White House tells agencies they no longer have to weigh a project's long-term climate impacts

The White House proposed Friday that federal agencies no longer have to take a project’s long-term climate impacts into account when assessing how they will affect the environment, reversing a major Obama administration policy.

The draft guidance, issued by the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), would change the way the U.S. government evaluates activities ranging from coal mining to gas pipelines and oil drilling by limiting the extent to which agencies can calculate their greenhouse gas emissions. In April 2016, CEQ finalized a directive that agencies quantify to what extent they will contribute to climate change, a move that threw approval of those projects into doubt.

http://www.startribune.com/white-house-tells-agencies-they-no-longer-have-to-weigh-a-project-s-long-term-climate-impacts/511648772/