The National Environmental Policy Act is two years old this month. In its short lifetime, NEPA has passed rapidly through several phases of administrative and judicial interpretation.¹ In retrospect, none of the court cases involving NEPA appears more important than Calvert Cliffs' Coordinating Committee v. AEC, 1 ELR 20346 (D.C. Cir. 1971). An earlier ELR comment probed several aspects of this decision in detail (see 1 ELR 10125), but did not discuss the court's finding that federal agencies must employ a "finely tuned and 'systematic' balancing analysis" in resolving conflict between environmental economic. social, aesthetic, and other values. This Comment will examine the nature of the balancing analysis that the opinion in Calvert Cliffs' requires.

A comment is warranted at the present time because at least two federal agencies—the Atomic Energy Commission and the Council on Environmental Quality—are interpreting the Calvert Cliffs' decision to allow agencies to include both environmental costs and expected benefits in environmental impact statements. The argument for including both project benefits and project costs in impact statements apparently is that in order to perform a "balancing analysis," the pros and cons of a proposed action must be set out in one document. The impact statement, the argument goes, is the logical choice.