Under a new policy, federal agencies will have to weigh the climate costs of their actions

On April 19, the Biden administration restored a critical climate provision to a bedrock federal environmental law, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) which had been narrowed under former President Donald Trump. The standard will require new infrastructure projects to more broadly consider how they alter the environment, especially when they are planned near already polluted communities.

That recently revived rule is one of several recent White House policies to address climate change by pressing federal and corporate decisionmakers to fully reckon with the costs of an overheated planet.

The price of climate change is hard to fathom—financial consulting firm Deloitte predicts that the US stands to lose $14.5 trillion over 50 years if the planet warms by 3°C degrees Celsius—but policymakers have been slow to simply incorporate any of those risks into cost-benefit analyses. The policies all face legal opposition from a range of fossil fuel companies, states, and construction industries.