic groundhog day in hopes that investors become frustrated and end the development.”
“Today’s action puts an end to this abuse of the Clean Water Act,” he said.
But former career EPA officials said the rule change is a naked attempt to tilt the application process in favor of fossil fuel companies, and flies in the face of decades of Supreme Court rulings on Section 401 of the Clean Water Act.
The decision amounts to what many see as a fresh assault on states’ rights to regulate pollution, marking yet another example of the Trump administration flipping Republican orthodoxy on environmental federalism on its head.
Wheeler singled out New York’s decision last month to reject a permit to build the Northeast Supply Enhancement project ― a controversial fracked gas conduit better known as the Williams Pipeline ― under Lower New York Bay as an example of a state violating the spirit of the law.
The statute as it existed previously required states to grant or deny permits in a “reasonable” amount of time within one year. For infrastructure projects in a fixed geographical area, such as a dam, the process could take just a few months.
But pipelines ― like the Williams Pipeline, which aimed to carry gas from the fracking...
