Savannah’s port and the regulatory problem
If you missed George Will’s latest column — written from the site of the next GOP primary, but about the question of deepening Southeastern ports to handle the larger container ships that will begin coming through the larger Panama Canal within the next several years — I draw your attention to this bit citing the head of the South Carolina State Ports Authority, Jim Newsome:
Newsome says the study for deepening Savannah’s harbor was made in 1999. It is 2012, and studies for the environmental impact statement are not finished. When they are, the project will take five years to construct. “But before that,” he says laconically, “they’re going to be sued by groups concerned about the environmental impact.” A Newsome axiom — that institutions become risk-averse as they get challenged — is increasingly pertinent as America changes from a nation that celebrated getting things done to a nation that celebrates people and groups who prevent things from being done.
Writing at Power Line, Steven Hayward echoes the point:
Take the Keystone pipeline as an example. The pipeline is likely to be approved eventually, but only after more years of review and litigation. Certainly measures will need to be taken to reduce the environmental risks of the pipeline, but is there any safety measure that we will eventually impose that we didn’t recognize in the first six months of the review process? It’s not like we’ve never built a pipeline before, or learned from previous pipeline accidents (like the one in Montana last summer). Are there really any potential environmental impacts of deepening a harbor … by five feet that require six to ten years of review and litigation, and a three-thousand page Environmental Impact Statement? …
What needs to be done? The regulatory review process ought to have a short deadline. Agency review should be completed within six or nine months, with a presumption in favor of granting permission unless an agency can delineate a substantively new problem based on precedents from previous similar projects …. Standing to sue to block projects should be tightened, and the threshold for hearing such suits made much more restrictive. And how about requiring that all Environmental Impact Statements be no longer than 200 pages? I’m sure all the environmental lawyers and consultants who charge by the hour and make a bundle doing these multi-volume EIRs that no one reads will howl, but if the Supreme Court can limit briefs to 50 pages on matters of high constitutional importance, why can’t our regulatory process not emulate a standard of brevity that emphasizes the essential over the frivolous and tedious?
I’d venture to guess a majority of conservative voters, and perhaps a majority of all voters, would approve of such changes, which can hardly be described truthfully as deregulation. They might be better termed a decluttering of regulation.
– By Kyle Wingfield
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89 comments Add your comment
Rafe Hollister
January 16th, 2012
8:10 pm
Disgusted
It is not greed; it is called risk management. There is a whole new science involved. We take an assesment of the likelyhood of catastrophe and the benefits of the project being successful. You weigh one against the other. If the likeylood of things going poorly is that at most 10 volunteers may become seriously ill or die and the benefit of success is that cancer is eradicated throughout the world, what do you do.
You certainly do not sit around and think of everything that can go wrong with a project and predict a failure, without considering the benefits of success. Nothing is ever accomplished with this attitude, which is the attitude of most enviromental wackos.
Risk Managment is an effort to balance the risk and the benefits. Unfortunately most Americans tend to be risk averse, which is why we have many of the problems we have.
Linda
January 16th, 2012
8:19 pm
Disgusted@7:54, Rather than “risk the Gulf of Mexico’s becoming a giant oil impoundment,” why not “vote into office somebody who” would approve drilling on land, such as Alaska, & lift both the congressional & presidential bans on drilling for oil on the Outer Continental Shelf in waters that are not so deep, that is, more manageable & less risky, along states that are clamoring for drilling rights?
JDW
January 16th, 2012
9:12 pm
@Markie Mark…first off you need to work on your attention span it is lacking. Second, the point of the link was to encourage TD to do some research before spouting complete falsehoods.
TD stated in the post in question “Nothing, besides the military, has been actually cut in the Federal budget since Reagan”
That statement is a simple falsehood. The Federal Budget is made up of 20 sections or subtotals if you will. That means that during Reagan’s 8 budgets there were 160 opportunities to spend less in one of those area’s than in the year prior and that happened 48 times.
Now for the falsehood part….
…Bush 1 did it 14 times
….Clinton equaled Reagan’s 48 times
…Duhbya did it 37 times
….and Obama, using the White House projections through 2016 which is only 7 budget years is slated to do it 65 times.
