over and vote, but he may be back before I am. So, excuse me, please.

[Recess taken.]

Senator BAUCUS. The committee will come to order.

I apologize to the witnesses for the delay. There was a vote. I don't think there will be any other votes for some time. Let's hope so, anyway.

We have one more witness on this panel, Mr. Robinson. Mr. Robinson is the Director of the Center for Environmental Legal Studies at Pace University School of Law.

Mr. Robinson?

STATEMENT OF NICHOLAS ROBINSON, DIRECTOR, CENTER FOR ENVIRONMENTAL LEGAL STUDIES, PACE UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF LAW

Mr. ROBINSON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

It is a pleasure to be here. I am a professor of law and have submitted a statement which I understand is incorporated into the record. Annexed to it is part of the Report of the Legal Advisory Committee to the President's Council on Environmental Quality of December, 1971 which addressed the question of NEPA's extraterritorial application.

I was privileged to serve on that Committee by appointment of Russell Train who was then the CEQ chairman. A decade later, I became involved with these kinds of environmental impact statement issues again as the General Counsel and Deputy Commissioner of New York State's Environmental Conservation Department. We in New York are one of the 25 States that have a law like NEPA at the State level. I would point out that 17 of the 50 States border on another country, and the environmental impact statements that are done in those areas regularly look at impacts abroad across the boundary as well as dealing with impacts in the United States, sometimes from the effects abroad.

Citizens from abroad are allowed under our procedures to intervene in American administrative proceedings to discuss those environmental impacts under our rules.

I have found in the last 10 or 15 years that there is tremendous interest in environmental impact assessment as as a technique abroad. It is generally one of the ideas that Congress came up with which has achieved international stature and acceptance.

The Common Market, Western European countries under the Treaty of Rome, are requiring the use of environmental impact assessment in all those nations beginning this coming July. The U.N. Environment Programme has voted on impact assessment guidelines and recommended to all countries, primarily developing countries, that environmental impact assessment be adopted. The Associtaion of Southeast Asian Nations has, by treaty, agreed to establish environmental impact procedures in all those nations. I have just returned from some meetings in the Soviet Union. The Soviets are actively studying it and establishing an environmental impact assessment process as well.

It is an idea, as Senator Symms pointed out, that makes good sense. It works. It can be used.

It does take some extra work. People have to think about the environmental consequences. Environmental baseline data has to be assembled. Agencies not used to NEPA are a little unsure about how to tool up.

I have never seen an agency, which was not an environmental agency, say we would love to accept NEPA. It has been something that the legislative side of our government has said must be done.

The executive agencies reluctantly have learned to do it. Eventually, they become strong advocates of it. Those that do the EIA process find that it is very useful.

Most critics of the process are people who have never done it. I have had to advise an agency on the performance of environmental impact statements and also advise local governments doing the process. I have been an attorney for development interests as well as conservation interests, participating in environmental impact statement procedures. It is an even-handed, good tool that should be used in our international arena.

I will not summarize the legal points I have made in my paper. I believe it is amply clear that the foreign affairs agencies are covered by the National Environmental Policy Act. The environmental assessment procedures do work. AID finds that they work.

I see no conceptual or policy reason why the U.S. participation in the World Bank could not undertake some form of environmental impact assessment.

Since most of the donor nations have already agreed in their domestic legislation to perform environmental impact assessments, to undertake this process, one of the ideas, which is not in my prepared text but I will suggest now, is that Congress mandate the executive to open discussions with the other donor countries, with our Western European allies, with Japan, to discuss agreeing on some standard policy for environmental impact assessment that might be agreed upon by these nations. They are the ones that fund the development process. Since they perform environmental impact assessment domestically, it seems to me they could ably do it on development aid projects and agree upon procedures as voting members of the World Bank to do it, and this might be a further tool to promote this process.

