"The reversal may not be enough to satisfy the courts, which have repeatedly faulted agencies for not calculating their actions’ carbon footprint."
"The White House proposed Friday that federal agencies no longer have to take a project’s long-term climate impacts into account when assessing how they will affect the environment, reversing a major Obama administration policy.
The draft guidance, issued by the White House Council on Environmental Quality, would change the way the U.S. government evaluates activities ranging from coal mining to gas pipelines and oil drilling by limiting the extent to which agencies can calculate their greenhouse gas emissions. In April 2016, CEQ finalized a directive that agencies quantify to what extent they will contribute to climate change, a move that threw approval of those projects into doubt.
Now, according to the new directive, agencies conducting reviews under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) only have to calculate an action’s greenhouse gas emissions when “a sufficiently close causal relationship exists” between a project and greater carbon emissions. It also tells agencies they can opt not to assess a project’s climate impact if they decide it “would be overly speculative,” and they can put any projected emissions in the context of the local, regional or national carbon output."
Juliet Eilperin reports for the Washington Post June 21, 2019.
SEE ALSO:
"Trump Cuts Weight of Climate Change in Environmental Reviews" (Bloomberg Environment)
