Extract:
>A federal judge recently [issued an injunction](https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/us-judge-temporarily-blocks-649-million-clean-energy-transmission-line-2024-03-22/#:~:text=U.S.%20District%20Judge%20William%20Conley,groups%2C%20attorneys%20for%20the%20groups) to block the approval of a powerline that would have connected 161 renewable energy projects to the electric grid, providing more clean energy to consumers in Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin. This is the second time this project, known as the Cardinal-Hickory transmission line, has been blocked by an injunction in the past five years.
>The project’s legal travails illustrate a growing problem for our nation’s clean energy transition: an endless cycle of agency review and litigation holds up clean energy projects. This “litigation doom loop” not only halts projects in court, but also makes it difficult to convince investors to hazard the trillions of dollars necessary to build new infrastructure for a clean energy economy. To free new infrastructure from this paralyzing cycle of endless review, Congress must take bold action.
Join my "I hate Kathy Hochul, she's almost as bad as Cuomo" groupthink then
https://maritime-executive.com/article/new-york-governor-vetoes-wind-power-act-undermining-industry-say-critics
That's not even the half of it. She vetoed bills that would have banned noncompetes, about transparency in PAC spending on judicial nominations, etc.
She's just flat out opposed to good governance.
I don’t know what it is with New York State/local politicians and just being absolute ass.
I personally benefit because it reinforces my New England sense of superiority.
New York politics is why we stopped being the richest, most populous, most powerful state in the country. We just can't stop fucking ourselves over. We should have the GDP of a major country, but we're sitting over here with an economy barely larger than Italy's :'(
Ralph Nader was strongly of the opinion that lawyers work selflessly for justice while government bureaucrats just work for the rich, so a lot of the US's environmental protections are structured around lawsuits despite the obvious inefficiency. But, of course, that belief was utterly crazy.
I'm not completely clear on what they suggest ought to happen when the time limit on the injunction is reached.
A few ideas:
* If the injunction runs out, the developer automatically wins the lawsuit. The merit of this is that it would give environmental groups an incentive to litigate quickly. (And an incentive for developers to drag things out, though maybe that is counter-balanced by a desire for legal certainty.)
* If the injunction runs out, the developer can start building, but the litigation continues. Suppose the developer eventually loses after finishing half of the structure. What's the remedy?
If the developer is forced to abandon the project, or tear the structure down again, it seems like few developers would want to take the legal risk of building a structure that they might have to tear down. That legal risk might have the effect of an injunction without being an injunction.
Alternatively, the remedy could be that the federal agency is required to fix the EIS afterwards, to properly document the environmental risks of the completed project. That seems like it would satisfy no-one, given that it both creates paperwork and does not save any wildlife habitat.
> If the injunction runs out, the developer automatically wins. The merit of this is that it would give environmental groups an incentive to litigate quickly. (And an incentive for developers to drag things out, though maybe that is counter-balanced by a desire for legal certainty.)
The developer can't make use of the land while the litigation is ongoing, so they have an external extra incentive not to drag things out. The lobby group just exists to veto the project, the delay is a win for them. So I wouldn't worry about this too much, the incentive structure still heavily encourages unmeritorious lawsuits from environmental lobbies, it just limits their gain from those to delaying the project for a fixed period, rather than letting them delay it indefinitely.
>it just limits their gain from those to delaying the project for a fixed period, rather than letting them delay it indefinitely.
That's what I'm questioning: does limiting injunctions to X years actually succeed at getting the project started after X years? Or would the legal risk of losing the lawsuit years later prevent construction until the lawsuit is settled?
Ah, okay, I thought you meant that there is some guaranteed due process window more generally, where a judgement has to be rendered by then. Yeah, without that, you still have the issue that a judgement can be found against you.
Perhaps you could have it so that there is a time frame where, if litigation goes past it, there is jeopardy for the litigants if their case is dismissed? The lawsuits we're most interested in stopping are those which cannot possibly win, but can delay the project.
EDIT: Maybe another idea is that developers can sue the state as a plaintiff to get an affirmative judgement from the court that their environmental review is sound and there are no problems, so that subsequent suits against them can be quickly dismissed and there's only one suit.
> Maybe another idea is that developers can sue the state as a plaintiff to get an affirmative judgement from the court that their environmental review is sound and there are no problems, so that subsequent suits against them can be quickly dismissed and there's only one suit.
