The Supreme Court announced Monday that it will soon be hearing a case concerning the extent to which federal agencies must consider secondary environmental impacts when deciding whether or not allow a proposed project to move forward.
The case — Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, Colorado — focuses on the proposed 88-mile Uinta Basin Railway, which would transport oil and minerals from northeast Utah.
Although the project initially received a green light from the Surface Transportation Board (STB), the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit went on to reverse this approval last year, ruling that further assessment of the railway’s potential environmental impact was necessary before approval could be granted.
The petitioners are hoping to have the Supreme Court throw out this decision and allow the project to move forward as planned.
The Justices are now tasked with answering the question of: “Whether the National Environmental Policy Act requires an agency to study environmental impacts beyond the proximate effects of the action over which the agency has regulatory authority.”
The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) was signed into law in 1970 and “requires federal agencies to assess the environmental effects of their proposed actions prior to making decisions.”
This case focuses on a disagreement over the interpretation of the Court’s 2004 ruling in Department of Transportation v. Public Citizen wherein the Justices unanimously found that NEPA does not require agencies to study environmental impacts beyond their jurisdiction.
It is the practical application of the Public Citizen ruling that underlies the controversy at the center of this challenge.
“Most circuits see Public Citizen as tying the scope of an agency’s NEPA review to the limits of that agency’s regulatory authority,” the petitioners wrote in their brief. “But the D.C. Circuit takes a conflicting view. It reads Public Citizen as turning ‘not on the question ‘What activities does [the agency] regulate,’’ but on the agency’s power to block a project that ‘would be too harmful to the environment.'”
Broadly speaking, the Court may decide in this upcoming case that federal agencies need not consider the indirect impacts, such as green-house gas emissions, of a proposed project when deciding whether or not to give it the green light.
The Justices may also craft an opinion that actually prevents federal agencies from giving weight to these considerations when determining whether or not a project should move forward.
Although this case is specifically focused on a railway project, the Court’s ruling has the possibility of extending further to cover shipping ports and other initiatives involving the transportation of energy-related goods.
In its ruling, the DC Circuit Court found that the STB was too narrow in its analysis of the project, as it did not take into consideration the potential impact of the railway on future oil production, the risk of rail accidents, and the development of water pollution, among other things.
Eagle County, alongside several environmental groups, argued in their brief to the Supreme Court that the STB has a responsibility to consider the “reasonably foreseeable effects of its approval of a new rail line.”
“By requiring an agency to consider any environmental effect that it has the power to prevent, no matter the limits of its regulatory authority, the D.C. Circuit’s rule turns each agency into a ‘de facto environmental-policy czar,'” the Seven County Infrastructure Coalition wrote in their petition to the Court.
Oral arguments for this case are expected to take place in the fall.
