Senate Democrats are asking the Army Corps of Engineers to end a federal review process that allows oil and gas pipeline projects to be approved under a general permit, arguing that it allows companies to get around strict environmental reviews and worsens climate change.
The senators’ request is part of the larger campaign to crack down on fossil fuels to slow climate change — a campaign that’s become even more important to Democrats and green activists now that Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) is holding out on supporting energy and climate provisions within the party’s spending negotiations.
Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) and five of his Senate colleagues requested the Corps, which is charged with permitting infrastructure under the Clean Water Act and the Rivers and Harbors Act, to eliminate its Nationwide Permit 12 on Thursday. The permit functionally fast-tracks oil and gas projects by exempting them from undergoing individual reviews, so long as the proposed activity does not result in the loss of greater than 0.5 acres of waters of the United States for each single and complete project.
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The Corps’s procedure provides that it will conduct an independent review of a project unless it determines that the project “will cause only minimal adverse environmental effects when performed separately and will have only minimal cumulative adverse effect on the environment.”
The Democrats, in their letter addressed to Corps leadership on Thursday, said oil and gas companies are exploiting the process and that fossil fuel projects have deleterious effects on the environment.
“Given the state of our climate crisis there is no new fossil fuel project that can have a ‘minimal adverse impact’ on the environment,” said the signatories, which also included Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA). “Every additional project worsens the wild fires, flooding, extreme heat, drought, hurricanes and other climate impacts that Americans are already facing.”
All projects should instead undergo independent reviews in order to take fully into account their risks, the senators argued.
Biden has been urged to take matters into his own hands to mitigate climate change and its effects absent a Senate agreement, a charge he’s taken up.
On Wednesday, he announced $2.3 billion in funding through the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program, which helps state and local governments mitigate the risks of natural disasters and hazards, such as heat waves.
The Interior Department also subsequently published details on two draft offshore wind energy areas in the Gulf of Mexico that would make 700,000 acres available for possible development.
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The series of actions are well short of the transformative spending for green energy technologies that Biden wants to pass through Congress to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
So far, Biden has held out on declaring a climate emergency, which is being promoted widely within the Democratic coalition as his best course of executive action.
