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Comment by dgellow | Hacker News Reader

What do you mean? That it is used as a political tool?

Yes. As a survivor of one of these battles, when the neighbors don't want you to do something, they will throw every wrench they can find into the works. "Good faith" is nonexistent. I'm very, very sympathetic to environmental concerns, but the way I've seen this sort of thing used in real life is absolute nonsense.

Do you have some examples, just to get an idea of the problem?

My high school was a bunch of trailers on a large tract of unused but school-owned land that would eventually become a full-blown high-school. It sat next to a Tractor museum and a small marsh-type thing the opposite side of its access road. The footprint of the planned construction was only maybe twice the size of the trailers, and didn't stretch across the access road, and the land it occupies now was mostly disused fields of dirt and shrubs.

We were promised that our senior year would be in the new facility. However the school got hit with environmental studies around a specific species of endangered frog that was known to inhabit the area, and construction did not complete until 5 years later

What's crazy, viewed from outside the US, is that this kind of roadblocks seems to only apply to public works but not to private developments, or less so at least.

In Europe, public works have less barriers of that type, as it's assumed they are for the general good, whereas private projects are required to demonstrate it.

My high school was a public charter school, so it was both public and private at the same time. But I think that the environmental studies would have come up even if it were a regular public school

I'm afraid I can't get any more specific than that. There's still a lot of bad blood, and it might not be over yet.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2015/09/25/sunnyvale-drive-throu...

Plenty of examples in this recent article:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/03/signature-...

It is unknowable. People who truly want the best for the environment obviously exist, but the outcomes of our environmental policies have secondary and tertiary effects that would also benefit people who wanted to make population growth and population change difficult for other reasons.

Apologies for the gross long URL, and as always correlation is not causation, but correlations are still worth thinking about: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=redlining%2Cen...

In a lot of ways, yes. Kicking projects back for more environmental review has recently become a method to delay/soft cancel projects that are now out of vogue. FERC recently kicked a proposed LNG terminal in Oregon back for more environmental review[1], the Biden admin revoking the permit for Keystone XL, and so on. (I would note I am in support of both of those moves)

Combined with a rising 'consulting class' if you will where it is only to their benefit to drag out these studies and billable hours.

[1]https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-lng-jordancove/u-s-fe...

It's used as a political tool to block construction for NIMBY reasons, and as a way to line the pockets of those involved in the study.

No, there is a lot unnecessary red tape involved with them. They aren't used as a political pawn.

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