President Obama: Reform Environmental Impact Assessment

Environmental impact assessments – supposed to predict the likely impacts of proposed projects on the environment under laws like the U.S. National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) are today routinely performed by for-profit consulting firms working for the proponents of the projects whose impacts they are supposed to predict. As a result, they are often if not always biased toward minimizing project impacts, though often only after extensive, expensive, sometimes unnecessary study. Critical public comments on such assessments are routinely dismissed without serious consideration. This leads to disasters like the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe. The system badly needs reform.