In summary, I think that the proposal that Senator Symms has made is a useful one. It could either be done gradually through a programmatic or generic EIS in which Treasury would look at all of the impacts of its vote as a way to leverage the World Bank into doing more environmental analysis.

It could be done through grants and training to cultivate the staff capacity both in the World Bank and in some of the recipient nations to do this, but there is every good reason in policy and law under NEPA why the World Bank should begin doing so, and the United States Government should facilitate that process and comply with NEPA.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Senator BAUcus. Thank you, Mr. Robinson.

Mr. Robinson and Mr. Reilly, you heard Mr. Burnham say-I think he used the words "environmental imperialism." I think in part it is because NEPA generally applies to U.S. agencies, and NEPA has a major impact, that is, American courts have held that

where agencies do not comply with NEPA, the project stops, or may not proceed until the agency complies with NEPA and the EIS, environmental impact statement, is provided.

But those are all within the confines of United States jurisdiction. Isn't it environmental imperialism for the United States Government to say we are going to apply American law not only to Americans and American agencies but also to other countries?

Mr. ROBINSON. I don't think it is, Mr. Chairman. We don't apply American law to the other countries. We constrain ourselves. We tell ourselves that we must not act so as to harm the environment. When we bankroll disasters, as the expression goes, we are imposing a sloppiness and a negligence in our performance on other peoples, and some of them will live with the damage that is done to the environment abroad for several generations as a result.

The Canadians are very sensitive to the fact that they do not want Americans dictating to the Canadians. Both the Federal Government which has a good and creative environmental impact assessment process, and some provinces have drawn on our experience in the United States to develop a very different, very Canadian, procedure. Canada has found that this is a good policy.

Canadian agencies have also been quite willing to participate in U.S. agency procedures. Consider the fact that while I was at a conference in Warsaw of the Economic Commission for Europe last September, both the Dutch delegate-the Dutch have a very strong environmental impact assessment process that they have implemented-both the Dutch delegate and the Hungarian delegate stood up and said, we think the National Environmental Policy Act provides a wonderful tool, and everything we have learned about it we have learned from the United States, and we are proceeding to institute it.

This is extraordinary. I don't think it is cultural imperialism any more than saying that we live in one biosphere and our scientists around the world tell us the same natural science exists and the same natural phenomena take place. We can study them and come to conclusions based on scientific study about how to avert environmental mishaps.

Senator BAUCUS. What about that, Mr. Burnham? We are attempting to encourage other countries to sign a treaty on the reduction of chlorofluorocarbons. That was American initiative primarily, and I hope that the President raises the matter in Toronto this weekend and encourage other countries to sign the treaty.

The fact is that the world is getting smaller, that we all live in this world together, that deforestation does have an adverse effect upon peoples not only in Brazil or other tropical forest countries but also upon us in America and other peoples in the world.

What is wrong with this simple requirement that an environmental impact statement or, more simply yet, an environmental assessment be required of the U.S. Government or the lending agencies before a decision is made whether to proceed with the loan? What is wrong with just asking for the information?

Mr. BURNHAM. First of all, that information frequently is asked for by the executive directors. It is provided to the executive directors and, as a matter of course, it is normally, when relevant to a project, included in the project documents that are available to the

executive directors and available to the Treasury Department and other agencies of the executive.

So, the fact is that when there are environmental issues involved people are trying to look at these, within the resources that the bank and its borrowing members have. It seems to me-the debate is being presented as a procedural issue. I don't believe it is a procedural issue.

I think it is, fundamentally, the notion that the rate of discount of a highly developed prosperous country, the U.S., Canada, Sweden, or whatever, should be applied to future costs and benefits to economic projects that are associated with very, very poor countries which have citizens who have very immediate needs and desires.

