Global Climate Change Considerations
In an October 8, 1997, memorandum, the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) issued draft guidelines
on how global climate change should be
treated in NEPA documents. The CEQ guidance calls on federal agencies to consider in
NEPA documents both how major federal actions could affect sources and sinks of greenhouse
gases and how climate change could potentially influence such actions. The CEQ
recommends that such analysis be done for programmatic EISs, rather than site-specific
ones.
The CEQ bases this guidance on the NEPA regulations which mandate that all
“reasonably foreseeable” environmental impacts of the proposed federal action
have to be considered in the NEPA document. The CEQ considers that there is adequate
scientific evidence (for example, in the Second Assessment Report by the International Panel on Climate Change) that
indicates that climate change is a “reasonably foreseeable” impact of greenhouse
gas emissions.
We considered greenhouse gas emissions in the programmatic EISs for the 1992-1997
leasing program and for the 1997-2002 leasing program. For an example, see the
global climate section of the 1997-2002 programmatic EIS.
For more information, contact Dirk Herkhof.
