Time To Modernize Archaic Environmental Rules

Gerard Scimeca January 11, 2020

With the new decade upon us, policymakers should make a New Year’s resolution to revamp a set of environmental rules that are more outmoded than the disco era and leisure suits they predate.

Recently, 33 industry groups sent a letter to the White House Council on Environmental Quality Chair Mary Neumayr requesting to “expeditiously proceed” with plans to modernize the outdated National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) regulations.

NEPA was enacted with the best of intentions while the Environmental Protection Agency was still in its infancy. It began, modestly enough, as an effort to better understand potential negative impacts that major construction projects would have on their surrounding environment prior to moving forward.

While the EPA has had its problems with overreach and burdensome bureaucracy, it has at least helped to make the air easier to breathe. By contrast, however, NEPA has almost no environmental legacy to benefit America. In fact, its sole purpose seems to be to choke the life out of the economy..........To Read More......

 

My Take - The problem with all these environmental laws and agencies is as long as they exist they can be, and will be abusive.  These agencies are all filled with activists who merely hunker down until the administration changes, and then they come out of their holes and start the entire process of abuse all over again.  The only fix is repealing these laws, eliminating these agencies, and getting rid of the bureaucrats that infest them.  Then review what worked and put that into legislation with:

1. Sunset all laws and regulations, Departments, agencies and bureaus.  No law, regulation or office should be allowed to exist forever.  Force the Congress to re-authorize the laws, and offices that enforce them.  There should only be four Deparments of the Federal government: State, Treasury. Defense, and Justice.  All others should be eliminated.
2. Place restrictions on the federal courts to review laws.  The federal judiciary is filled with political hacks and is out of control.  But the Constitution gives the Congress right to determine the jurisdicion of the federal judicary, including the Supreme Court, which is the only Federal Court autorized by the Constitition.  All other Federal Courts are creations of the Congress.
3. End "standing" by activists.  The Endangered Species Act was the first to give standing to outside concerned groups regrading the implementation of federal law.  End that.
4. Make it impossible for future bureaucrats to re-interpret the laws.
5. Eliminate