Call it a blank check for environmental obstructionism.
Guidelines issued this month by the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) give extremists and their friends in government a powerful new way to impede work. They suggest agencies consider the possible effects on climate change of decisions subject to the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). That's the 1969 law requiring formal reviews, including the often-contentious environmental impact statement (EIS), for governmental decisions such as those involving oil and gas leasing of federal land and construction of pipelines and other facilities.
Targets for challenge
Completion of an EIS can take years. The process provides opportunities for public comment and generates targets for legal challenge. Environmental pressure groups skillfully use it to kill or delay projects they oppose. Expansion of NEPA review to encompass climate change adds raw material to their obstructionist enterprise.
Legality of the CEQ initiative is questionable. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, responded to publication of CEQ's final guidelines with a statement repeating his earlier assertion that "global climate change falls outside the scope of NEPA so the guidance has no legal basis." He also noted the CEQ has no chairman approved by the Senate or nominated by the president. So the guidelines, he said, "can have no force or effect as CEQ staff have no authority to take any official action."
Legal questions aside, NEPA regulation of climate change defies logic. NEPA review is supposed to assess specific environmental effects and remediation options of specific activities requiring federal sanction. The CEQ now urges agencies to consider the potential effects on climate change by assessing a proposed activity's emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs), such as carbon dioxide, methane, and water vapor. But this approach has a problem: While GHG emissions of most activities are reasonably predictable, the potential effects on globally averaged temperature, the core metric of climate change, are not.
Large questions remain about the extent to which temperature responds to increases in atmospheric concentrations of GHGs. Temperature observations don't validate the high-sensitivity assumptions that underlie predictions of dangerous warming. Until climatological processes are understood better than they are now, no one accurately can say how a prospective activity's GHGs might affect climate change. The CEQ, with a strategy typical in the politics of climate, handles the uncertainty problem by ignoring it.
Even if rising GHG levels warm the atmosphere as much as dubious computer models assume, no single project can contribute meaningfully to climate phenomena. The climate is a huge, complex system. A specific activity's contribution to change of that system is destined to be small, probably immeasurably so. That should exclude climate change from NEPA review. But it doesn't stop the CEQ.
In the final guidelines, the council acknowledges, "The totality of climate change impacts is not attributed to any single action but are [sic] exacerbated by a series of actions including actions taken pursuant to decisions of the federal government. Therefore, a statement that emissions from a proposed federal action represent only a small fraction of global emissions is essentially a statement about the nature of the climate change challenge and is not an appropriate basis for deciding whether or to what extent to consider climate change impacts under NEPA."
A bludgeon
This tautological nonsense dodges the genuine issue of NEPA applicability and dangerously implies that any possibility for any effect on climate change, signaled by the potential for any emissions of GHGs, warrants assessment. Standing by are platoons of environmental lawyers eager to challenge the sufficiency of any such assessment for projects their clients dislike.
CEQ's guidelines interpret NEPA and don't constitute a regulation. Agencies don't have to follow them. In the administration of President Barack Obama, however, agencies seldom forgo opportunities to exert control and thrill environmentalists. The fusion of climate change and NEPA creates a bludgeon few of them will resist. Later, Americans shouldn't wonder what clobbered their economy.
