CEQ’s Draft Guidance on NEPA Climate Analyses: Potential Impacts on Climate Litigation

In December 2014, the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) issued for public comment a draft guidance document1 on how federal agencies should evaluate climate change in their analyses under the National Environmental Policy Act .2 The draft guidance does not directly regulate greenhouse gases (GHGs) or climate change, but rather provides agencies with “direction on when and how to consider the effects of greenhouse gas emissions and climate change in their evaluation of all proposed Federal actions . . . .”3 This is the second time CEQ has issued draft guidance on the subject . Its 2010 draft guidance on the analysis of GHGs in NEPA documents, though nonbinding, was widely expected to draw attention from federal agencies and ultimately from the courts .4 However, this expectation did not come to fruition . While federal agencies did begin to incorporate climate change in NEPA analyses more frequently, there was little consistency in how they did so,5 and in the courts, the 2010 draft guidance has had very little influence .6