  We study collinear and soft singularities in perturbative quantum gravity by
constructing an effective field theory similar to soft-collinear effective
theory for QCD (SCET). We find that the soft sector exhibits factorization
properties similar to those of SCET. The collinear sector is, however, quite
different. While the leading-power collinear effective Lagrangian is trivial,
the presence of the metric field $h_{++}$ with negative scaling dimension
allows for collinear divergences in loop diagrams with couplings to
non-collinear sources. We provide a compact proof of the well-known fact that
there are no collinear singularities in perturbative quantum gravity by
demonstrating the decoupling of $h_{++}$ from the sources. We briefly discuss
the connection of our approach to recent work by Akhoury et al. (Phys. Rev. D84
(2011) 104040) as well as to the Weinberg's original paper (Phys. Rev. 140
(1965) B516), where the cancellation of the collinear singularities was
demonstrated for the first time in the eikonal approximation.
