Huffington Magazine Issue 39 | Page 46

SINKING IN BUREAUCRACY would have impacts all along their length as well. Because the proposed site is located more than 3 miles from shore — the line where state law generally ends and federal jurisdiction begins — Cape Wind, like many offshore projects, also triggered the full complement of oversight, because construction staging, shorebound electric cables and other aspects of the endeavor must also adhere to state guidelines. Over the course of nine years, all of this was considered, opened for public comment, and then reconsidered again. In nearly all cases, according to the final review document, the impacts were declared to be negligible, minor or moderate. In the minds of many green advocates, this level of scrutiny has done wonders over the last 40 years to keep economic development smart and the environment safe. But the multiplicity of agencies involved, the lack of strict time frames, and the reflex to gird against lawsuits have also dramatically lengthened the review process, many critics say, not just for Cape Wind but for all manner of major infrastructure projects in the U.S., from road and bridge improvements to power plants and HUFFINGTON 03.10.13 transmission lines. In a paper published in the journal Environmental Law in December, Jeffrey Thaler, a professor of energy policy, law and ethics at the University of Maine, noted that there are currently as many as “50 different federal environmental and wildlife statutes and executive orders, largely enacted or promulgated since 1980 that create a daunting gauntlet of regulatory hurdles.” Thaler added that by his own informal count, there are over 63,000 pages of such regulations dealing with environmental, energy, resource management and wildlife at the federal level — and untold thousands more at the state level. Last June, the New York, New Jersey & Connecticut Regional Plan Association’s “America 2050” program, which takes a broad look at national infrastructure planning and policy, published an analysis of NEPA that bore some startling statistics. Titled “Getting Infrastructure Going: Expediting the Environmental Review Process,” the study found that: “In the 40 years since the passage of the National Environmental Policy Act and the development of the current federal regulatory