00:00Ladies, time has expired. The chair recognizes the gentleman from Wisconsin, Mr. Tiffany, for five minutes.
00:05Well, Mr. Chairman, one thing I'm really heartened about is the choice that my youngest daughter made to become an environmental engineer.
00:12It sounds like she has a bright future here, based on the testimony that we heard earlier.
00:20Mr. Hergett, would you agree that delay is death?
00:25Absolutely.
00:25Did the originators of NEPA, did they envision NEPA becoming what it is today?
00:34Absolutely not. When Rachel Carson put NEPA together, the idea that it would be used as an obstruction tool to fight a proxy war on fossil fuels that has now backfired would never have been something that she had envisioned.
00:44Yeah, I point to one of the products of NEPA is the chart right behind me.
00:49All you've got to do is look at the blue line is fire. The green slashes are harvest on our national forests.
00:57And I believe the watershed year was 1988 when we reversed or when we stopped managing our forests on federal lands in the way that we should.
01:09And I would just say, Mr. Mergen, in regards to your comments, we're losing all this expertise.
01:15What I hear consistently back home is that all kinds of ologists are being hired over the last couple decades in the federal and federal forest management.
01:25And foresters are in a significant minority.
01:28So when you talk about not having the people, we have we do not have enough foresters anymore.
01:34And that has resulted in this far more fire, far less fiber being produced here in America.
01:42And I'll put some numbers to it.
01:44We did something called the Forest Practices Study when I was in the state legislature and did a rigorous review of state forest management.
01:52But I extrapolated those numbers to the Chequamegon-Nicolay National Forest, which covers about a million and a half acres in northern Wisconsin.
02:01And over the last three decades, the estimates that I came up with, while crude, I think they're fairly accurate,
02:07$250 million worth of value that have been left behind on the national forest.
02:13But what's also left behind were families.
02:16There are a number of sawmills that closed as a result of that.
02:19I've heard from Representative McClintock what's happened in the Sierras where they've lost dozens, if not hundreds, of mills over the last couple decades.
02:28Well, something similar, while not on the same scale, has happened in northern Wisconsin as a result of this preservationist attitude that you can see with this chart.
02:39Mr. Bowles, I'd like to ask you a question.
02:41Can you give me an example of a project that timelines are extended significantly for the American Road and Transportation Builders?
02:50Do you have any examples where it's taken far longer than what it should to be able to build a project?
02:58I don't have any personal examples where projects were hampered by the NEPA process.
03:04But in the written testimony, there are some of our members and some of my colleagues that have experienced that.
03:11I think some in a project in Arkansas, a project in Boston, and then a cited one in Oregon,
03:19where that delays have just extended the construction process to really beyond what anybody could imagine.
03:29Does it end up extending it into decades, not just years?
03:35I guess it doesn't extend.
03:37I mean, it continues to extend until it's over.
03:40So some of them are not over?
03:42Correct.
03:42Is that what you're saying?
03:44Mr. Campbell, is it true the grid has become more unstable over the last decade,
03:48the electrical grid here in the United States?
03:51Yes, it has.
03:51Load growth is significant now, and we've closed a lot of our always available baseload power plants.
03:58Yeah, I'm just going to close with this, Mr. Chairman.
04:04I want to know how long.
04:05We just had that iconic lodge up on the north rim of the Grand Canyon burned down in the last couple weeks
04:12as a result of fire that got away that it appears should not have gotten away,
04:17and I hope we have an oversight hearing in regards to that.
04:20I want to know how long it's going to take to rebuild that lodge.
04:23And any guesses, if we have to go through this extensive EIS process, how long it's going to take?
04:29And I will just close with asking unanimous consent, Mr. Chairman,
04:33to introduce a product here from the Breakthrough Foundation,
04:38the procedural hangover, how NEPA litigation obstructs critical projects.
04:42And they talked specifically about the Chico project in California.
04:46But I thought there was a very operative line in here.
04:50By delaying the project for years, Conservation Congress,
04:53an environmental outfit out of Canada, or Montana,
04:57likely did more damage to the natural habitat of the northern spotted owl
05:02than any amount of forest service intervention could have.
05:08I yield back.
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