Brian Potter: evaluation

Transcript context

…It's my spicy take at the end that I always have to throw in right at the end but yeah, the basic argument is that the purpose of a law is roughly twofold: to encourage something that you would want more of or discourage something that you would you would want less of. We have laws against drunk driving because we think drug driving is harmful and we want less drug driving in our society. The second purpose of a law is to basically reduce coordination problems and enable exchanges that might not otherwise be able to take place.The government enforces which side of the road you're allowed to drive on not because one side is inherently better than the other, but because it's good if everybody agrees on which side of the road to drive on. Contract law is in some ways like this. It's good if you know that people will be punished for breaking contracts because that allows people to enter into them, which allows exchanges that might not otherwise take place. I forget exactly what the example of this is, but the ability of the English government in the 1600s to 1700s to pay back its debts was a really important development because it allowed it to raise money that it otherwise wouldn't be able to because people could trust they would be able to get paid back. Anyway, those are the two rough purposes of a law and NEPA does not do either of those things. NEPA is basically a procedural statement or requirement it does not require the government to weigh environmental concerns especially heavily. It doesn't prevent a big oil and gas drilling project from taking place–– essentially what it does require is that for any major environmental effects, you just have to document them very thoroughly so all of it is a documentation requirement, and notifying the public of what you're doing but bit doesn't prevent major environmental negative ramifications. As long as you've documented it quite thoroughly, you can kind of do whatever you want and the evidence is very unclear as to whether it has had net beneficial environmental effects to the extent that it has made it harder to do anything at all. The other side is about solving coordination problems and I think that NEPA actually is very very bad at this. It creates a lot of uncertainty because the requirements for doing the analysis are so unclear and the definition what an environmental effect keeps shifting over time. In the 1970s, it was maybe not obvious that greenhouse gas emissions were in major environmental effect, but now in 2020, it obviously is and so what you've had to do for a NEPA analysis changes over time which is of course fine in that sense, right? But it does mean that it's very unclear how long it's gonna take and what is going to be involved and whether anybody is going to sort of litigate your decision. This is the other sort of big part of NEPA–– people are basically able to sue people for not completing the analysis thoroughly enough. and whether anybody is going to sort of litigate your decision. This is the other sort of big part of NEPA–– people are basically able to sue people for not completing the analysis thoroughly enough. They can't permanently stop the project because all you need to do is basically show that you've documented your things thoroughly enough. So once you have documented it thoroughly enough, they don't have grounds for stopping it anymore, but they can't slow it down. If they slow it down enough, sometimes the project becomes unattractive and it gets canceled. That's kind of what a lot of these groups hope for and so basically instead of great uncertainty and solid coordination problems, it creates all this new uncertainty where people will like very deliberately try to avoid the NEPA process because they do not know how long it will take and how much it will cost to get their project approved and in some cases going through the process will take a very very very very long time. So making a business decision as to whether to do a new offshore wind development or develop a new forest resource or something like that is very hard to do. You don't know when your project is going to start because you don’t know how long the process will take. Yeah, that's so fascinating. All right, so I've got a lot more questions about this because your breakdown was really interesting. I don't know if you're familiar with the longtermist movement, maybe you’ve come across this before, but one thing they've proposed is not like a doctrine or anything, but on the periphery, some idea I saw was that just as we have environmental review we should have a posterity review so that you're analyzing the impacts of your actions on generations way down the line. What are the future impacts of actions just as we analyze what the environmental impacts reactions? What do you think of an idea like that given the various dysfunctions of the environmental review process?…

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