SINKING IN
BUREAUCRACY
initiate litigation challenging the
project, per the Administrative
Procedure Act’s statute of limitations. In one instance, the nearcertainty that a project’s permits
would eventually be litigated
under NEPA motivated Shell Oil
Company to file a lawsuit challenging its own project in order to
avoid waiting six years for adversaries to file suit before the statute of limitations expired.”
Several proposals for streamlining NEPA review have been
floated in Congress over the years,
and the 2012 transportation bill
included some provisions that
would do just that. But not everyone agrees that NEPA itself, as
written, is problematic.
Sue Reid, an environmental
attorney and director of the Conservation Law Foundation’s Massachusetts office, argues that the
1970 law has proved a vital tool
in curbing abuses by project developers who, prior to its passage,
ran roughshod over environmental
interests with little scrutiny.
“Obviously I work for a shop
that relies on litigation as one
of many tools in our toolbox, in
terms of confronting bad projects
that shouldn’t have passed, or
HUFFINGTON
03.10.13
shouldn’t pass environmental and
regulatory reviews,” Reid said. “I
would say that I wouldn’t want to
change the rules based on abuses
of existing systems, and I think
that’s what you’d be talking about
potentially here. All of these environmental groups like CLF and the
Natural Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club and Greenpeace and all these groups that
engage in litigation — not even
periodically but regularly — do so
relatively surgically, and we look
for when there’s a problem with a
proposed development project or
a regulatory process. We focus on
the biggest issues and target those
and go after them, when necessary, with litigation.”
This is not the same, Reid suggests, as the tack deployed by opponents of Cape Wind. “That is,
to sue in connection with basically every single regulatory approval, whether it’s related to the
contracts or the environmental
reviews or the permitting — every
single turn has been challenged,”
Reid said. “I think that’s a whole
different animal, and again, I
wouldn’t want to necessarily use
the exception to the rule to frame
how you should change the rules.”
Kit Kennedy, an NRDC attorney who specializes in renewable
energy policy, and who has written about the long-running Cape