WASHINGTON — Following a survey of its members, the Congressional Progressive Caucus announced its official position to oppose the SPEED Act, legislation that undermines the National Environmental Policy Act in favor of fossil fuel industries and allows the Trump administration’s attacks on clean energy to go unaddressed. The position was adopted after a super-majority of the caucus voted to formally oppose the legislation.
The SPEED Act weakens the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) by narrowing the definition of major federal action, expanding categorical exclusions, limiting the requirement to study long-term or cumulative impacts, reducing the scope of NEPA analysis, and limiting legal challenges by reducing the deadline for filing claims and imposing extreme restrictions on who can challenge bad projects. The bill restricts what federal agencies can consider when evaluating the environmental and public health consequences of major proposed projects, including removing agencies’ ability to incorporate new scientific analysis during reviews and limiting agencies’ environmental analysis to near-term and proximate impacts. The bill would also limit public input and legal recourse by cutting the window for filing lawsuits down from six years to an unreasonably short 150 days and prohibiting courts from challenging agency environmental findings. Environmental protection groups warn that this is a dangerous attempt to gut NEPA, the nation’s bedrock environmental law, turning it into a toothless procedural formality.
The effect of this bill will be to prioritize oil and gas, and SPEED Act does nothing to advance permitting reforms for clean energy that progressives have long championed, which include:
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Investing in the No. 1 cause of project delays: staffing capacity at permitting agencies tasked with implementing NEPA protections. The Inflation Reduction Act invested $1 billion for NEPA staffing, which accelerated permitting timelines by 150%, but was gutted by Republicans’ Big Ugly Bill.
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Reforming the electricity transmission at a federal and interregional level to make it easier to get new electricity-generating projects, largely using renewables, to homes and businesses. Currently, thousands of clean-energy developers face backlogs in waiting to connect to the grid.
