The White House has instructed federal agencies not to include changes to the climate in their reports on climate change.

The administration has quietly released its revised “Draft Guidance for Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Climate Change Impacts,” its guide for how federal agencies should report on the climate change impact of projects and policies. Despite the climate change focus, however, the guidelines instruct agencies to only note “potential changes in carbon sequestration and storage” in their global warming reports. What agencies should not do, it makes clear, is to actually note the “specific climate impacts” of projects.

Here is an excerpt from the draft guide instructing agencies to ignore the climate in climate change reports:

In light of the difficulties in attributing specific climate impacts to individual projects, [Council on Environmental Quality] recommends agencies use the projected [greenhouse gas] emissions and also, when appropriate, potential changes in carbon sequestration and storage, as the proxy for assessing a proposed action’s potential climate change impacts.

The Daily Caller offers some thoughts on why the White House wants “specific climate impacts” left out of federal reports:

Federal environmental assessments will likely show regulations have a negligible impact on the environment in terms of temperature rises, sea level rises and such — indeed if every industrialized country stopped emitting carbon dioxide tomorrow, temperatures would only be reduced 0.21 degrees Celsius by 2100.