Q: Sierra environment variables

I'm looking for the canonical way to set environment variables for gui applications. Of course it works fine in the terminal, but it seems an easy way to change the env for all apps was removed for security reasons or something. It would be nice if there were some way to do this globally (a la setting variables for the login shell in Linux) but at this point I'll settle for a way to do this on a per app basis. Specifically I want Emacs to have a proper PATH so it can call binaries I have installed, like Elixir's IEx, but this is a generic issue with environment variables and gui apps.