What Happened
The Biden Administration has recently issued several wide-ranging initiatives related to climate and environmental justice that have both short- and long-term implications for Federal decisions and associated NEPA analysis. Understanding potential implications of these orders is key to effectively planning your on-going and future projects.
Read more in the full Regulatory Alert.
SWCA Lens
SWCA can answer questions and help you understand what these initiatives mean for your activities. Contact your SWCA project manager.
In our opinion, these actions do not constitute a cessation of new oil and gas development. Instead, they represent a strong push to reinstate initiatives addressing climate change and the impacts of GHG emissions on climate change. Broad ramifications of these actions include:
- Federal agencies will be analyzing GHG emissions and climate change as part of their NEPA analyses. This analysis will include the social cost of carbon.
- The suspension on new leasing will likely be lifted after completion of broad programmatic NEPA analysis, which will include leasing’s cumulative impacts on greenhouse gas, climate, and environmental justice communities. The scale of new leasing may be adjusted based on that analysis.
- Changes in cumulative impacts analysis mandated under the new NEPA regulations will not preclude NEPA analysis of cumulative climate…