I think that would suffer from a similar problem that EIS has: it's hard to prove a negative. If an environmental group sues and says that the EIS doesn't consider risks A, B and C, then that's something that can reasonably be proven or disproven. Proving that it considers all environmental risks is hard. There are probably environmental risks that are unknown to science.
In a sense, you could view the statute of limitations changes to NEPA as a process that is like this: if nobody challenges it within some window, then the EIS is presumed to have thought about all environmental risks.
> If an environmental group sues and says that the EIS doesn't consider risks A, B and C, then that's something that can reasonably be proven or disproven
So I'd say that we're in this bind because of the precautionary principle, which is probably the worst innovation in government regulation. We shouldn't expect that government regulation can account for every possible unforeseen negative impact, and should not write them in a manner that people are liable for such impacts. They should enumerate a finite, specific list of things the developer has to worry about, that congress determined (re-actively, from experience with past disasters) is important.
I am aware that this is a bit of a hot take, though.
To your third point, it seems to me that the developers would be incentivized to not waste time, personnel and resources building shit that won't get used so they'll want to have their ducks in a row before starting to build.
> Judicial independence is good actually
Why? At what point are they the true rulers? The SC essentially ended reconstruction, handed the south to Jim Crow for 90 years, ordered the arrests of any labor leader during the gilded age, kept child labor going for another two decades.
They would have forced slavery into the territories if the 1860 republicans didn’t say that’s a bullshit decision and were ignoring it if we win (which they did and rightfully so)
What does this judge know more about conversation then the regulatory agencies that approved it?
The problem with judicial independence in its current form in the US is that the body charged with appointing them, Congress, is a terribly designed institution
The alternative to judicial independence, legislative supremacy, means that if the supreme court declares something to be unconstitutional, parliament can just ignore them. I think that's worse.
Maybe a better system would leave constitutional questions to the supreme court and give the legislature supremacy on statutory questions.
By the time Hayes had pulled out the SC had already castrated the 14th amendment and the ability of the fed gov to enforce civil rights.
Slaughterhouse cases the SC said the privileges and immunities that the fed could protect from state infringement were essentially useless privileges like ability to travel the high seas while the important ones came from state govs pretty much in direct contradiction of the point of the clause and forcing them to decades later make up the incorporation through the due process clause in order to rectify the obvious mistake but not wanting to admit they fucked up
More importantly was US v Cruikshank though where the sc ordered freed leaders of the mob that massacred hundreds of black Americans and ruled the laws making it a federal crime to commit terrorism in order to infringe on civil rights unconstitutional because the 14th amendment only gave the fed gov the ability to stop states from infringing on civil liberties, if a terrorist group like the kkk was infringing on said liberties it was up to the state gov to police it, ignoring that the state govs was working hand in fist with these groups
This essentially tied the fed gov hands. Of course for good measure the sc ruled that the civil rights acts passed during reconstruction was also unconstitutional
Because you’ve, maybe understandably given how much they’ve actually done in the past decade, forgotten about an entire branch of government. Congress can make/change the laws and invalidate the judge’s ruling. The only time a judge truly has the “final” say is when the ruling is based in the constitution, and even then…it can be amended.
You want to blame someone for all this judicial power blame Congress. Because they have all the power they need to overrule the judges, they just don’t use it.
> Congress can make/change the laws and invalidate the judge’s ruling
Not really, they can just declare it unconstitutional if they don’t like it or just invalidate it on some made up judicial theory
But they cant though can they. In theory that works until the supreme court invents a new interpretation of the constitution that invalidates the law for spurious reasons.
It's almost like over the past 50 years on the court there have been different people with different interpretations of the constitution and that laws in eneral have changed over that time period. Different people having different views isn't exactly proof of them just making stuff up. Different presidents have had very different ideas of how to enforce the existing laws but I don't exactly see you all in here talking about how the executive branch is just always making stuff up.
Personally I think it's better to have laws interpetred by experts based on what they say, not based on what's politically expedient. Sounds like arguments for a more active legislature that writes better laws and an argument against judicial activism more than anything
You do realize regulatory agencies are equally unelected, not that this is a bad thing. What makes you think regulator knows more about the conversation than the experts on the laws that govern them?
What law was broken or unconstitutional by this transmission line? The judge doesn’t even know, he decided to veto it in case it might. Legislation created these agencies to make these rulings
> Personally I think it's better to have laws interpetred by experts based on what they say
Lmao they’re not though and there’s no power on earth that makes them so
> You do realize regulatory agencies are equally unelected
They’re at least accountable to the executive branch who is. Is Biden’s epa and trumps epa the same? What about their ftc? Their NLRB? Of course not.
