Group Calls Upon Obama To Enact Executive Power On Environmental Issues Despite Deadlocked Congress

The Center for American Progress has issued a call to President Barack Obama to require any government agency to provide the public with a comprehensive report on the effect of proposed projects on the environment, specifically in relation to climate change.

Such policy change, the organization said, is immediately available to the president through the powers provided to the executive branch and available in the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which requires government agencies to report on the environmental consequences of proposed actions.

Among the proposed measures, the Center recommends a standardized assessment of calculated carbon pollution to be included in such a report, citing increased scientific understanding “regarding the impact of greenhouse gases on accelerated climate change” since the act was signed into law in 1970.

“Including greenhouse-gas emissions in federal environmental analyses is critical for multiple reasons,” the Center states in the press release. “First, NEPA requires a ‘hard look’ at the impacts of agency actions on issues from water and air quality to local species and their habitats. Ignoring the potential for contributing to climate change in this review process is a tremendous shortcoming that ignores the fundamental basis for this law, which is to understand the long-term environmental implications of the federal government’s decisions.”

A move to include greenhouse-gas emissions is not an unprecedented one: in 2011 the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management issued a report on the Hay Creek II coal lease in the Powder River Basin north of Gillette, Wyo., which included roughly 277 million tons of coal. In the assessment it included a discussion of the impacts the sale would have on carbon emissions and the role that the leasing of federal coal from the area would have on the nation’s overall greenhouse-gas emissions.

Furthermore, while some may dispute that the quantification of climate impacts is “difficult and speculative,” the group argues the same is also true for the federal analysis of economic impacts of major projects.

As an example, the group points to the environment-impact statement for Lease Sale 193 in the Chuckchi Sea off Alaska, where the economic benefit of developing the reserves was based on an estimate of how much oil would be produced as a result of the sale - an amount officials had no way of knowing for sure.

However, the group notes, while the group estimated the climate impacts of the drilling activities, it failed to address the consequences of burning the oil harvested, “even though,” the group states, “the science was available to make those estimates.”

Finally, in its report the group called upon the president to end the exclusion of federal land and resource-management actions from the Council on Environmental Quality’s draft NEPA guidance, calling it a major “loophole” that must be closed.

Ultimately, the group stated, “Climate change poses some of the most pressing health, economic, and security threats of our time. The longer we delay significant reductions in our carbon pollution, the more we ensure that the devastating impacts of climate change - including sea-level rise, raging wildfires, and consistent drought - will continue.”