Read this post on Josh’s Substack: Powering Spaceship Earth.
Chris Koopman and I have an extended essay in Commonplace on the broad need to repeal or fix the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).
You can read the entire piece, but here are the highlights. Our introduction gives the motivation:
America stands at the threshold of a potential new golden age of innovation and industry. Our technological capabilities have never been greater, our entrepreneurial spirit remains unmatched, and there is growing bipartisan recognition that we must rebuild American productive capacity. What stands in our way is not lack of vision or resources. The biggest impediment to the future is the regulatory apparatus that makes building impossible in America today.
At the center of this paralysis stands the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), perhaps the single greatest procedural barrier to American progress since it was signed in 1970. NEPA marks the dividing line between an America that built with confidence and an America that regulates itself into inaction. If we’re serious about restoring American technological leadership and industrial renewal, eliminating NEPA is the keystone reform that would unlock our capacity to build again.
Repealing NEPA is best
The simplest fix is repeal. That’s an uphill battle, but one worth fighting. The good news is that there’s a broad range of fixes:
If full repeal proves politically unattainable, Congress should pursue four substantial reforms:
Restrict Litigation Access: Limit injunctive relief to cases brought promptly by directly affected parties where imminent environmental harm is demonstrable and no other remedy exists. Environmental lawsuits should require substantive standing, not procedural technicalities. Changes like this would blunt the weaponization of NEPA by advocacy groups and grant would-be builders confidence that their plans could actually materialize.
Shorten Time Horizons: Reduce the statute of limitations from six years to 180 days, forcing opponents to raise objections quickly rather than strategically delaying projects through last-minute litigation.
Focus on Proximate Effects: Require agencies to consider only direct, proximate, and reasonably foreseeable effects of federal actions, not speculative or remote possibilities that turn environmental reviews into exercises in science fiction. Like restricting litigation access, this shrinks the target for the weaponization of NEPA against builders. Today, reviews require predictions about hypotheticals that are unending and unanswerable.
Expand Categorical Exclusions: Exempt routine actions and smaller projects from review, focusing limited resources on truly significant undertakings.
Imagine an America that builds again
Conclusions can be the most difficult part to write. But when you are talking about ways to 10x America’s role in the world and enable broad-based economic and environmental success, it writes itself:
Imagine an America where projects move at the speed of permits measured in days, not decades. Where energy infrastructure, such as pipelines or transmission lines, can be built quickly to meet our needs. Where housing can be constructed to meet demand. Where transit systems can expand without delay. Where industrial facilities can be approved before the technology they’re built to produce becomes obsolete.
This is precisely how America operated before 1970. We can choose this future if we have the courage to strike directly at the root of it by eliminating NEPA.
The path forward should be clear: delete NEPA now. Let America build again.
As I have written about before, the call is coming from inside the house. Said another way, our concerns about energy, housing, and America’s power and influence all stem from a crisis of our own making.
The best part about self-imposed limits is that we have everything we need to remove them.
Recommendations:
- I published a two-page overview of how to fix NEPA.
- Thomas Hochman has a nuts-and-bolts essay on leveraging the Fiscal Responsibility Act’s definitional changes to NEPA to make reform possible.
- The Property Environment Research Center has led the way in making the case for NEPA reforms so that national forests don’t burn down.
- Exformation, by Will Rinehart, on vetocracy.