WASHINGTON – AXPC CEO, Anne Bradbury, released the following statement on the White House Council on Environmental Quality’s (CEQ) National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) interim guidance to assist agencies in analyzing greenhouse gas (GHG) and climate change effects of their proposed actions under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA):
“Through this guidance, the White House is blatantly picking energy winners and losers. The Administration’s interim NEPA guidance is a policy attack on American-made oil and natural gas and threatens the permitting of emissions reductions technologies that are critical to a lower-emissions future, like CCUS and hydrogen. The guidance creates even greater delay, uncertainty, and legal vulnerability in the federal permitting process – which could make energy more expensive and less reliable for the American people.”
Background – [CEQ–2022–0005] NEPA Guidance on Consideration of GHG Emissions and Climate Change:
In the update, CEQ is instructing federal agencies to immediately (as of January 9th, 2023) rely on this Interim Guidance in all reviews where an agency has yet to issue a final Environmental Assessment (EA) or Environmental Impact Statement (EIS). The guidance calls for “mitigation” over better science-based information and elevates the use of flawed, biased cost-benefit metrics and methodology. Contrary to the NEPA statute, the guidance deliberately tips the scales in favor of renewables by adding new regulatory burdens for oil and natural gas, while exempting value chain analysis for renewables.
Notably, ClearView Energy Partners interprets the guidance as: “(1) establishing a de facto zero minimum GHG emissions significance level; (2) recommending consistency with federal, state and regional GHG reduction strategies; (3) strongly urging the consideration of green alternatives when conducting an EA or EIS; (4) tacitly condoning a “methane magnifying glass” that spotlights 20Y warming impacts at an 84x GWP multiple; (5) segmenting differential impacts on environmental justice populations, as suggested in President Biden’s January 20, 2021 Memorandum on modernizing regulatory review; (6) providing for the citation of monetized SC-GHG costs or benefits without requiring a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis; and (7) encouraging agencies to look upstream and downstream and programmatically across geographies while also incorporating future and historical impacts borne by a broadly defined set of populations. We also interpret the Interim Guidance as directly addressing some components of the debate over the evaluation of GHGs in Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s (FERC) NEPA reviews, but by no means all of them.”
About the American Exploration and Production Council:
AXPC is a national trade association representing the leading independent oil and natural gas exploration and production companies in the United States. We lead the world in the cleanest and safest onshore production of oil and gas, while supporting millions of Americans in high-paying jobs and investing a wealth of resources in our communities. Learn more at https://axpc.org/
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