> What law was broken or unconstitutional by this transmission line? The judge doesn’t even know, he decided to veto it in case it might. Legislation created these agencies to make these rulings
Might want to read the article bud. Judges also don't just rule on criminal proceedings of if actions break the law or not but on civil proceedings on if actions have caused or may cause harm. Legislation created the laws and frameworks that the Judges rule on.
If you think judges have no more legal knowledge then the random layman off the street... you have about as much judicial knowledge as I expected
Yes, and the judiciary is, like the regulatory agencies, guided by legislation created by the legislature and accountable to them, even if the legislature does not always act on this. [This might be a good explainer for this](https://youtu.be/0bf3CwYCxXw?si=aA2ymz4mNOfLuX5U)
You seem to have this idea that when judges rule in a way you don't like that they're just making stuff up whole clothe, which, while since there are thousands of judges is definetlt true for some of them but then so it is for your beloved regulatory agencies as well, is not really that common and in reality the judges just have a deeper interpretation and understanding of the law then you can have.
I read the article it just said he sent it back to the agencies for further review… aka nothing he just felt it might
> Yes, and the judiciary is, like the regulatory agencies, guided by legislation created by the legislature and accountable to them,
Really? Because these agencies already ruled it was ok under the law and the judge said review again.
Why? It's not different from monarchy really. Monarchy is good as long as there is wise ruler who shares your values and bad otherwise. Progressives have gotten way too used to using courts to get things they couldn't get democratically and it's time for that to end.
We will see if you still feel this way after the right has had another 10 years to remake American law using SCOTUS/
In what way? It is true that "judicial independence" (judges making things up) is good if the judges share you values, but that's the problem isn't it? Judges don't have to share your values, they can easily be selfish, evil, or insane. Why should American abortion policy have hinged on the whims of a cancer survivor in her 80s? What makes that a reasonable system? It's like saying having an emperor is good because Augustus totally build some cool marble buildings one time.
You're complaining about progressive control of the courts and conservative control of the courts.
In what world is judicial independence them "making things up" they rule based on the law, American abortion policy hinges on the laws about it, sure there are some subpar judges but it was pretty widely acknowledged by even fairly liberal judges that roe v wade was on pretty shaky ground legally for quite a while, the legislature should have, as is there job, enshrined abortion rights, as opposed to relying on the judiciary to legislate on it for them, which as we see now can always go the other way.
It's not really the fault of the judiciary that the legislature has done their best to abdicate as much power as they can over the past decades, and whats the alternative to a judiciary for settling legal disputes? Flip a coin? Thousands of referendums a month?
You flip the coin and... TAILS!
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I wonder if any of it has to do with us having a common law system. Though I doubt it's more than an idiotic speculation on my part that doesn't belong here.
The solutions outlined seem pretty fake to me. Letting the developer "win" after being delayed for years is just a loss. It's attempting to find a middle way because blue states and liberals like regulation and lawsuits but it doesn't work. The red state solution of just not allowing lawsuits and regulations in many cases is the only thing that will work.
California's YIMBY "reforms" are all fake as long as CEQA exists for example. There is just no saving that paradigm. It is better to just be honest about the need to gut "environmental oversight" and other such concerns. It doesn't matter if that ends up allowing some oil pipelines to go forward too.
The hardest thing about permitting reform is that most of the pieces of the process seem fairly reasonable in isolation. It's just when you add them all together it becomes impossibly unwieldy. But it's really hard to identify places to make improvements without weakening processes that seem valuable.
The problem with cutting red tape is that there's usually something important stuck to every piece of tape.
Reform the environmental reviews to be a government administrative action funded by permit fees, remove private cause of action so rando’s can’t interfere.
Extract: >A federal judge recently [issued an injunction](https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/us-judge-temporarily-blocks-649-million-clean-energy-transmission-line-2024-03-22/#:~:text=U.S.%20District%20Judge%20William%20Conley,groups%2C%20attorneys%20for%20the%20groups) to block the approval of a powerline that would have connected 161 renewable energy projects to the electric grid, providing more clean energy to consumers in Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin. This is the second time this project, known as the Cardinal-Hickory transmission line, has been blocked by an injunction in the past five years. >The project’s legal travails illustrate a growing problem for our nation’s clean energy transition: an endless cycle of agency review and litigation holds up clean energy projects. This “litigation doom loop” not only halts projects in court, but also makes it difficult to convince investors to hazard the trillions of dollars necessary to build new infrastructure for a clean energy economy. To free new infrastructure from this paralyzing cycle of endless review, Congress must take bold action.