So had TD done even the most basic research he would have known his statement was false prior to spouting…which was the point.
JDW
January 16th, 2012
9:14 pm
O’ further to the point, the only President in that time frame to actually submit a budget that cut total spending year to year…Obama in 2010 and 2012.
Disgusted
January 16th, 2012
9:21 pm
Rather than “risk the Gulf of Mexico’s becoming a giant oil impoundment,” why not “vote into office somebody who” would approve drilling on land, such as Alaska, & lift both the congressional & presidential bans on drilling for oil on the Outer Continental Shelf in waters that are not so deep, that is, more manageable & less risky, along states that are clamoring for drilling rights?
Because such drilling wouldn’t increase America’s oil supply one iota, Linda. You seem to think that we can become energy-independent by drilling more in American territory and waters. Think again. Oil is a world commodity. It is sold on the world’s open market to the highest bidder. I’m uninterested in exhausting our own pathetically small share of the world’s oil reserves in order to make a few executives and some shareholders wealthy, along with giving Japan and China shorter routes to meet their oil needs.. And I can pretty well bet that you wouldn’t be interested in any kind of law that required oil found in American territories to be kept here.
In short, your argument for more drilling in America is a giant fail. The consequences would be even more dependence on overseas supplies in the long run. Moreover, it wouldn’t decrease fuel prices by even a penny, and we would be put in an even more perilous situation if overseas supplies were cut off and we had exhausted our own reserves.
GodHatesTrash, Superstar
January 16th, 2012
9:30 pm
The simple-minded cons here always come up with simpleton “solutions”.
Half-wit twits all.
I Report (-: You Whine )-: mmm, mmmm, mmmmm! Just sayin...
January 16th, 2012
9:41 pm
The average Occupy Wall Street protest did more damage to the environment than any oil pipeline ever will but since liberals are easily frightened and confused, they whine and moan, much like any other empty headed sissy.
Unfortunately, the rest of us, decent folk all, are left to hope they don’t urinate or defecate on us in their simple minded rage.
GodHatesTrash, Superstar
January 16th, 2012
10:09 pm
Curly, you cons love “trickle down”.
And santorum. Disgusting!
Rafe Hollister
January 16th, 2012
10:10 pm
Disgusted
Your argument was that adding billions of US oil to the world market will not impact prices. That makes no sense and assuming you are right, we still have added tens to hundreds of thousands of jobs exploring, drilling, shipping, refining that oil.
How do you know we have a miniscule amount of oil? When the Horizon rig blew up, the “experts” were absolutely amazed at the pressure of that well and the amount of oil leaking out. Whoda thunk it after years of the naysayers chanting there is no substantial amount of oil off shore. As the ole saying goes, can’t never could.
Rafe Hollister
January 16th, 2012
10:12 pm
Physics would indicate trickle down works. Trickle up, impossible.
JDW
January 16th, 2012
10:23 pm
@Rafe…”Physics would indicate trickle down works.”
When talking rocks you are absolutely correct…economics not so much.
td
January 16th, 2012
10:49 pm
JDW
January 16th, 2012
9:12 pm
You can not consider it a cut when you decrease an expected increase. This is called government accounting and if the private sector did it then they would be sent to jail (ever hear of Enron).
Again Military has had actual cuts. The “peace dividend” is how Clinton balanced the budget.
JDW
January 17th, 2012
6:38 am
@TD…you are not listening…when you spend less in this year than you did in the last that is a cut. If you would actually look at the data once in a while instead of repeating rumors you would be correct more often.
@@
January 17th, 2012
7:07 am
Well…it’s often been said “The details are in the devil.” and Newt’s got the details down.
schnirt
Newt and Santorum delivered.
Romney stutters and stammers.
Paul is plagued by hysteria.
Perry is…well…perilously predictable.
Bob
January 17th, 2012
7:47 am
The fact of the matter is that this country built projects like the Hoover Dam prior to the current mess. We will never see a project like that again because some group will find some judge to block it.
independent thinker
January 17th, 2012
8:13 am
Display of right wing ignorance: “The Environmental Protection Agency was created by the “real” GOP — the party of Roosevelt, Eisenhower and Nixon.”
