Brian Potter: commitment

Transcript context

…That's all right. You had a comment in that post that I found interesting where you said that this uncertainty also makes changing NEPA somewhat risky. Experts have noted for instance that rules to accelerate NEPA processes or impose maximum timelines might result in more of them being challenged in court by failing to take the proper “hard look” Do you want to explain this? Because this is counterintuitive to me. Meeting the deeper requirement means you have to take what the courts call “a hard look” where you have to consider these impacts quite thoroughly. So the risk is that if you put a timeline cap on some of these processes, it has to be done in a year and if it's not done in a year, it's automatically approved. It's just an idea you see floated from time to time. The risk is that people will just say, “Okay well, we’ll go and litigate this project immediately, and then when we do, we will say that they did not look hard enough at these impacts and if they can't marshal the resources we needed to study some particular flowering species and it only has a flowering period of two weeks in the spring and the time period was up before that happens,” then the court is good, which is a thing that happens in NEPA apparently. It’s one of the reasons why these take multiple years because if you're observing some species or whatever, you might need an entire year to actually observe. But if you fail to look at this plant during the flowering season, you don't know if it's actually there and so you haven't considered the impacts on the potentially endangered species and the court would say “Yeah, you did not look hard enough at this, go back and do it again.” You see that mentioned quite a few times that timeline caps could either easily backfire by increasing the amount of increasing susceptible litigation which just makes these things take longer than they already do already. You see a lot of extra analysis due to risk aversion from these federal agencies. The laws around NEPA actually say that your environmental impact statements should really not be longer than 150 pages except in extreme circumstances, but the average environmental impact statement is now 660 pages or something like that. So people are already going more than what the law says they should do just out of risk aversion. So if you don't fix the incentives that are causing this risk aversion, your solution will not work I'm curious if you think that there's been a talent drain from physical engineering tasks (ex. construction) into software. Has that happened and has that had an impact on the world of atoms or is that just something people discuss on the internet and it's not real?…

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