On June 30, DOE issued an Interim Final Rule that guts enforceable public participation, exempts many energy projects from environmental review, and sidelines the voices of frontline and Tribal communities, all under the guise of “streamlining.”
This rule weakens hard-fought safeguards and opens the door to unchecked development.
NJEJA was proud to sign-on and endorse a letter from our partners regarding the U.S. DOE’s revision to these rules.
Read the full letter below:
Recently, the Trump Administration put out a rule that would remove important regulations in the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) which protects environmental justice communities. If implemented, the new rules would expedite permitting and prioritize efficiency over thorough analysis of the cumulative impacts and risk to EJ communities.
NJEJA joined our partners at the Moving Forward Network, NRDC, and the Environmental Justice Health Alliance to express our opposition to these new rules as they will likely lead to further disproportionate impact on environmental justice communities across the country.
For questions and additional support on NJ EJ Law engagement, please reach out to us at info@njeja.org
Read our full set of comments below:
The New Jersey Environmental Justice Alliance (NJEJA) would like to submit the following comments to the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) concerning its recently released National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) Implementing Regulations Revisions. In March of 2020 NJEJA submitted comments on CEQ’s proposed changes to the regulations that implement procedural provisions of the National Environmental Policy Act (Docket ID No. CEQ-2019-0003, Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, 40 CFR Parts 1500, 1501, 1502, 1503, 1504, 1505, 1506, 1507, and 1508). Those comments focused on, and strongly disagreed with, CEQ’s proposal to remove the requirement to perform cumulative impacts analyses in environmental review documents created pursuant to NEPA. Because it is such an important issue to environmental justice (EJ) residential communities and to the EJ advocacy community these comments similarly focus on whether cumulative impacts analyses should be a required part of NEPA reviews. NJEJA believes they should be.