By Clark Mindock
(Reuters) – Republican attorneys general from 20 U.S. states sued the Biden administration on Tuesday, seeking to block new reforms to the U.S. environmental review process for major projects such as transmission lines and wind and solar farms.
States including Iowa, North Dakota, Texas and Florida challenged the reforms included in a rule finalized in April by the White House Council on Environmental Quality in North Dakota federal court, arguing that they limit the agency’s authority would exceed, increase project costs and unfairly promote clean energy. projects.
The reforms are intended to streamline analysis under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), a foundational environmental law that requires environmental reviews for major projects that receive federal permits or funding. NEPA reviews are often the subject of lawsuits, which can delay project construction for years.
The states said the regulations also require agencies to consider a broader range of a project’s impacts during environmental assessments, including climate change and environmental justice considerations, which will cause project delays even though these factors are not explicitly described in the NEPA text .
They said the rule changes will make it harder for some projects to gain approval if they could impact disadvantaged or minority communities.
The rule will impose inappropriate bureaucratic roadblocks on projects such as highways or fossil fuel power plants “by imposing social, environmental and race-based regulations on developers,” the states said in a statement.
A White House spokesperson said the rule will speed up project review and ensure the industry can move forward on important investments and projects, but declined to comment directly on the lawsuit.
The reforms build on and expand initial work to reform the NEPA process that was completed in 2022, when the Biden administration began rolling back changes in the Trump administration that made the process less stringent.
The previous changes in the Biden administration required federal agencies to consider the direct, indirect, and cumulative impacts of proposed projects or actions.
The White House Council on Environmental Quality has called the latest reforms a “core element” of Biden’s efforts to build out clean energy systems and rebuild America’s infrastructure.
It said in April that the new reforms are consistent with the agency’s legal authority.
