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Comment by amcoastal | Hacker News Reader

This is extremely dangerous. Waiving environmental review and consideration when building roads and bridges is extremely foolish. They greatly effect water quality at crossings and alongside the roads. My guess is this will be held up in courts and not allowed to go further -- it is an extreme deviation from what we currently do (which is held up by supreme court precedent). Entire industries are built on doing environmental impact studies and mitigation.

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Perhaps we can push back against what is effectively legislation by the executive branch. Then, here's the tough part, don't expand executive power when your own party is in the white house.

> Perhaps we can push back against what is effectively legislation by the executive branch.

By doing what? Protest?

I agree with the general principle, but in this case Congress can't exactly pass a bill for every project requiring environmental review. They have to delegate some authority to the executive here.

I always thought the BRAC (Base Realignment and Closure) process was intuitive. Congress passed an act tasking the executive branch to pick which military bases to close, then there was a guaranteed for/against vote with minimal deliberation and no delays or Filibuster.

In parliamentary democracies, this sort of thing is normally a devolved ministerial power. Of course, it’s a lot easier to get rid of a naughty minister.

>here's the tough part, don't expand executive power when your own party is in the white house.

Solution to that is a functioning Congress, which requires less polarization (i.e. more compromise) and sane campaign finance laws. Term limits couldn't hurt either.

It's a two party system where neither seems to care that the presidency wields too much power, so fixing it is probably in the realm of constitutional amendments at the moment.

Much of the power given to the President here seems to be from legislation itself or lack of legislation altogether. I don't think there's any constitutional changes that would need to take place in order to restrict executive power on subjects like environmental regulation, emergency powers, among other things.

True. But the Senate is broken by being effectively owned by a single senator.

Owned by a party, McConnell just takes all of the responsibility because he’s in one of the safest seats

Any four GOP senators can defect and depose Mitch McConnell, but haven't. The Senate is very much in control of 53 people.

100% this. Towing the party line at all cost is what the GOP are doing today.

20 years ago this wouldn't be the case, but keeping the party unified at all cost, against morals, ethics, logic, is what is happening.

What saddens me is the majority vote says they shouldn't be in power in many cases but ultra effective wielding our laws in corner cases has led us to this point. Even while I loathe it, I must say it is quite effective.

> Then, here's the tough part, don't expand executive power when your own party is in the white house.

Optimistic Democrats cheered Obama's expansive use of executive power (so progressive!), and were dismayed when Trump revoked every executive order that Obama's name was on pretty much immediately after taking power. Perhaps this will be a lesson... but I'm betting that Biden would veto any such limitation even if he had a friendly Congress and Senate.

They cheered because he was doing things they liked, not because he was expanding executive powers. They knew full well that these actions could be undone by the next executive. No one is surprised by this. Obama was doing what he thought was right in the only way left to him: the Republicans controlled the other branches of government and were openly opposed to any compromise. The Republicans still control the Senate and the the courts and Trump, with their complicity, has neutralized all oversight of the executive branch, but it is in his character to rule by fiat, so here we are. What is more remarkable is how little Trump accomplished in his first two years despite controlling all branches of government.

Something’s gotta give. There’s always going to be some sort of gross underbelly to this level of economic damage. I would personally prefer vastly higher taxes but I recognize that it has to come from somewhere.

Can those kinds of environmental issues be fixed later, or are they generally unrecoverable? It may be worth some number of fixable environmental issues to recover from the pandemic faster.

Some environmental impacts can be fixed later, but it generally much more expensive to "bolt-on" a fix than to design the project properly in the first place. This of course means the fix is rarely implemented.

According to NEPA, when an impact is identified, the intent is to develop an alternative to avoid the impact entirely. It's only when alternatives are found to be infeasible that other mitigation methods can be considered.

These are permanent solutions to a temporary problem. No one is digging up the roads and pipelines after the economy has recovered.

