What is NEPA, and Why Should You Care?
Signed into law in 1970, it requires federal agencies to study and analyze the environmental effects of proposed plans prior to making decisions on whether or not to proceed with them. Before NEPA, federal agencies did not have to even consider the environmental impacts of their actions. After NEPA, these agencies, in cooperation with state and local governments, must use all practical resources to create conditions in which “man and nature can exist in productive harmony.”
Specifically, NEPA requires all federal agencies to prepare detailed Environmental Assessments and Environmental Impact Statements for projects and actions they undertake. The purpose of the law is two-fold, ensuring that the government does due diligence in determining the full extent of any potential impacts a proposed project may have on the environment and surrounding communities as well as ensuring that those communities are aware of any such potential impacts and have a voice in whether and how they are implemented.
By publishing these studies, as is required by NEPA, the public can not only gain a better understanding of the environmental impacts of a given project, but they can also respond accordingly. Again, this is critical because the law ensures that both the time and effort are taken to investigate and understand the environmental impacts as well as provides an opportunity for the public to meaningfully participate in the process.
NEPA also established a Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), which is required to monitor all federal agencies and ensure that they are adhering to the legislation.
Why We Need to Protect NEPA
Explore and share our ‘Nepa Does Not Delay’ StoryMap here. Read the Why We Need to Protect NEPA Op-Ed by Peggy Shepard, Co-Founder and Executive Director of WE ACT for Environmental Justice, and Christy Goldfuss, Senior Vice President for Energy and Environment Policy at the Center for American Progress.
NEPA Under Threat
The Trump administration is seeking to gut NEPA, tipping the scale in favor of developers and polluting industry instead of the people. There are major changes being proposed. See WE ACT’s letter with CJA and GreenLatinos:
- Removing consideration of environmental justice and cumulative impacts in NEPA analyses.
- Getting rid of clear public engagement guidelines.
- Ending Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ)’s long-standing regulations.
- Directing individual agencies to have separate NEPA processes.
Weakening NEPA has big negative impacts. These moves threaten to weaken protections for environmental justice communities, make involvement in decision-making more difficult, and reduce public participation, transparency, and equity.
Individual agency NEPAs create chaos and further injustice. Encouraging individual NEPA processes for each agency is creating chaos, and multiple agencies including the Department of Energy, Department of the Interior, and Department of Agriculture now “all limit public engagement, weaken environmental reviews, and ultimately increase risks of project uncertainty, community opposition, and delay.”
Context matters: Deregulation in a pro-fossil fuel administration is dangerous. Even if Congress passes bipartisan permitting reform legislation, the current administration’s priorities do not guarantee that transmission and clean energy projects will even receive federal permits, and will instead continue a no-guardrails approach to deadly fossil fuel buildout.
Deregulation in the guise of “permitting reform” is not the answer. Explore our new storymap to learn more about holistic solutions to clean energy transition advancements including:
- Strengthen NEPA & early and meaningful community engagement. The A. Donald McEachin Environmental Justice for All Act includes legislative language that would strengthen community engagement requirements for development projects and cumulative impacts. This bill is championed by communities not just because of its provisions, but because the late representatives A. Donald McEachin and Raul M. Grijalva took the bill across the country to ensure it was written by communities, for communities.
- Adequate funding and staffing within agencies responsible for NEPA implementation. Environmental justice advocates celebrated the $1 billion for NEPA implementation which was included in the IRA, and research from the Biden-Harris administration showed that this investment directly led to the decrease of permitting timelines by 6 months.
- Greater interagency coordination. The Biden-Harris administration successfully utilized improved interagency coordination, developed digital and online tools to better communicate with developers and stakeholders, and increased transparency and accessibility of project requirements overall.
- Address transmission acceleration and clean energy separately. In 2022, groups including WE ACT for Environmental Justice drafted the Transmission Principles, as well as a corresponding white paper, outlining solutions that would address the backlog of clean energy generators waiting to be connected to the grid.
The Environmental Justice Implications of NEPA Webinar
Additional Resources
Citizen’s Guide to NEPA (in both English & Spanish)
Environmental Justice Considerations in the NEPA Process