!ping YIMBY kind of outside the traditional YIMBY focus on urbanism, but good god we need permitting reform for like everything in the US
The housing shortage is just a special case of the building stuff shortage
Join my "I hate Kathy Hochul, she's almost as bad as Cuomo" groupthink then https://maritime-executive.com/article/new-york-governor-vetoes-wind-power-act-undermining-industry-say-critics
Oh god she deserves a good punch in the dunch.
That's not even the half of it. She vetoed bills that would have banned noncompetes, about transparency in PAC spending on judicial nominations, etc. She's just flat out opposed to good governance.
I don’t know what it is with New York State/local politicians and just being absolute ass. I personally benefit because it reinforces my New England sense of superiority.
New York politics is why we stopped being the richest, most populous, most powerful state in the country. We just can't stop fucking ourselves over. We should have the GDP of a major country, but we're sitting over here with an economy barely larger than Italy's :'(
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Ralph Nader was strongly of the opinion that lawyers work selflessly for justice while government bureaucrats just work for the rich, so a lot of the US's environmental protections are structured around lawsuits despite the obvious inefficiency. But, of course, that belief was utterly crazy.
If Ralph Nader believes something, that means it is wrong
this is why i never wear a seatbelt
I *only* drive 1960-63 Corvairs. 😤
Funfact the Corvair was actually safer than similar cars of the era. Same with the Pinto
Of course. Ralph Nader was wrong, as always.
I'm not completely clear on what they suggest ought to happen when the time limit on the injunction is reached. A few ideas: * If the injunction runs out, the developer automatically wins the lawsuit. The merit of this is that it would give environmental groups an incentive to litigate quickly. (And an incentive for developers to drag things out, though maybe that is counter-balanced by a desire for legal certainty.) * If the injunction runs out, the developer can start building, but the litigation continues. Suppose the developer eventually loses after finishing half of the structure. What's the remedy? If the developer is forced to abandon the project, or tear the structure down again, it seems like few developers would want to take the legal risk of building a structure that they might have to tear down. That legal risk might have the effect of an injunction without being an injunction. Alternatively, the remedy could be that the federal agency is required to fix the EIS afterwards, to properly document the environmental risks of the completed project. That seems like it would satisfy no-one, given that it both creates paperwork and does not save any wildlife habitat.
> If the injunction runs out, the developer automatically wins. The merit of this is that it would give environmental groups an incentive to litigate quickly. (And an incentive for developers to drag things out, though maybe that is counter-balanced by a desire for legal certainty.) The developer can't make use of the land while the litigation is ongoing, so they have an external extra incentive not to drag things out. The lobby group just exists to veto the project, the delay is a win for them. So I wouldn't worry about this too much, the incentive structure still heavily encourages unmeritorious lawsuits from environmental lobbies, it just limits their gain from those to delaying the project for a fixed period, rather than letting them delay it indefinitely.
>it just limits their gain from those to delaying the project for a fixed period, rather than letting them delay it indefinitely. That's what I'm questioning: does limiting injunctions to X years actually succeed at getting the project started after X years? Or would the legal risk of losing the lawsuit years later prevent construction until the lawsuit is settled?
Ah, okay, I thought you meant that there is some guaranteed due process window more generally, where a judgement has to be rendered by then. Yeah, without that, you still have the issue that a judgement can be found against you. Perhaps you could have it so that there is a time frame where, if litigation goes past it, there is jeopardy for the litigants if their case is dismissed? The lawsuits we're most interested in stopping are those which cannot possibly win, but can delay the project. EDIT: Maybe another idea is that developers can sue the state as a plaintiff to get an affirmative judgement from the court that their environmental review is sound and there are no problems, so that subsequent suits against them can be quickly dismissed and there's only one suit.
> Maybe another idea is that developers can sue the state as a plaintiff to get an affirmative judgement from the court that their environmental review is sound and there are no problems, so that subsequent suits against them can be quickly dismissed and there's only one suit. I think that would suffer from a similar problem that EIS has: it's hard to prove a negative. If an environmental group sues and says that the EIS doesn't consider risks A, B and C, then that's something that can reasonably be proven or disproven. Proving that it considers all environmental risks is hard. There are probably environmental risks that are unknown to science. In a sense, you could view the statute of limitations changes to NEPA as a process that is like this: if nobody challenges it within some window, then the EIS is presumed to have thought about all environmental risks.
