Insisting upon bureaucratic efficiency seems fair

The Trump Administration has decided that:

The US interior department has announced plans to radically fast track permitting for projects involving fossil fuels and mining citing Donald Trump’s ‘energy emergency’ declaration that many experts say does not exist.

The move would reduce to a maximum of 28 days permitting procedures that previously could take multiple years, the department said late Wednesday.

That the bureaucracy itself, when presented with all the relevant information, has to make a decision in less than geologic time seems sensible to us. It also doesn’t seem like a huge imposition. Nor even a loosening of necessary protections.

For why a specific project has been authorised, or not so, hasn’t changed at all. Only the time period over which the decision is made.

Which does lead to an interesting point.

Green groups immediately criticized the plans to boost planet-heating fossil fuels and questioned their legality describing them as an extreme change to the nation’s core environment laws.

It’s the delay that has gone, nothing else. So, those shrieking about how it’s terrible the delay has gone must, in logic, have been using the delay as part of their plans. No? Which does rather seem like a double win here. These permit decisions will now be made solely on the merits - or not - of the case itself. Not on whoever has enough money to survive years and decades of permit lawfare.

This strikes us as a definite advance.

Tim Worstall