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This procedural burden weighs especially heavily on new players and novel technologies that haven’t had time to work the system. Oil and gas drilling companies, for instance, have been granted several NEPA exceptions that reduce the requirements for things such as drilling exploratory wells. Geothermal energy, on the other hand, does not receive such exceptions, even though it involves drilling wells like those for oil and gas. Procedural requirements, like most regulations, heavily favor the incumbents.
Stopping climate change requires building hundreds of billions of dollars of new infrastructure. Procedural regulation makes that task far more difficult. Going forward, we can draw on lessons from some of the biggest environmental wins of the last fifty years. A broad range of successes have been built on substantive regulations: from the elimination of leaded gasoline to the end of acid rain and the hole in the ozone layer.
The whole piece is worth reading in full.
The foundations of modern environmental legislation were laid in the early '70s. Some of these laws helped fix the ozone layer, clean up DDT, and fight lead pollution - while others are delaying the necessary transition to green energy. If the activists of fifty years ago had known what we know now, what might they have done differently?
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