From now on, every government agency will have to consider climate change

[babylonsister]

From now on, every government agency will have to consider climate change
By Chris Mooney August 2 at 1:30 PM


In the past several weeks alone, the Obama administration has made multiple new moves to fight climate change. The administration announced new steps to help fill U.S. roadways with electric vehicles. It ruled that greenhouse gas emissions from aircraft endanger human health and welfare. And on the international stage, it moved the world closer to a deal to phase out super-polluting HFCs, chemicals in refrigerants and other industrial substances that warm the climate.

But as Obama’s term dwindles, the act isn’t over — on Tuesday the White House released yet another policy to fight climate change, one with potentially far-reaching consequences. The White House’s chief environmental office, the Council on Environmental Quality, finalized a six-year process of shaping how the government’s agencies, across the board, will factor climate change into their decisions.

The council’s new guidance involves what activists and environmental lawyers know as “NEPA” — one of those exceedingly wonky policies that is nevertheless critical to how the modern federal government functions. NEPA is short for a foundational 1969 environmental law, the National Environmental Policy Act, that required federal agencies to consider environmental consequences of their actions — all kinds of actions, ranging from granting a permit to drill on public lands to building a new road or bridge.

NEPA hails from the Nixon era, when Republicans were environmentalists, too, and when both parties actually agreed about environmental policy (or, at least, a lot more than they agree now). For the most significant federal actions, it requires agencies to prepare an “Environmental Impact Statement,” essentially a report, detailing the consequences of the move and how those consequences might be averted. The federal government wrote 563 of these reports in 2015, according to the White House.

NEPA is pretty sweeping – under it, “all federal agencies are to prepare detailed statements assessing the environmental impact of and alternatives to major federal actions significantly affecting the environment,” according to the EPA.

And now, the new guidance from the Council on Environmental Quality will ask agencies to not only include climate change in these considerations but actually quantify the climate impacts of their decisions, when possible, in the context of the environmental reviews that are already required by NEPA. It will also ask them to consider how to do things differently, in a way that could help prepare the U.S. better for a warming climate.

more...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/08/02/from-now-on-every-government-agency-will-have-to-consider-climate-change/?utm_term=.6cdf9f6915f3#comments

[The Green Manalishi]

1. It's being presented as "Making it harder to build roads and bridges"

[babylonsister]

2. That's a laugh considering

building or fixing the infrastructure has been voted down by rethugs time and again.