Coming soon to US national parks: Oil and gas pipelines, thanks to Trump's new plan
The Trump administration's big infrastructure plan, unveiled Monday, amounts to the largest rewrite of one of the nation's bedrock environmental laws in decades. It would dramatically speed up the permitting of all sorts of structures -- not just roads and bridges, and even lead to the bizarre possibility that oil and gas pipelines could be swiftly approved for National Park Service lands.
Yes, that's right, the infrastructure plan would allow for faster approval of constructing oil pipelines to go through our national parks. The plan, if enacted, would accomplish this by giving the Interior secretary the authority to approve a pipeline project on Park Service-administered land, as is currently done with electrical transmission lines and water infrastructure.
Currently, though, if you want to build an oil pipeline through, say, Glacier National Park in Montana, you need a specific act of Congress in order to allow it. But the Trump administration sees that as a barrier to the swift creation of jobs, and the transport of more oil and gas.
"Obtaining congressional approval for each pipeline crossing and facilities necessary for the production of energy is time consuming and delays construction of needed natural gas pipeline facilities," the infrastructure plan released by the White House states.
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The U.S. is one of the largest producers of oil and gas in the world, a fact that the Trump administration seems to remind the American people about nearly every day.
Under the Trump administration, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has been aggressively promoting oil and gas drilling on public lands, including by taking the unusual step of dramatically shrinking a national monument and then opening up much of that region to drilling.
As one might expect, environmentalists are blasting the infrastructure proposal, and many on both sides of the aisle are pointing out how it dramatically alters the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, which governs the environmental review process for new federal construction.
The short version is that the Trump administration wants to drastically cut environmental reviews under NEPA, ostensibly to speed up review times for projects. However, this also opens up the possibility of building roads, bridges, pipelines and other infrastructure that ends up harming the environment.
The climate change advocacy group 350.org came out harshly against the infrastructure plan.
“This is a climate-wrecking fossil fuel infrastructure plan that fast-tracks pipelines at the expense of frontline communities and working people. This flies in the face of everything we know about climate science," said 350.org executive director May Boeve in a statement.
The infrastructure plan is not likely to get far in Congress, at least not anytime soon, but it demonstrates the White House's priorities. Also, some of its proposals could be undertaken through executive orders or other regulatory means, which makes them important to keep an eye on.
Topics Donald Trump Politics
Andrew Freedman is Mashable's Senior Editor for Science and Special Projects. Prior to working at Mashable, Freedman was a Senior Science writer for Climate Central. He has also worked as a reporter for Congressional Quarterly and Greenwire/E&E Daily. His writing has also appeared in the Washington Post, online at The Weather Channel, and washingtonpost.com, where he wrote a weekly climate science column for the "Capital Weather Gang" blog. He has provided commentary on climate science and policy for Sky News, CBC Radio, NPR, Al Jazeera, Sirius XM Radio, PBS NewsHour, and other national and international outlets. He holds a Masters in Climate and Society from Columbia University, and a Masters in Law and Diplomacy from The Fletcher School at Tufts University.
