The Nickel Report

Two recent actions by the Biden Administration will identify areas of focus for environmental justice (EJ) and therefore influence environmental enforcement priorities, federal permitting and licensing, and federal spending, among other actions. On February 18, the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) released the beta (or draft) version of its Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool (CEJST), a key component of President Biden’s Justice40 Initiative and mandated by the same Executive Order 14008. As we described last year, the Justice40 Initiative set the goal of “delivering 40 percent of the overall benefits of relevant federal investments” to disadvantaged communities. The CEJST serves a specific purpose: to help agencies identify disadvantaged communities in order to direct federal benefits and help agencies measure whether 40 percent of benefits are being received by those communities.

Risk management is one of the few key policy issues to facilitate carbon capture and storage (CCS) in Class VI storage facilities that has not been the beneficiary of substantial policy revision in the past few years. Stakeholders are interested in the development of policy to effectively manage the safety, performance, and liability risks associated with containment of captured and stored CO₂.