CEQ's Draft Guidance on NEPA Climate Analyses: Potential Impacts on Climate Litigation

摘要

While it is important to keep the 2014 draft guidance in perspective-it is, after all, only a draft version of a non-binding guidance document-it could nevertheless prove to be a useful tool both for agencies seeking guidance on how to conduct a climate analysis under NEPA, and environmentalists who want to improve agency consideration of climate. By cloaking the draft guidance in administrative formalities, CEQ may have created a guidance document that, like some it has issued in the past, is used by the courts as a tool to measure an agency's compliance with NEPA.92 Hopefully, the guidance will ultimately incentiv-ize agencies to take the threat of climate change seriously, both in the climate analyses they conduct and the decisions they make.