I think you've gotten confused - my question was whether they are indeed permanent solutions, or if we can fix them later without having to dig the whole thing up.

The SF bay area is still fixing environmental damage from 50 years ago (semiconductors) or even 170 years ago (gold rush/mercury mines). Environmental problems can outlive everyone that will decide this issue.

Environmental review is constantly used to stop housing construction and entrench existing segregation. Let's build some more of that so we won't need to drive anywhere :)

e: Since when do people on HN downvote calls to build more housing??

Stopping a mid-rise building during SEPA review because of migratory bird flight paths is one thing, but macro scale environmental impacts that could occur during the constructions of freeways etc - yea we should review thoroughly.

I agree that environmental protection is a top priority, but I think it will be overall better for the environment if we accept the reality of having a little visible infrastructure/manufacturing in our collective faces. If anything, visibility should drive us to develop cleaner alternatives instead of the current reality where things like the Foxconn iPhone factory suicide netting is a funny joke to many of us. I believe the move away from domestic manufacturing created an even bigger climate problem from the thousands and thousands of ships and planes carrying materials across the planet for assembly, carrying them back for sale, and spewing unchecked amounts of pollution the entire way.

The offshoring of US manufacturing jobs also disproportionately hurt Black Americans and others who were once able to use those jobs as an accessible path to a middle-class life: https://equitablegrowth.org/african-american-workers-are-hur...

I'm trying to unpack what you're saying here because it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. You think we should roll back environmental protections so that the negative effects of manufacturing are more in peoples faces so that they care more with an end goal of... putting those same protections back I assume?

Pretty close, yeah! More like with an end goal of developing cleaner manufacturing processes that we can stand to be around. I think the environmental laws we have just take the same old dirty tech we've always had and move it far enough away that we don't see local negatives. The statistics I've seen about the environmental impact of the shipping industry are pretty alarming, and I suspect the actual impact is way worse than that since the entire area is so poorly explored.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/apr/09/shipping... (Paywall: http://archive.is/Pf7Bw )

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_shippi...

I don't understand why fixing issues with shipping requires us to dismantle environmental protections elsewhere. This just seems like whataboutism to me.

Could an executive order be made to make the approval process more effective and efficient? We did the fist part of the work by identifying the bottle necks (at least broadly), the Acts where approved by Congress, so now let’s optimize.

It seems like a lot of these executive order get thrown out which if true seems like a big waste of time and resources.

I would be down for that, yeah. That's why I don't like the way Trump approaches things as mandates instead of conversations. I think it just ratchets up the divisiveness to the point that people start downvoting you on here if you like one thing Trump does because you think it's good to build houses and give people jobs to buy them with :p

You can't ignore the fact that labor costs were also a large part of the reason manufacturing moved offshore. Those jobs aren't coming back, regardless of environmental regulations.

The path forward is to continue to innovate, not roll back environmental protections.

>Those jobs aren't coming back, regardless of environmental regulations.

And many of those jobs no longer exist... they were automated away long ago. So even if you brought the factories back, it wouldn't put many people to work.

I don't believe an iPhone made in America would have to cost much—if anything—more than my iPhone from Foxconn. There's surely some spare change in Apple's hundred-billion-dollar cash pile that we could use to pay those more-expensive American workers a living wage: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/cash-on...

We should first examine environmental laws for their impact on communities, people and the economy. Far too often the environment is just a veil for NIMBY.

The problem there is mostly state law, which this wouldn't affect.

This is mostly about pipelines, oil and gas drilling, and highways. In reality, it’s to appease the energy lobbyists.

> Let's build some more of that so we won't need to drive anywhere

Have you been to the projects? There's housing, and nothing else. People still have to sit 2 hours on a bus to get groceries because it's still a food desert. Businesses won't show up because there's no money, because there's no job training programs and no public transit to where the jobs are, etc. Eliminating segregation and raising people out of poverty is complex, and I don't think eliminating environmental review would move the needle.

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