The Wall Street Journal ran an op-ed last week about the EPA and mine permitting. Daniel McGroarty of the American Resources Policy Network writes,

The Environmental Protection Agency last week put forth new restrictions that would essentially block the Pebble Mine, a proposed multi-metal project in the Bristol Bay region of southwest Alaska. For months the EPA has argued that under the Clean Water Act it can prevent the mine before the company has even filed for a permit.

The EPA had never invoked this authority before Pebble . . . .

But anti-mine activists want the EPA to do something similar for projects in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Oregon.

What these projects have in common is that none has put forward an actual mine plan. This action would trigger a thorough mine review, as required under the National Environmental Policy Act. For more than 40 years NEPA has defined the process by which a mine plan is evaluated. Under the law, every one of the concerns raised by opponents to the Wisconsin, Minnesota and Oregon mines would be aired publicly, examined by scientists and a range of technical experts, before approval is granted or denied. Now, using Pebble Mine as precedent, anti-mining activists are urging the EPA to ignore NEPA and bar mining projects with no review necessary.

Activists also are urging the EPA to measure environmental impact in a way that makes projects seem more pernicious than they are. Current law requires an environmental-impact statement, which is an extensive assessment of a mine’s potential impact weighed against mitigating safeguards.

But anti-mining activists are pushing for a switch to “cumulative effects assessments,” which would take into account past, present and future actions in the project vicinity. Under such an approach, a mine could be vetoed because other proposed mines in the region could at some point in the future collectively contribute to deleterious environmental effects. Even the most meticulously engineered mine plan can be undone by a parade of hypothetical horribles.

This will sound familiar to readers following the decisions by agencies here in Washington to use an expanded SEPA process for certain projects. We wrote about the issue here. As we note in the policy brief, for the Gateway Pacific Terminal, EPA argued for both an expanded SEPA and NEPA process; Ecology was responsive, but the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was not.