Christy Goldfuss, managing director of the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), provided scant comfort last month when she assured lawmakers new guidance on greenhouse gas emissions isn't mandatory. To zealous regulators of the Obama administration and their allies in environmental pressure groups, the attachment of climate change to the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) confers license to kill.
The CEQ in August sent federal agencies final guidelines on assessing the effects of their decisions on climate change in reviews required by NEPA. Opponents of fossil energy projects often challenge federal permitting and other decisions on the basis of NEPA compliance. And they often succeed. Climate change loads a powerful bullet into a NEPA gun eternally aimed at projects such as pipeline construction and oil and gas leasing of federal land.
Minuscule effects
Yet linking climate change to NEPA is futile-unless the reason for doing so is to foreclose unwanted activity. NEPA relates to specific federal decisions about well-defined undertakings. It's supposed to address environmental effects of those activities, asking how a specific decision might affect the environment. When the question encompasses global average temperature, the core metric of climate change, the only reasonable answer in relation to any specific project can be that effects will be minuscule. Yes, a federal decision might beget work that emits carbon dioxide, methane, or other GHGs. But that's the extent of measurable climatological effects.
According to current prejudice-supposedly ratified by "science" improperly characterized as "settled"-a decision leading to an increase in the concentration of GHGs in the atmosphere must intensify observed warning. Formulas exist by which to estimate the temperature increase and associated cost. But they're theoretical, wholly dependent on speculative assumptions about poorly understood climate processes. And the theory isn't bearing up well to temperature observations. Even if incremental GHGs warmed the atmosphere as much as they are assumed to do, moreover, those related to any given federal decision would be so minor in relation to the whole system that specific temperature effects would be inconsequential.
In the hysteria driving climate politics, however, ANY human contribution to GHGs in the atmosphere represents peril necessitating regulatory control-or, increasingly, outright prevention. In their opposition to federal leasing in the Arctic, for example, activists now stress the prospective effect on climate, deemphasizing traditional concerns about oil spills and aquatic life. Spills and damage to marine organisms probably won't happen; GHG emissions from combustion of whatever oil and gas might be found certainly will occur, however negligible the warming effect. Pipelines essential to extracting maximum economic value from newly abundant oil and gas regularly smash against this thickening political wall.
Mandatory or not, CEQ's merger of NEPA and climate anxiety will be, in the hands of incumbent regulators, deadly for oil and gas work. With proportionality vanishing from climate regulation, the rapidly developing and altogether dangerous tendency is to reject any activity that emits GHGs or that leads to activities that will. This needs more attention than it receives in discussions about why the US can't sustain economic growth above 2%/year.
Declining emissions
Declining US emissions of GHGs make sacrificial regulation all the more questionable. The Environmental Protection Agency reports emissions from large industrial sources in 2015 were down 4.9% from 2014 and down 8.2% from 2011. The biggest improvement came from the biggest emission source: electric power plants. It reflected increases in power from renewable sources and substitution of coal by natural gas. Emissions from upstream oil and gas activity were down slightly from 2014 but above 2011 levels and from refineries, up slightly from 2014 but below 2011.
EPA's report shows the US can moderate emissions without letting precaution become paralysis. Yet federal regulators act with growing urgency about preventing GHG emissions wherever possible and with decreasing concern about consequences for projects and jobs. The CEQ move opens a new phase in a regrettable expansion of government already too large.
