January 8, 2020 — The White House is poised to exclude climate considerations from its controversial rewrite of rules surrounding the nation’s core environmental law.
The Council on Environmental Quality’s proposed changes to National Environmental Policy Act guidelines will likely emerge this week.
NEPA, signed into law by President Nixon, gives communities input and allows them to challenge federal decisions on projects like pipelines, highways and bridges. And it requires federal regulators to analyze a host of impacts.
The Trump plan is expected to “simplify the definition of environmental ‘effects’ and clarify that effects must be reasonably foreseeable and require a reasonably close causal relationship to the proposed action,” according to a draft White House memo obtained by E&E News.
In other words, the government could only study the impacts tied directly to a project — not how a project would add to a larger problem, something environmentalists have been clamoring for.
“No one pipeline causes climate change, so that wouldn’t be considered a reasonably close causal relationship,” explained Christy Goldfuss, a senior vice president at the left-leaning Center for American Progress (CAP). “I suspect that’s the intent.”