'Giant Road Block': Doug LaMalfa Decries National Environmental Policy Act Permitting Process

4 months ago

During a House Natural Resources Committee hearing on Tuesday, Rep. Doug LaMalfa (R-CA) spoke about the National Environmental Policy Act.

Transcript

00:00I'm fired. The chair recognizes the gentleman from California, Mr. LaMalfa, for five minutes.

00:04Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate the hearing today on this important topic, and it's

00:08cracking me up once again the idea that Donald Trump, after 50-plus years of layers, layers of

00:14first the legislation that put some of these in place, and then many, many, many lawsuits on top

00:21of that, different interpretations, and a bureaucracy that has only grown in slowness and

00:27in size, somehow that is blamed currently on President Trump. I mean, Mr. Chairman, I really

00:33enjoy that graphic you got there, that poster there, which, you know, the flowchart for making

00:39a natural gas pipeline project, and it's hard to read the font on the 8x14 here. It's hard

00:45to read the font there, and it's actually, it'd be kind of hard to dunk over that thing. It's

00:49so tall. It's given the amount of steps you would have to take, so appreciate that illustration,

00:55and so as noted earlier by one of our colleagues, is that they're celebrating now that it's down

01:02to 150 pages over a period of time. Well, that took probably one of those earth-ending bills

01:09and pieces of legislation that might have come from this committee to shorten that stack of

01:17pages of timeline in order to get these done. So indeed, the NEPA process, although well-intentioned

01:2550-plus years ago, is now a giant roadblock and way of getting important things done.

01:32My colleague from California talked about forest management a little bit there, and, you know,

01:37to do a simple thing like maintaining one of the forest roads to replace a culvert, to

01:42do just minimal amounts of work, you've got to get an NEPA. You've got to do the environmental

01:49before we can do simple things that help keep our forests in a place where we can manage

01:53them. So, and then we have the remedy being like, well, we just need more money and more

02:00staff and more personnel that are really good experts on this. So we had the laughably named

02:06Inflation Reduction Act a couple years ago, which is tagged anywhere between one and two trillion

02:11dollars, depending on how it plays out over the years. The money had to come from thin air.

02:16And so some of that money supposedly was getting to helping with staff up the bureaucracies,

02:21so they would get through these timelines, get through these permits quicker. So we had

02:27a hearing with Forest Service a couple years ago on that, and they said, oh, we've had more

02:31money right now available than we ever had before. Yet in the same sentence, they said, we need

02:3530 more million dollars in order to approve a project that would require some, or that would

02:40make some important thinning and forest management available or in another state.

02:45So, one thing after another, it isn't going to be adding bureaucrats to the equation. It's going to

02:50be getting them focused on a narrow timeline of what NEPA really should be, and not every case really

02:56needs NEPA. We need more categorical exclusions of things to get things done, certainly to help save our

03:02forests and the ravages of fire year after year. So, Mr. Hergut, let me ask you a little bit about

03:08that. So with the categorical exclusions in forested areas around the power lines, making fuel breaks

03:15so we can save our towns instead of burning down like I've had three of my towns burned down around

03:19critical infrastructure. What do you see as we can do to advance that cause to have categorical exclusions

03:26be not these scary things that are trying to bypass NEPA, but actually useful towards getting projects

03:32done? I think one of the more important things, and it's simple and it's something this committee

03:37can tackle easily, because at the end of the day, I'm trying to fix a problem, not prove a point,

03:41is we don't have transparency. If you walk into Department of Interior right now, it doesn't

03:44matter if it was Secretary Halen or if it was Secretary Burgum, you ask how many EISs, how many

03:48categorical exclusions, how many environmental assessments, FONSIs, all the relevant aspects of NEPA,

03:54it would take weeks to get back because it's not centrally tracked. It's nearly impossible to

03:57figure out where it is in the system. Categorical exclusions even on the forest side that used to

04:02take anywhere between three months to six months are taking two years and overbilled and you better

04:08hope they don't have an interagency dependency with another with the Fish and Wildlife Service or

04:13or with the Bureau of Reclamation because at that point, your categorical exclusion ends up becoming a

04:18built out EA dressed up as reform. Two or three fire seasons can go by in that kind of

04:23review time. Oh, exactly, exactly. We had a project suffer in Butte County, my home county,

04:30where they had the dollars lined up to do some work and then waiting so long for the permits,

04:34the place burned down instead. Let's talk a little bit about, we hear a lot of pie in the sky about

04:40electrifying so many more things on our grid, you know, our automobiles, trucks, appliances, yard

04:46devices, yet important minerals like copper. It takes, in one case, 29 years to get a copper mine permit.

04:53It's typically more like maybe 12 or so. How is that going to help us electrify the whole grid

04:57like some wish to do? It's absolutely not. And the thing about permitting and the permitting

05:03decision in particular is we got to remove the obstacles and the headwinds for all sectors,

05:06right? Do it for mining, do it for transmission, do it for offshore wind, just remove obstacles.

05:11And at the end of the day, the mining sector runs on such low margins, we are never going to have

05:16win an asymmetric war with China. If we continue to add 20 to 30 percent just on the permitting cost,

05:21every dollar that goes towards a mine development right out the door with no with no environmental

05:26gain to cultural historic resources. Yeah, thank you. I misspoke on the grid,

05:31the grid will be overloaded by electrifying everything that is required to be on the grid. So,

05:36Mr. Chairman, thank you. I yield back.

'Giant Road Block': Doug LaMalfa Decries National Environmental Policy Act Permitting Process

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