On the recordJanuary 26, 2015
I am grateful that Senator Boxer will yield for a question. This is a question I have of Senator Boxer, and I wish to get her feedback because of her years of experience, her wisdom, and her depth of understanding on this issue. I think there needs to be an amendment for critical protection. The need for regulation requires agencies to supplement already issued environmental impact statements when significant new circumstances come about. When there is information about these new challenges to the environmental impact of a project, something really has to happen. So this pending bill deems that the final environmental impact statement issued last January would fully satisfy the NEPA, that this would remove the obligation of permitting agencies to supplement that EIS if any new circumstance or information is discovered. The amendment would change that and would preserve the obligation of agencies to supplement--if we had such an amendment, it could really protect that. I was told by a lot of people that NEPA is sort of referred to as the environmental modern day Magna Carta. In other words, it is such a critical set of protections. If we have a circumstance in which there is a significant change in the pipeline--say they just decide to change the direction or move it a little bit and it goes through an entirely new area--not to be able to take into consideration new information, new circumstances where an environmental impact statement abated, seems to be wrong.…
