The Obama administration has begun a quiet push to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions created by transportation projects, a new front in the president’s global fight to limit climate change.

Administration officials told POLITICO they are about to propose rules that could force recipients of federal transportation dollars to track transportation-related emissions and set goals for cutting them. There are no plans for federal targets or penalties, but the hope is that making state and regional infrastructure planners take climate impacts into consideration will encourage smarter growth, mass transit, electric vehicles and other emissions reduction strategies, while discouraging sprawl-inducing exurban roads to nowhere.

U.S. vehicle emissions have doubled since the 1970s, and now make up more than one-fourth of all U.S. emissions. In February, President Obama unveiled a $320 billion plan for a “21st century clean transportation system” funded by a $10-per-barrel tax on oil, but it was dead on arrival in the Republican Congress. Environmental groups and some blue-state transportation officials have pushed performance measures for greenhouse gases as a way for Obama to take unilateral action, and after months of internal debate, the administration is moving ahead with them, hoping to nudge U.S. infrastructure planning in a greener direction.

“You can’t manage what you don’t measure,” a senior Department of Transportation official told POLITICO. “This is groundbreaking stuff.”

The new Federal Highway Administration rulemaking aims to require recipients of federal transportation dollars—mostly states, cities and metropolitan planning organizations—to monitor, report and set targets to improve their performance on a variety of categories laid out in the 2012 transportation bill, including travel reliability, peak-hour congestion, freight movements, and on-road emissions of pollutants like ozone and soot. The original bill did not specifically address greenhouse gases, but the Department of Transportation—after some tense meetings with White House environmental and budget officials—will also seek comment on whether and how to establish performance measures for climate-related pollution. The administration hopes to finalize the rule before the end of the year, forcing state and local officials to account for the emissions generated by their asphalt for the first time.

The rules would not prescribe or prohibit specific projects, but it’s no secret that in the transportation world, concern about climate usually translates into concern about new and wider roads. Nick Goldstein, vice president for regulatory affairs with the American Road and Transportation Builders Association, warned that a mandate for agencies to set climate targets could be used as a pretext to discourage highway construction at a time when America desperately needs better infrastructure. He suggested the Obama administration has embraced an anti-asphalt mentality that assumes new roads produce demand for more cars and exurban development, when Goldstein believes they merely accommodate existing demand.

“Everybody says they want more infrastructure projects, but they’re constantly throwing more regulatory hurdles in the way,” Goldstein said.

Supporters of the climate push point out that states like California and Massachusetts are already monitoring their greenhouse gas emissions from transportation, as are the Chicago and Minneapolis metropolitan areas. Obama has vowed to attack global warming from every possible angle, and while he has ratcheted up fuel efficiency standards for cars and trucks, and helped launch the U.S. electric vehicle industry with his 2009 stimulus package, this would be his first major effort to inject climate into infrastructure and land-use decisions. The fuel standards are already reducing the amount of carbon emitted per mile driven, but more climate-conscious planning could help reduce the miles driven, through policies ranging from congestion fees to telecommuting incentives, or simply by making it harder to justify roads to nowhere.

Several advocates compared the new rules to the EPA’s Toxic Release Inventory, which requires corporations to provide a public accounting of their releases of toxic chemicals, but does not require any particular actions to fix them. Similarly, these rules would not tell states how to build their infrastructure, or even punish states that fail to meet their emissions goals. Administration officials call them a down payment on their politically doomed plan to use oil taxes to reshape the transportation sector and reduce its carbon intensity.

“This is the logical next step,” said Deron Lovaas, a senior policy adviser for the Natural Resources Defense Council. “The federal government wouldn’t be making the decisions. It would just be requiring some transparency.”

Sources said an initial Department of Transportation draft of the rule did not even include greenhouse gases, which triggered a few months of interagency battles, and even this version merely invites comments on a greenhouse gas rule as a planning and reporting tool. A top federal transportation official told me several weeks ago that he was worried about the complexity of the problem, and unsure how the regulatory details would work.

Still, Obama has made climate action a key theme of his second term, from his Clean Power Plan to reduce emissions in the electricity sector to the global accord to reduce emissions in Paris, and his administration seems committed to extending it to transportation planning.

“They can’t pass any legislation, so there’s a real uptick in regulation,” said Goldstein, from the transportation builders group. “Where does it stop?”

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