This essay is from a tainted source with vested interests in repealing NEPA and other environmental regulation, and a long history of covert action to bias academic institutions. It conflates the...
This essay is from a tainted source with vested interests in repealing NEPA and other environmental regulation, and a long history of covert action to bias academic institutions.
It conflates the size of the reports with the causes of regulatory delay.
If you want to sclerose a bureaucracy to the point of paralysis and easy elimination, do these things:
File lawsuits constantly, to dilute or overturn every administrative ruling, or to force the agency to perform statutory duties. This helps ensure that dwindling funds are spent on lawyers and administration rather than enforcement. Further, litigation encourages actions that stand up in court, and don't necessarily serve the public purpose of the agency, like 1,000 page reports justifying decisions in minute detail.
Feed the media partisan stories, and create astroturfing organizations to ensure the agency is vilified for every mistake (or for doing nothing because it has no resources), and that successes are buried or misreported.
Constantly change the organization's mission (what it's legally accountable for doing), evidentiary basis, and leadership according to partisan whim.
There are a few more, but these are the major items - repeat until the offending regulatory agency is abolished, or so feeble that it's a placeholder (e.g. the U.S. Federal Election Commission).
For bonus points, reinvent the agency as a weapon against your political enemies (e.g. the FBI under Trump).
First of all, if you do your own searches for this, be cautious and verify the validity of your references. Sourcewatch does a fair job of identifying biased or AstroTurf organizations, e.g. the...
Exemplary
First of all, if you do your own searches for this, be cautious and verify the validity of your references. Sourcewatch does a fair job of identifying biased or AstroTurf organizations, e.g. the so-called "Environmental Literacy Council".
If you'd like a relatively unbiased review of the legal requirements and operation of environmental impact statements, the American Bar Association has an excellent reference here.
From inside the U.S. government, this document, the Community Guide to Environmental Justice and NEPA Methods, is still available. It contains many links to information which pertains to your question, though I haven't checked to see if they're still valid and unaltered.
It's a hard question to answer - there's a wide range of sources that aren't always easy to access with just a web search, and it's a subject deep enough to require book chapters. This is an old...
It's a hard question to answer - there's a wide range of sources that aren't always easy to access with just a web search, and it's a subject deep enough to require book chapters.
This is an old paper, but it's a relatively even-handed review of the relative costs and benefits of all environmental regulatory activity, not just impact assessment. I haven't read it in its entirety, but it's hard to quantify the full public health and other costs of long-running disasters, like Superfund sites and more recent widespread PFAS contamination.
While it may not translate precisely to U.S. regulation, this recent review of environmental impact assessment costs in the EU might be illuminating. EIA costs were estimated at 0.2 - 1% of the total project cost, and study time required from 3 months to one year, depending on complexity. These are comparatively well-funded and politically supported agencies.
The U.S. has particular issues because states may have their own requirements and agencies ("little NEPAs") for environmental impact assessments. While the federal government is attempting to curtail detailed assessments, and can permit environmentally destructive projects, the state agencies, particularly New York and California, are allowed to make greater demands.
Even in supposedly litigious California, the regulations impact a relatively small number of projects.
In any case, based on my survey, average EIA costs globally run around 0.2 - 1% of project cost, and decrease with institutional competence and continuity. Judging project scope properly requires experience, as does knowing when to intervene to prevent costly changes late in a project. That's not taking into account proposed damage mitigation costs, but mitigation is just part of good engineering and often saves money both short- and long-term.
There are major causes of delay other than the environmental review process, such as ensuring easements, eminent domain suits, and changed profit outlook. Years-long delays between the initial EIA and construction start can also require time for reevaluation.
It's best to think of the EIA process as only one of many factors in slowing progress. The bigness of prior fast construction isn't a measure of relative complexity in the current environment. China could toss up temporary modular hospitals for COVID-19 in a matter of days, but emergency labor worked around the clock and the facilities didn't have infrastructure, equipment, connectivity, or durability to function like conventional hospitals.
God forbid we think about things before doing them! There are also obviously entire other dimensions that are not mentioned in this piece, such as safety regulations for the workers who build...
God forbid we think about things before doing them!
There are also obviously entire other dimensions that are not mentioned in this piece, such as safety regulations for the workers who build things. Stuff like OSHA (formed in 1971). It is physically possible to build things very rapidly, but the building process won’t be safe for the workers, and the work product won’t be safe to use (esp. structures like dams or bridges). Before safety regulations were widely adopted, large infrastructure projects used to be much more dangerous (they’re still dangerous now, but not as bad).
In terms of the Project Management Triangle, you have to be deranged to choose big scope, short timeline, and high cost, only to get a low quality result. Unfortunately, there are a lot of deranged people out there. Many of them somehow end up in project management.
The highest level of NEPA review is called an environmental impact statement (EIS), and it is used when a major federal action is likely to affect the environment. NEPA itself doesn’t say how long an environmental review needs to be, only that it needs to contain five specific elements: i) the environmental effects, ii) unavoidable adverse environmental harms, iii) alternatives to the proposed action, iv) a comparison of short-term environmental effects and long-term productivity effects, and v) irreversible use of resources.
