Council on Environmental Quality

Deciphering NEPA 2.0

Here’s everything you wanted to know about the “New NEPA” but were afraid to ask.

NEPA was long an island of legal stability, standing almost unamended for over a half century.  Then in the summer of 2023, everything changed.  As a rider on the agreement to raise the debt ceiling, Congress extensively rewrote and expanded NEPA, gifting us with a new statutory regime.  As I’ve written before — and discuss …

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Enforcing NEPA’s Forgotten Mandate

The courts have failed to enforce a core requirement of NEPA. That leaves the White House.

The Democrats have adopted an ambitious platform for environmental protection, full of innovative legislative initiatives.  Here’s another idea Biden and Harris should consider, making use of the oldest of the modern environmental statutes. The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) is best known for requiring environmental impact statements. While they have enforced that requirement, the courts …

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Finally, a national ocean policy

Cross-posted at CPRBlog. Last year, I noted that the interim report of the Interagency Ocean Task Force appointed by President Obama marked a promising step toward a national ocean policy. Now the Task Force has issued its final recommendations, which the President promptly began implementing. A national ocean policy has been a long time coming. …

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A great case for worst case analysis

Cross-posted at CPRBlog. The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) is the nation’s look-before-you-leap environmental law, intended to make sure that we understand what environmental problems we might result before we act. To that end, federal agencies must prepare an environmental impact statement (EIS) before they take, authorize, or provide funding for actions that may have …

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Ditching cap and trade (the phrase, not the proposal)

Looks like the White House is taking note of the same polling data Dan blogs about here on the public’s antipathy toward, or misunderstanding of, the phrase “cap and trade”.  This from the LA Times, in a story generally chronicling the administration’s efforts to figure out the best language and framing for its climate policies: …

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