Do We Need Environmental Permitting Reform for Climate and Housing Projects?

There is a movement among the business community and their political representatives to remove the regulatory barriers that they argue impede infrastructure projects and vastly inflate their costs. The Debt Ceiling Bill passed to avert a financial crisis earlier this year included a suite of permitting reforms that supposedly would make it easier to green-light clean energy and infrastructure projects, so badly needed to confront the climate crisis. But are the environmental regulations at fault for the slow uptake of say, energy transmission projects? We discuss the impact of the reforms to the National Environmental Policy Act (called NEPA) in the debt ceiling bill. This law requires federal agencies to assess the potential environmental effects of development projects, public works, and other major government actions. The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) is an environmental and public health bill of rights that is like NEPA for Californians. This should be the law of the land in all 50 states, but that is not happening. And multiple chamber of commerce, business, and development interests now want to weaken these laws as well. We discuss these issues with two community activists from Southern California. Host Jack Eidt talks with Gloria Sefton, Vice President of Orange County California’s Friends of Harbors Beaches and Parks, and Conner Everts, Executive Director of the Southern California Watershed Alliance and Co-Chair of the Desal Response Group. Gloria Sefton is a long-time environmental advocate and a solutions-focused attorney. She is Vice President of Friends of Harbors, Beaches and Parks (FHBP) [https://fhbp.org/], working to protect and enhance open spaces, natural preserves, and historic sites in Orange County. She is also co-founder of the Saddleback Canyons Conservancy [http://www.saddlebackcanyons.org/], established in 2001 to preserve Orange County’s rural canyons. Through conservation activism, she has helped protect several hundreds of acres as natural open space in the canyons. Conner Everts has spent a lifetime in pursuit of clean water, first as a Southern California steelhead fisherman and then in the quest of the Human Right to Water. He is currently co-chair of the Southern California Water Dialogue [https://www.socalwaterdialogue.org/], the Green LA Water Committee and as an Board member to the Environmental Justice Coalition for Water [https://ejcw.org/] and Amigos de los Rios [https://amigosdelosrios.org/]. Jack Eidt is an urban planner, environmental journalist, and climate organizer, as well as award-winning fiction writer. He is Co-Founder SoCal 350 Climate Action and Executive Producer of EcoJustice Radio. He is also Founder and Publisher of WilderUtopia [https://wilderutopia.com], a website dedicated to the question of Earth sustainability, finding society-level solutions to environmental, community, economic, transportation and energy needs. For an extended interview and other benefits, become an EcoJustice Radio patron at https://www.patreon.com/posts/conner-everts-on-85723768 More Info/Resources: Part One: https://soundcloud.com/socal350/do-environmental-regulations-stop-clean-energy-and-affordable-housing Podcast Website: http://ecojusticeradio.org/ Podcast Blog: https://www.wilderutopia.com/category/ecojustice-radio/ Support the Podcast: Patreon https://www.patreon.com/ecojusticeradio PayPal https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=LBGXTRM292TFC&source=url Executive Producer and Host: Jack Eidt Engineer and Original Music: Blake Quake Beats Episode 182