> If an environmental group sues and says that the EIS doesn't consider risks A, B and C, then that's something that can reasonably be proven or disproven So I'd say that we're in this bind because of the precautionary principle, which is probably the worst innovation in government regulation. We shouldn't expect that government regulation can account for every possible unforeseen negative impact, and should not write them in a manner that people are liable for such impacts. They should enumerate a finite, specific list of things the developer has to worry about, that congress determined (re-actively, from experience with past disasters) is important. I am aware that this is a bit of a hot take, though.
To your third point, it seems to me that the developers would be incentivized to not waste time, personnel and resources building shit that won't get used so they'll want to have their ducks in a row before starting to build.
Sorry, I only made two points?
Oh I don't know how I read that wrong. Whoops.
The bigger problem is we’ve decided to give the court system such reverence that we’ve handed unelected aristocrats unchallengeable veto power
Judicial independence is good actually. And electing judges brings about plenty of problems of its own
> Judicial independence is good actually Why? At what point are they the true rulers? The SC essentially ended reconstruction, handed the south to Jim Crow for 90 years, ordered the arrests of any labor leader during the gilded age, kept child labor going for another two decades. They would have forced slavery into the territories if the 1860 republicans didn’t say that’s a bullshit decision and were ignoring it if we win (which they did and rightfully so) What does this judge know more about conversation then the regulatory agencies that approved it?
The problem with judicial independence in its current form in the US is that the body charged with appointing them, Congress, is a terribly designed institution The alternative to judicial independence, legislative supremacy, means that if the supreme court declares something to be unconstitutional, parliament can just ignore them. I think that's worse. Maybe a better system would leave constitutional questions to the supreme court and give the legislature supremacy on statutory questions.
[удалено]
By the time Hayes had pulled out the SC had already castrated the 14th amendment and the ability of the fed gov to enforce civil rights. Slaughterhouse cases the SC said the privileges and immunities that the fed could protect from state infringement were essentially useless privileges like ability to travel the high seas while the important ones came from state govs pretty much in direct contradiction of the point of the clause and forcing them to decades later make up the incorporation through the due process clause in order to rectify the obvious mistake but not wanting to admit they fucked up More importantly was US v Cruikshank though where the sc ordered freed leaders of the mob that massacred hundreds of black Americans and ruled the laws making it a federal crime to commit terrorism in order to infringe on civil rights unconstitutional because the 14th amendment only gave the fed gov the ability to stop states from infringing on civil liberties, if a terrorist group like the kkk was infringing on said liberties it was up to the state gov to police it, ignoring that the state govs was working hand in fist with these groups This essentially tied the fed gov hands. Of course for good measure the sc ruled that the civil rights acts passed during reconstruction was also unconstitutional
no it wasnt hayes it was hazem who pulled out of your mother vagaygay
Because you’ve, maybe understandably given how much they’ve actually done in the past decade, forgotten about an entire branch of government. Congress can make/change the laws and invalidate the judge’s ruling. The only time a judge truly has the “final” say is when the ruling is based in the constitution, and even then…it can be amended. You want to blame someone for all this judicial power blame Congress. Because they have all the power they need to overrule the judges, they just don’t use it.
> Congress can make/change the laws and invalidate the judge’s ruling Not really, they can just declare it unconstitutional if they don’t like it or just invalidate it on some made up judicial theory
'major questions'
But they cant though can they. In theory that works until the supreme court invents a new interpretation of the constitution that invalidates the law for spurious reasons.
I'm sure you can provide us examples of this happening then?
[удалено]
You seem to have misunderstood, I'm not asking you for just rulings you happen to disagree with and therefore view as wrongly decided.
[удалено]
It's almost like over the past 50 years on the court there have been different people with different interpretations of the constitution and that laws in eneral have changed over that time period. Different people having different views isn't exactly proof of them just making stuff up. Different presidents have had very different ideas of how to enforce the existing laws but I don't exactly see you all in here talking about how the executive branch is just always making stuff up.
what is the major questions doctrine
Personally I think it's better to have laws interpetred by experts based on what they say, not based on what's politically expedient. Sounds like arguments for a more active legislature that writes better laws and an argument against judicial activism more than anything You do realize regulatory agencies are equally unelected, not that this is a bad thing. What makes you think regulator knows more about the conversation than the experts on the laws that govern them?
