The United States Supreme Court unanimously ruled in favor of an oil railroad expansion in Utah Thursday in a decision impacting the practical application of a central piece of environmental legislation.
In light of the Court’s ruling, federal agencies will not be required to consider secondary environmental impacts when deciding whether or not allow a proposed project to move forward.
This case — Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, Colorado — focuses on the proposed 88-mile Uinta Basin Railway, which was proposed to 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 appealed to the Supreme Court in hopes that the Justices would throw out this decision and allow the project to move forward as planned.
Upon accepting this case, the Justices were tasked with answering the question: “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.
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Thursday’s 8-0 ruling was authored Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Justice Neil Gorsuch, a Colorado native, recused himself from consideration of this case. A concurring opinion was authored by Justice Sonia Sotomayor and joined by Justice Elena Kagan and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
According to the Justices’ interpretation of NEPA, the STB is only required to consider the direct effects of any given project, not the broader upstream or downstream impacts it could have.
“Importantly, NEPA does not require the agency to weigh environmental consequences in any particular way,” the ruling said. “Rather, an agency may weigh environmental consequences as the agency reasonably sees fit under its governing statute and any relevant substantive environmental laws.”
“Simply stated, NEPA is a procedural cross-check, not a substantive roadblock. The goal of the law is to inform agency decisionmaking, not to paralyze it,” the Court explained.
“Fewer projects make it to the finish line. Indeed, fewer projects make it to the starting line. Those that survive often end up costing much more than is anticipated or necessary,” the opinion said. “And that in turn means fewer and more expensive railroads, airports, wind turbines, transmission lines, dams, housing developments, highways, bridges, subways, stadiums, arenas, data centers, and the like. And that also means fewer jobs, as new projects become difficult to finance and build in a timely fashion.”
“Under NEPA, the Board’s EIS did not need to address the environmental effects of upstream oil drilling or downstream oil refining,” said the Court. “Rather, it needed to address only the effects of the 88-mile railroad line. And the Board’s EIS did so.”
“Citizens may not enlist the federal courts, ‘under the guise of judicial review’ of agency compliance with NEPA, to delay or block agency projects based on the environmental effects of other projects separate from the project at hand,” the Justices concluded.
The concurring opinion suggests that the majority “unnecessarily ground[ed] its
analysis largely in matters of policy,” and explains that although these Justices reached the same conclusion in this case, their approach was a more narrow one.
“I reach that conclusion because, under its organic statute, the Board had no authority to reject petitioners’ application on account of the harms third parties would cause with products transported on the proposed railway,” the concurring opinion stated.
Under NEPA, agencies must consider the environmental impacts for which their decisions would be responsible,” they concluded. “Here, the Board correctly determined it would not be responsible for the consequences of oil production upstream or downstream from the Railway because it could not lawfully consider those consequences as part of the approval process.”
Click Here to Read the Supreme Court’s Full Opinion
While environmental groups have raised concerns about the potential negative consequences of the Supreme Court’s decision Thursday, others have praised the Justices for opening the door for the Utah project to move forward.
“It represents a turning point for rural Utah — bringing safer, sustainable, more efficient transportation options, and opening new doors for investment and economic stability,” said Keith Heaton, Director of the Seven County Infrastructure Coalition, an alliance of local counties supporting the project.
Wendy Park, a lawyer with the Center for Biological Diversity, issued a decidedly less optimistic statement in response to the ruling.
“This disastrous decision to undermine our nation’s bedrock environmental law means our air and water will be more polluted, the climate and extinction crises will intensify and people will be less healthy,” said Park.
These, however, are not the first limitations that have been placed on the scope of NEPA in recent years. In 2023, then President Joe Biden (D) set page limits on environmental assessments and clarified that agencies only needed to consider “reasonably foreseeable” climate impacts when making determinations.