Nixon created it to buy moderate votes and cover up his administration’s failures. Roosevelt and Eisenhower had zero to do with it.
The number of unfunded mandates creating bloated buracricies created by GOP presidents is endless. Look at No Child Left Behind created by George W. as another example. A total waste.
And of course Romney lies and says the buracracy increased under Obama. Most of that was in defense, VA hospitals immigration and homeland security.
nelson
January 17th, 2012
8:19 am
“Government by Litigation”. When free government becomes too perplexing and futile , people turn to dictatorship. It is the simplest form of government.The legal profession can scarcely boast of its popularity. Some advocate that that the law schools should be paid for not producing lawyers. It takes good lawyers to kill great measures for the public betterment. Those were all quotes by Supreme Court Justice Jackson speaking at the NYS Bar Association in 1937.
Litiagation would tie up building a deep water port at Savannah for years and years.
godless heathen
January 17th, 2012
8:27 am
As one who has worked with the State and Federal Regulatory agencies for over 25 years, I can assure you that the system is broken. The “meat” of one of these EIS’s could easily be presented in 200 pages. Much of the work is done by contractors and what I’ve seen of many of the “environmental” reports, they must charge by the pounds of paper produced. They reproduce manuals, previous studies, research documents, and regulations and include them in the reports when they could merely be referenced. Each EIS is like starting over at the beginning of time.
The people that work at the regulatory agencies are good people and I am friends with many of them but they are hamstrung by the litigious nature of our society, the timidity of managers, layers of bureaucratic redundancy, and spineless lawmakers.
Protection of the environment is not the top priority in Environmental Protection. Protection of one’s backside is, and as a result, the environment and the economy suffers.
I know of an issue under review by a regulatory agency, where a disaster could occur that would actually immediately kill a large number of people, (as opposed to as issue like if contaminated water cause cancer if ingested over a lifetime), and the issue has been under review by the agency since the 1980s.
Serious reform needs happen and the first step is to make it more difficult to file lawsuits, because the fear of lawsuits has paralyzed the system.
independent thinker
January 17th, 2012
8:42 am
How many environmental lawsuits did it take for Atlanta to finally stop polluting streams and rivers??
St Simons - we're on Island time
January 17th, 2012
9:11 am
yes, praying for ‘no environmental impact’ is soooo much better.
you pompous asses can stick pins in voodoo dolls & pray for crap
all you want up there, but the people that live here want to see
the study & let science determine whether our kids are safe.
Intown
January 17th, 2012
9:58 am
Simple minds are blind to complex facts, and scientific uncertainties and thus, love deregulation.
retired early
January 17th, 2012
10:08 am
The previous deepening of the Savannah River several decades ago caused a severe loss of freshwater marsh. It also DESTROYED the best striped bass fishery on the Atlantic coast. The CEO of the company hired for the current deepening impact study is opposed to further deepening. The Corp of Engineers own study states that the “Port of Savannah will continue to grow even without further deepening, just at a more “moderate pace”. Not all of these future are going to be “mega ships”. there will still be plenty of smaller ones the Savannah Port can accommodate. The Savannah port. remember, is 20 miles from the ocean. Let the ports with more environmentally doable sites handle these “mega ships”.
Savannah will do just fine without them. One other thing…..if our freshwater aquifer if infiltrated with salt water…which is one major concern. Who will buy these uninhabitable homes on the coast.
Jefferson
January 17th, 2012
10:19 am
Ga does not need this, move on.
BW
January 17th, 2012
10:49 am
Unfortunately certain people don’t understand decluttering vs deregulation…all regs should be periodically reviewed by department to allow approval as quickly as possible…unfortunately this highly logical argument has been morphed into repealing regulations because of the complexity which is to say it’s not black or white but grey and there is no use for grey.
getalife
January 17th, 2012
10:49 am
I can sum up this cycle in three words.
willard will lose.
Rafe Hollister
January 17th, 2012
10:50 am
Where were all of you boys who cry wolf, when they dug the Suez and Panama Canals. Had your voices been heard loudly back then, we would still be sailing around the tips of Africa and South America.
