Exactly this. Every project is going to impact the environment. The end goal of a risk assessment is not to bring the environmental risk to zero, it is to bring it down to an acceptable level given the benefits of the project.

The Cape Wind project, which was going to be the US's first offshore wind farm, was famously killed by wealthy and powerful people worried about their views with environmental causes as a pretext. I think that bureaucratic review could be much better than the current case of "anybody wealthy enough can sue to stop the project" but that would have required spending money spinning up the department when the law was introduced and relying on lawsuits from the public looks free.

EDIT: And of course recently fossil power interests were able to stop some power lines to bring hydro electricity in from Canada.