Opinion ID: 3005368
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Cumulative Actions. The cumulative actions

Text: regulation is no more helpful to Sierra Club. “Cumulative actions” are those that must be assessed together because they have “cumulatively significant impacts.” 40 C.F.R. § 1508.25(a)(2). A cumulative impact is that “which results from the incremental impact of the action when added to other past, present, and reasonably foreseeable future actions regardless of what agency (Federal or non-Federal) or person undertakes such other actions.” Id. § 1508.7. The cumulative actions doctrine is not concerned with geographic segmentation; if it were, it would be wholly redundant of the connected actions doctrine. See Coal. on Sensible Transp., Inc. v. Dole, 826 F.2d 60, 70-71 (D.C. Cir. 1987). Instead, it prevents agencies from ignoring the environmental effects of other actions, without regard to whether their author was federal, because those effects set the baseline state of affairs and thus the context in which the significance of proposed federal action must be evaluated. An agency deciding whether to approve construction of a replacement airport, for example, must consider the prospective impact of the airport’s added noise in the context of noise from other sources— including private sources not traceable to agency action. See Grand Canyon Trust, 290 F.3d at 346. Sierra Club’s argument is not, however, that the agencies’ NEPA analyses ignored the environmental impacts of cumulative actions on discrete swaths of the pipeline, but that they failed to analyze the entire length of the pipeline. The cumulative actions doctrine therefore does not advance Sierra Club’s case.