NEPA took effect on January 1, 1970, and initially, these statements were quite short. Some were as short as 10 pages, with no record of complaints about them. But over time, as EISs were challenged in court, page counts increased. NEPA is a procedural statute; if a court finds an EIS to be inadequate, all it does is halt the project and instruct the agency to add a section to the EIS. In order to avoid such court orders, agencies started developing longer and longer EISs. Today, the average length of an EIS is more than 600 pages plus appendices, which themselves average over 1,000 pages.
This runaway page count inflation has also taken a toll on timelines to complete EISs. Conditional on completion, EISs now take an average of 4.5 years to complete, and the right tail of the distribution is long. The Council on Environmental Quality identified 4 EISs completed between 2010 and 2017 that took at least 17 years. During this time, no action could be taken on these projects. Not a single shovelful of dirt could be moved. And of course, this statistic leaves out EISs that are literally interminable.
Not only are EIS timelines long, they are growing. The latest annual report from the National Association of Environmental Practitioners finds that average EIS preparation time is increasing by about 39.5 days per year.
This essay is from a tainted source with vested interests in repealing NEPA and other environmental regulation, and a long history of covert action to bias academic institutions.
It conflates the size of the reports with the causes of regulatory delay.
If you want to sclerose a bureaucracy to the point of paralysis and easy elimination, do these things:
Cut funding and continually reduce staff to the point that there's one person to do the work of five or ten.
File lawsuits constantly, to dilute or overturn every administrative ruling, or to force the agency to perform statutory duties. This helps ensure that dwindling funds are spent on lawyers and administration rather than enforcement. Further, litigation encourages actions that stand up in court, and don't necessarily serve the public purpose of the agency, like 1,000 page reports justifying decisions in minute detail.
Feed the media partisan stories, and create astroturfing organizations to ensure the agency is vilified for every mistake (or for doing nothing because it has no resources), and that successes are buried or misreported.
Constantly change the organization's mission (what it's legally accountable for doing), evidentiary basis, and leadership according to partisan whim.
There are a few more, but these are the major items - repeat until the offending regulatory agency is abolished, or so feeble that it's a placeholder (e.g. the U.S. Federal Election Commission).
For bonus points, reinvent the agency as a weapon against your political enemies (e.g. the FBI under Trump).
What's a good source to read more about environmental impact statements?
First of all, if you do your own searches for this, be cautious and verify the validity of your references. Sourcewatch does a fair job of identifying biased or AstroTurf organizations, e.g. the so-called "Environmental Literacy Council".
If you'd like a relatively unbiased review of the legal requirements and operation of environmental impact statements, the American Bar Association has an excellent reference here.
From inside the U.S. government, this document, the Community Guide to Environmental Justice and NEPA Methods, is still available. It contains many links to information which pertains to your question, though I haven't checked to see if they're still valid and unaltered.
Thanks! Though I should have been more specific. I'm more interested in trends and economic impact.
It's a hard question to answer - there's a wide range of sources that aren't always easy to access with just a web search, and it's a subject deep enough to require book chapters.
This is an old paper, but it's a relatively even-handed review of the relative costs and benefits of all environmental regulatory activity, not just impact assessment. I haven't read it in its entirety, but it's hard to quantify the full public health and other costs of long-running disasters, like Superfund sites and more recent widespread PFAS contamination.
While it may not translate precisely to U.S. regulation, this recent review of environmental impact assessment costs in the EU might be illuminating. EIA costs were estimated at 0.2 - 1% of the total project cost, and study time required from 3 months to one year, depending on complexity. These are comparatively well-funded and politically supported agencies.
The U.S. has particular issues because states may have their own requirements and agencies ("little NEPAs") for environmental impact assessments. While the federal government is attempting to curtail detailed assessments, and can permit environmentally destructive projects, the state agencies, particularly New York and California, are allowed to make greater demands.
Even in supposedly litigious California, the regulations impact a relatively small number of projects.
In any case, based on my survey, average EIA costs globally run around 0.2 - 1% of project cost, and decrease with institutional competence and continuity. Judging project scope properly requires experience, as does knowing when to intervene to prevent costly changes late in a project. That's not taking into account proposed damage mitigation costs, but mitigation is just part of good engineering and often saves money both short- and long-term.
There are major causes of delay other than the environmental review process, such as ensuring easements, eminent domain suits, and changed profit outlook. Years-long delays between the initial EIA and construction start can also require time for reevaluation.
It's best to think of the EIA process as only one of many factors in slowing progress. The bigness of prior fast construction isn't a measure of relative complexity in the current environment. China could toss up temporary modular hospitals for COVID-19 in a matter of days, but emergency labor worked around the clock and the facilities didn't have infrastructure, equipment, connectivity, or durability to function like conventional hospitals.
God forbid we think about things before doing them!
There are also obviously entire other dimensions that are not mentioned in this piece, such as safety regulations for the workers who build things. Stuff like OSHA (formed in 1971). It is physically possible to build things very rapidly, but the building process won’t be safe for the workers, and the work product won’t be safe to use (esp. structures like dams or bridges). Before safety regulations were widely adopted, large infrastructure projects used to be much more dangerous (they’re still dangerous now, but not as bad).
In terms of the Project Management Triangle, you have to be deranged to choose big scope, short timeline, and high cost, only to get a low quality result. Unfortunately, there are a lot of deranged people out there. Many of them somehow end up in project management.
From the article: