The Trump administration on Thursday unveiled plans to gut one of America’s most important environmental laws — a move experts say is as much of a handout to polluting industries as it is a slap in the face to science and local communities.

This article was originally published by HuffPost and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The proposed rules would change how the federal government implements the National Environmental Policy Act, a 50-year-old law that protects air, water and land by requiring federal agencies to conduct detailed environmental assessments of major infrastructure projects. Agencies would no longer be required to consider climate change when evaluating the environmental effects of pipelines, power plants, oil and gas drilling, airports, highways and other development.

President Donald Trump announced the reforms in a speech at the White House Thursday morning, saying the federal permitting process is “big government at its absolute worst.”

“The United States will not be able to compete and prosper in the 21st century if we continue to allow a broken and outdated bureaucratic system hold us back from building what we need,” he said.

The rules from the White House Council on Environmental Quality, which oversees NEPA, have been a long time coming. They seek to codify what has become common practice since 2017, when the White House rescinded Obama-era guidelines that tasked agencies with considering greenhouse gas emissions and climate change in NEPA reviews. The move is the latest in a relentless deregulatory effort by the Trump administration that has largely benefited the fossil fuel industry.

The controversial overhaul is aimed at speeding up energy projects and other development by limiting the number of projects that require in-depth environmental review and expediting the process for those that do. It would establish strict two-year limits for completing reviews on major projects and a one-year deadline for smaller projects. Trump on Thursday highlighted a number of projects that took a decade or longer to get federal approval.

Most alarming to environmentalists is that the proposal would allow agencies to not only ignore a project’s vulnerability to climate change, but also its “cumulative” effects on global warming, which is already wreaking havoc around the world.

Christy Goldfuss, a former chair of the environmental council under President Barack Obama and current senior vice president for energy and environment policy at the left-leaning Center for American Progress, called the proposal “the ultimate silencing of science and facts in our policymaking around infrastructure.” She said it puts a huge amount of power in the hands of industry. “The oil and gas industry wins. The American people lose.”

“The oil and gas industry wins. The American people lose,” Goldfuss said. “The purpose of rewriting these regulations is to build new pipelines and more fossil fuel infrastructure. You would not have to look at the cumulative impacts of a wind turbine or a solar panel because there is no long-term pollution. This is about building towards the past and sticking our head in the sand about the impacts of dirty fossil fuels.”