"The passion for preserving NEPA comes from environmental activists and lawyers who count on it to stall projects they have no legal basis to halt. This becomes obvious when they begin to list the many scary and polluting projects that they fear would move forward without sufficient NEPA review. But of course, laws already exist to prohibit a project that poses unacceptable environmental risk; it can be stopped without NEPA review. And if the activists wanted to put more projects off limits, they could lobby to make those laws tougher."
