Former Obama administration Interior Secretary Ken Salazar is warning that the White House’s proposed guide for assessing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) leaves open a host of questions that will prompt agencies to adopt divergent approaches, create inter-agency disputes and drive new litigation over how and when agencies assess projects’ impacts.
Salazar together with attorneys Mark Kalpin and H. David Gold — all lawyers at Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP — write in a recent legal analysis first published by Law360 that while the Council on Environmental Quality’s (CEQ) draft guidance will eventually prompt agencies to conduct quantitative analyses of projects’ GHG impacts, it still leaves open the question of how to conduct such analyses and whether projects’ impacts are “significant” and require mitigation.
Originally published in Inside Washington Publisher's Inside EPA/Climate - April 7, 2015.
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