NEPA is Not the Right Vehicle to Address Climate Change

Robert Thornton co-authored the guest op-ed “NEPA is Not the Right Vehicle to Address Climate Change” for Eno Transportation Weekly. The article examines how “Congress is poised to pass the largest infrastructure spending bill in decades, presenting the opportunity to transform America’s aging transportation system, [and] addressing [the nation’s] daunting mobility problems while meeting climate change challenges.”

Robert suggest, “To make timely use of this opportunity, we need a new approach to evaluate and mitigate climate change impacts of transportation projects. Without a new approach, the transportation and environmental communities will spend the next decade in unproductive administrative and judicial disputes over the adequacy of NEPA compliance for transportation projects. Our collective energy should be devoted to developing a programmatic approach to evaluate the climate change impacts of transportation projects modeled on the Clean Air Act transportation conformity system, replacing the current inefficient and ineffective project-by-project analysis of climate change impacts in NEPA documents.”