On President Trump’s first day in office he issued an executive order “Unleashing American Energy,” which will greatly hinder the ability of green ideologues to hold up development using the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Section 5 of the order, “Unleashing Energy Dominance through Efficient Permitting,” revokes President Carter’s EO 11991 and pulls back the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), which has been availing itself of dictatorial powers, requiring all federal agencies that fund or give permits to projects—including nuclear power plants—to do nothing without full consideration of the impact to the natural and human environment. Trump’s order requires the CEQ to propose rescinding potentially all the regulations it imposed under NEPA, by Feb. 19 (30 days after EO issuance).
It is fair to say that with regard to industrial and technological growth, NEPA, coupled with the Council on Environmental Quality, staffed by three appointees of the President, have virtually been the root of all evil. In 1979, an executive order by President Carter authorized the CEQ to mandate regulations for all agencies. Carter appointed 35-year-old James Gustave Speth to the President’s Council on Environmental Quality. Speth, a Yale-trained lawyer, environmentalist and Rhodes Scholar, issued a plethora of obstacles to development and used his position to lecture President Carter about the dangers of acid rain, carbon dioxide buildup in the atmosphere, and what he said would be the likely extinction of 100,000 species during the next quarter-century.