TBone
January 17th, 2012
11:12 am
This is the kind of progressively backed crap that will put America on the scrap heap of former SuperPowers. When JFK challenged this nation in the early 1960’s to put a man on the moon before the end of the decade, we did. Now with the myriad of regulatory hoops that must be hurdled we could never do a feat like that. May God help us!
getalife
January 17th, 2012
11:21 am
Kyle,
Due to the fact cons are racist, you might try a MLK thread next year to try to prove them wrong.
At least try.
Thanks.
Kyle Wingfield
January 17th, 2012
11:26 am
getalife: Your grasp of the meaning of “fact” is as solid as your grasp on what “alife” is.
Jefferson
January 17th, 2012
11:32 am
Was that a wet spitball?
getalife
January 17th, 2012
11:50 am
Kyle,
Most blogs do a MLK post on MLK Day but you did not.
That is fact.
Capt. Francesco Shettino
January 17th, 2012
11:54 am
Si, make the Savannah port deeper, much deeper. Mama mia, take it from me you can flip a ship faster than you can say arrivederci Roma.
getalife
January 17th, 2012
12:14 pm
The President’s job council wants to reform tax code, lower corporate taxes and more domestic drilling.
These are gop ideas so you cons won these arguments.
So why the Obama envy?
Is it because he is successful?
Is it because he is not white?
Is it because you are brainwashed to envy him?
Linda
January 17th, 2012
12:20 pm
Disgusted@9:21 PM, Your assessment of the US energy supply is quite different from the Geological Survey report. If you will click on this article, it will debunk all the myths plus more that many people believe. The reality of myth # 3 is that the “US is the 3rd largest oil producer (10) & according to the Congressional Research Service, we have the world’s largest fossil fuel resources (11).” If you click on footnotes #10 & #11 at the bottom of the article, you can read for yourself. Only Russia & Saudi produce more oil than the US. The US has more fossil fuels than anyone else in the world.
http://www.stoptheenergyfreeze.com/myth-vs-reality/
If there are NO or MINIMAL natural resources in the OCS & in Alaska, why do the energy companies want to spend billions exploring there & why would congress & the president prohibit them from doing so?
What happened to the price of gas when Bush lifted the presidential moratorium?
Kyle Wingfield
January 17th, 2012
12:37 pm
No, getalife, no it’s not. But as I’ve said before, you ought to getaclue.
Don
January 17th, 2012
12:44 pm
The transcontinental RR was chartered in 1862, construction started in earnest in 1865 and was completed in May of 1869. Four years to build nearly 2000 miles of RR….by hand. Only 7 years from a rough line on a map to completion.
Now, even simple public works projects can’t get done in less than five. First, we need a study to see scope out the project. That gets bid out. Then, comes the rough engineering, study of alternatives and final scope. Then the EIS work. Then the final engineering. Then the construction. Each phase has to be bid out, reviewed and contracts written and let out.
All of this work is sequential. Almost none of the work gets done in parallel. And, it just clobbers the ROI with the benefits coming on line so long after the money starts to flow out.
The transcontinental RR was really nothing more than a rough line on a map when work started. The engineering, surveying and construction all went on in parallel.
We definitely need to focus on ways to speed up construction of public projects. It’s all about being good stewards of our tax dollars.
Clint
January 17th, 2012
11:57 pm
Kyle, good points, but from what I understand from talking to people familiar with the study, the delay has been caused by the authorizing legislation, which dictated all of the various agencies that had to be included. If we’re looking to place blame for the long process, it starts with Congress plain and simple. I’d be interested in knowing who wrote the original authorizing legislation which included so much inter-agency consultation. Perhaps the authorizing legislation was written like that intentionally?
ODD OWL
January 18th, 2012
1:07 am
The Republicans gallivant around yelling and screaming let the private sector do it… Well the private sector haven’t done schit. The Government is the agency of last resort. The government step in and fill the void where the private sector has failed. The Republicans who are the lap dog of the rich, the elite and their corporate bosses have become a problem in America. If we the people get rid of the Republicans, we can get rid of the problem.
Dave Brindza
January 19th, 2012
5:58 am
excellent post, very informative. I wonder why the other specialists of this sector do not notice this. You should continue your writing. I am sure, you’ve a great readers’ base already!