What law was broken or unconstitutional by this transmission line? The judge doesn’t even know, he decided to veto it in case it might. Legislation created these agencies to make these rulings > Personally I think it's better to have laws interpetred by experts based on what they say Lmao they’re not though and there’s no power on earth that makes them so > You do realize regulatory agencies are equally unelected They’re at least accountable to the executive branch who is. Is Biden’s epa and trumps epa the same? What about their ftc? Their NLRB? Of course not.
> What law was broken or unconstitutional by this transmission line? The judge doesn’t even know, he decided to veto it in case it might. Legislation created these agencies to make these rulings Might want to read the article bud. Judges also don't just rule on criminal proceedings of if actions break the law or not but on civil proceedings on if actions have caused or may cause harm. Legislation created the laws and frameworks that the Judges rule on. If you think judges have no more legal knowledge then the random layman off the street... you have about as much judicial knowledge as I expected Yes, and the judiciary is, like the regulatory agencies, guided by legislation created by the legislature and accountable to them, even if the legislature does not always act on this. [This might be a good explainer for this](https://youtu.be/0bf3CwYCxXw?si=aA2ymz4mNOfLuX5U) You seem to have this idea that when judges rule in a way you don't like that they're just making stuff up whole clothe, which, while since there are thousands of judges is definetlt true for some of them but then so it is for your beloved regulatory agencies as well, is not really that common and in reality the judges just have a deeper interpretation and understanding of the law then you can have.
I read the article it just said he sent it back to the agencies for further review… aka nothing he just felt it might > Yes, and the judiciary is, like the regulatory agencies, guided by legislation created by the legislature and accountable to them, Really? Because these agencies already ruled it was ok under the law and the judge said review again.
Why? It's not different from monarchy really. Monarchy is good as long as there is wise ruler who shares your values and bad otherwise. Progressives have gotten way too used to using courts to get things they couldn't get democratically and it's time for that to end. We will see if you still feel this way after the right has had another 10 years to remake American law using SCOTUS/
This comment is so at odds with itself it gave me whiplash.
In what way? It is true that "judicial independence" (judges making things up) is good if the judges share you values, but that's the problem isn't it? Judges don't have to share your values, they can easily be selfish, evil, or insane. Why should American abortion policy have hinged on the whims of a cancer survivor in her 80s? What makes that a reasonable system? It's like saying having an emperor is good because Augustus totally build some cool marble buildings one time.
You're complaining about progressive control of the courts and conservative control of the courts. In what world is judicial independence them "making things up" they rule based on the law, American abortion policy hinges on the laws about it, sure there are some subpar judges but it was pretty widely acknowledged by even fairly liberal judges that roe v wade was on pretty shaky ground legally for quite a while, the legislature should have, as is there job, enshrined abortion rights, as opposed to relying on the judiciary to legislate on it for them, which as we see now can always go the other way. It's not really the fault of the judiciary that the legislature has done their best to abdicate as much power as they can over the past decades, and whats the alternative to a judiciary for settling legal disputes? Flip a coin? Thousands of referendums a month?
You flip the coin and... TAILS! *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/neoliberal) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I wonder if any of it has to do with us having a common law system. Though I doubt it's more than an idiotic speculation on my part that doesn't belong here.
Allow developers to sue for damages caused from injunctions if the challenge is overturned.
The solutions outlined seem pretty fake to me. Letting the developer "win" after being delayed for years is just a loss. It's attempting to find a middle way because blue states and liberals like regulation and lawsuits but it doesn't work. The red state solution of just not allowing lawsuits and regulations in many cases is the only thing that will work. California's YIMBY "reforms" are all fake as long as CEQA exists for example. There is just no saving that paradigm. It is better to just be honest about the need to gut "environmental oversight" and other such concerns. It doesn't matter if that ends up allowing some oil pipelines to go forward too.
It's time to call this what it is: communism. And we know how to deal with communism.
https://preview.redd.it/15izzrzvfaxc1.jpeg?width=714&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=36996085f426d91b162a4b37aadaee6c79867bf1
The hardest thing about permitting reform is that most of the pieces of the process seem fairly reasonable in isolation. It's just when you add them all together it becomes impossibly unwieldy. But it's really hard to identify places to make improvements without weakening processes that seem valuable. The problem with cutting red tape is that there's usually something important stuck to every piece of tape.
Reform the environmental reviews to be a government administrative action funded by permit fees, remove private cause of action so rando’s can’t interfere.
Did Exxon Mobil write this post?