Trump Proposes Swapping Environmental Review of Energy Projects for Environmental Bribe

The permitting of energy projects, from pipelines to transmission lines and gas plants to solar plants, has long been a contentious issue. In an era when environmentalism has fundamentally shifted from an ethos of “stop building dirty stuff” to one of “build massive amounts of clean stuff,” the years of delays that can accompany any major project has become central to achieving climate and emissions goals.

Or, to achieving bigger profits for fossil fuel companies.

That certainly would seem to be the motivation for president-elect Donald Trump’s announcement on Truth Social on Tuesday that all it will take in his administration to skip the permitting process entirely is a $1 billion investment. Any person or company making such an investment, he wrote, “will receive fully expedited approvals and permits, including, but in no way limited to, all Environmental approvals.” All this time, all it took was a guy who doesn’t know what laws are and a cool billion. Who knew?

This is, obviously, illegal. The half-century-old National Environmental Policy Act clearly requires federal agencies to study the impacts of proposed projects and their alternatives; Trump is basically proposing to ignore it, and probably a bunch of other laws along with it.

There is a temptation with Trump’s proposed policy ideas, from massive deportation of the children of immigrants to rubber-stamping of the dirtiest energy ideas around, to throw up one’s hands. If the president is so blithely willing to ignore the laws of the country he was elected to run, and the people he is surrounding himself in the incoming administration share his malevolence and partner it with at least some degree of competence, and all that is supported by a Supreme Court that has proven its willingness to utterly trash its historical legitimacy to prop up preposterous policies… well, what’s to be done?

But to follow that road means to essentially allow that the country has no laws at all; and it does. Trump is not a king, even if the Supreme Court has done its best to make it so; he cannot yell something into the worst social network on the planet (second-worst?), before he even takes office, and have it be so. Lawsuits can still be filed, politicians can still exercise various methods of obstruction, and a midterm election is less than two years away.

“Corporate polluters cannot bribe their way to endangering our communities and our clean air and water,” a Sierra Club spokesperson said in a press release, committing with plenty of other such NGOs to fight against obviously illegal projects and processes like they always have. “Federal law requires rigorous review processes to protect the public interest, not rubber stamps for corporate polluters,” said another, from Evergreen Action.

Like with any utterance from Trump, there is no way of knowing if this will actually turn into anything concrete, an executive order or something else, that will immediately be challenged in court. It’s possible someone whispered in his ear yesterday about arguments at SCOTUS about NEPA and permitting of an oil railway project in Utah — a project that, hey-look-at-that, its developers say will include between $1.2 and $1.5 billion in private investment. Someone new will whisper something else today, and he’ll screech out another “policy,” which will also be some combination of dramatically illegal and impractical.

The idea that the country will be for sale to rich people and companies is, of course, a real risk as Trump takes office; but until proven otherwise the word “illegal” still means something, and this unquestionably qualifies.