On December 18, 2014, the Council on Environmental Quality
("CEQ") released a new draft guidance on when and how federal
agencies should consider the effects of GHG emissions and
climate change in their reviews under the National
Environmental Policy Act ("NEPA"). This likely will
expand the scope and complexity of a project's NEPA
analyses.
NEPA requires that federal departments and agencies consider and
disclose potential environmental effects caused by major federal
actions. The proposed guidance now requires that this disclosure
include analysis of both the potential effects of a proposed action
on climate change—with projected GHG emissions used as a
proxy for climate change impacts—and the implications of
climate change on the environmental effects over the proposed
action's lifespan.
For the GHG emissions analysis, the CEQ notes that many previous
NEPA analyses conclude merely that the GHG emissions from the
individual action are inconsequential to global climate change
effects. The CEQ now explicitly states that this is not an
appropriate basis to consider the climate impacts and cautions
against relying on such "boilerplate texts to avoid meaningful
analysis" of GHG and climate change effects. Instead, the
depth of the agency's emissions analysis should be proportional
to the projected level of GHG emissions and climate impacts. The
proposed guidance recommends that projects with estimated GHG
emissions over 25,000 annual metric tons likely warrant a
quantitative assessment of emissions and sequestration.
To analyze the effect of future climate change on the project,
agencies should compare the current and future state of the
environment without the proposed action to the anticipated state of
the environment over the lifespan of the proposed action. This
analysis should focus on the aspects of the affected environment
that will be affected by both climate change and the proposed
action. Consequently, the CEQ recommends that the agency consider
alternatives that are more resilient or adaptive to the effects of
a changing climate. A cost–benefit analysis may be relevant
to choosing among such alternatives.
Other notable changes in the draft guidance are its application to
federal land and resource management actions—previously
understood to be excluded under NEPA—and the requirement that
the NEPA analysis consider activities that have a reasonably close
causal relationship to the federal action, encompassing both
upstream and
downstream emissions.
The public comment period for the draft guidance closes on February
23, 2015.
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