Senator BAUCUs. Well, without prejudging the issue, that is, the decision of whether or not to vote for the loan-because there are lots of different criteria, lots of different factors, lots of different considerations in whether or not the United States' executive director votes for a certain loan or not-but before reaching that question, again, what is wrong with at least requiring the executive director to have an EA or an EIA, whichever seems more appropriate, before him before he casts that vote based upon environmental considerations and a host of other considerations?

Before I ask that, I would just like to ask you a factual question. Do American executive directors today have an environmental assessment or an environmental impact statement before them?

Mr. BURNHAM. As I say, I have not had direct access to World Bank documents for a couple of years. In terms of a particular project, there are rough assessments that are made at various levels of the staff within the World Bank. One can review these documents from time to time▬▬

Senator BAUCUs. But there is no requirement in the law today? Obviously, there is not, because that is the point of the Symms amendment.

Mr. BURNHAM. I would defer to the Treasury Department to tell us exactly what the current situation is.

Senator BAUCUs. Mr. Robinson, your idea of various donor countries working out environmental standards is a suggestion that would be in addition to a requirement that an environmental assessment or an environmental impact statement be available to executive directors?

Mr. ROBINSON. Yes. I think it could be additional to or if you decide you are going to develop the evolution of this more gradually, it could be a step along the road toward that.

Clearly, there is now experience among most of the donor countries in environmental impact assessment, and since their domestic legislation mandates it and they have largely all voted for it in the context of the guidelines of the U.N. Environment Programme, I think their policies are in accord with ours on that question.

What we need to do is bring the policies into a more applied setting at the level of the multilateral development banks.

Senator BAUCUS. Isn't this just a question of degree, that is, American law obviously does not have the same full force and effect on other countries as it does in America but, yet, we are

coming closer together as a people environmentally, and we have to work out some environmental solutions.

So, isn't this just a question of degree as to how far we move along this track in order to encourage not only American decision making but foreign decision making to address environmental as well as economic concerns?

Mr. BURNHAM. Mr. Chairman, I would just make the point, though, that there are other members of the World Bank who are the borrowing members who are paying the costs of these loans, who are paying the administration, who are subject to the interminable delays in loan processing and such. They are the ones who ultimately are supposed to be the ones who make the value judgments about rates of discount, in my mind.

Mr. SMITH. I have much sympathy for Mr. Burnham's concern over ecological imperialism. ČEI favors this step because good economic policies are highly correlated with good environmental policy. That realization has led, in the United States, to effective working coalitions of traditional environmental groups and free market groups. Those coalitions have challenged various federal projects as bad environmental policy and bad economic policy.

The United States is a rich country. Bad policy is just wasteful here. But when a Third World country squanders its wealth, we not only waste money, we destroy the hopes and dreams of the peoples of these nations. The coalitions that have allowed us to discipline projects here have the potential to work at the international level. We should ask other countries to follow our lead in this area. We should also condition further U.S. payments to the World Bank so no U.S. payments would be made to organizations violating U.S. guidelines. We could pull back the monies we are now giving and reduce the damage to there nations. There is no reason for U.S. taxpayers to be subsidizing the environmental and economic destruction of the Third World.

Senator BAUCUS. Mr. Reilly?

Mr. REILLY. Mr. Chairman, I think we ought to make a distinction in applying the procedures of the National Environmental Policy Act in the way that they have evolved and we have become familiar with them in the United States-that is, with a draft statement and a period of using comment and public hearings very often, the possibility of the Freedom of Information Act, judicial review-many of these features which are not contained in the European Community's directive that will become effective next month.

If we make that distinction, as Senator Symms suggested in his opening statement, I think there is a variety of possibilities for integrating environmental assessment directly within the project reviews of the World Bank where they have to be integrated.

But my second point is that I think we ought to be extremely careful to recognize that neither the theory nor the practice of many of the professionals who will make these decisions, presently at least, comprehends a lot of sensitivity or sympathy for many of the things we are talking about. We really have to approach this as a problem of reform and behavior modification in a way that doesn't end up generating paper merely to comply with requirements.