COLUMBUS, Ohio — An Ohio state senator wants Congress to dismantle the federal environmental review system that protects Ohio’s air, water, and wildlife — and he wants it done fast.
Senate Concurrent Resolution 20, introduced by Senator Shane Wilkin, calls on Congress to roll back the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and more than a dozen other federal environmental protections — framing the laws that have governed environmental oversight in this country for more than half a century as obstacles to American energy production.
The resolution specifically targets the legal tools that communities, scientists, and environmental advocates use to challenge pipelines, mines, and industrial energy projects before they are built. It calls those challenges “overlitigation” and describes the groups filing them as “radical” organizations holding worthy projects “hostage.”
In other words, if you live near a proposed pipeline route, the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, injection wells, etc., and you want your day in court, this resolution says that is the problem.
What gets cleared away
The resolution’s list of targets is not subtle. It calls for changes to the Clean Water Act — the federal law that prevents industrial polluters from dumping into Ohio’s rivers and streams. It wants NEPA gutted — the law that requires the government to tell the public what a major industrial project will do to the surrounding environment before it gets built. It wants the Endangered Species Act reformed in ways that would make it easier to build through habitat that currently receives federal protection.
It also wants faster permitting for mines — specifically citing critical mineral extraction — and calls out the fact that it currently takes nearly ten years to permit a new mine in the United States compared to two to three years in Canada and Australia. What the resolution does not mention is why that gap exists — American mining permitting timelines reflect decades of documented harm to communities and waterways from mines that were built before those protections existed.
Who benefits
The resolution frames its goals as neutral — applying to all energy sources “without prejudice,” including renewables. But the specific laws it targets and the specific infrastructure it names — pipelines, transmission lines, mines — point clearly toward the industries that have the most to gain from a weakened environmental review process.
Nuclear energy, natural gas infrastructure, and critical mineral mining would all see significant regulatory barriers reduced under the changes the resolution demands. These are also industries that have faced some of the most significant legal challenges from the communities and environmental groups, which the resolution dismisses as radical.
What gets lost
What the resolution does not address is what happens when a project goes wrong.
The environmental review process, the resolution calls broken exists because of specific, documented failures — rivers that caught fire, communities poisoned by industrial runoff, species driven to extinction by unchecked development. NEPA, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act were not created by bureaucrats who wanted to slow things down. They were created by a Congress that had watched what happened when industry built first and asked questions later.
Stripping those protections — or limiting the ability of communities to challenge projects in court — does not make projects safer. It makes it harder to stop them when they aren’t.
The bottom line
Senate Concurrent Resolution 20 does not carry the force of law. It is a message to Washington. But it is a message that tells Congress, in plain terms, that the Ohio Senator Shane Wilkins believes the laws protecting Ohio’s environment are more of a problem than the industries those laws were designed to constrain.
The resolution has been introduced and is awaiting action.