By Justin Jouvenal —
Supreme Court narrows scope of environmental reviews
The Supreme Court on Thursday unanimously narrowed the scope of government-required environmental reviews for major infrastructure projects, overturning a lower-court block on a rail line in Utah that would carry billions of gallons of oil.
The case became a proxy battle over how far federal agencies may go in assessing the environmental impact of highways, pipelines and other projects before deciding whether to approve them.
Business interests cheered the ruling as a necessary check on a process that had become too burdensome, costly and slow, while environmentalists said it would allow agencies to ignore major environmental impacts, including the acceleration ofclimate change.
An array of challengers spent years battling over the 88-mile stretch of track that would connect the remote Uinta Basin in northeastern Utah to national rail lines, allowing the extraction of more waxy crude oil from one of the nation’s largest oil fields.
The high court’s ruling returns the case to the lower court for further review under more limited parameters. It remains unclear whether the rail line will ultimately be built.
The decision adds to a string of high court rulings that have sharply curtailed environmental regulation. In March, the justices struck down rules regulating the discharge of water pollution. Last term, in a landmark ruling, the high court overturned a 40-year-old precedent that formed the basis of thousands of environmental regulations, allowing some long-settled rules to be challenged in court. The conservative supermajority also has trimmed the power of the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate air pollution, runoff in wetlands and greenhouse gases.
The Utah rail project – which could result in a large increase in greenhouse gas emissions – was approved by the Surface Transportation Board in 2021, with the federal panel saying the benefits of the line would outweigh the negative impacts.
Five environmental groups and the county that is home to Vail, Colorado, challenged that decision before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. The appeals court ruled that the transportation board failed to fully examine the effects of increased drilling in the Uinta Basin and the pollution caused by refining the crude oil on the Gulf Coast, as required by National Environmental Policy Act.
NEPA, signed into law by President Richard M. Nixon in 1970, is a cornerstone of environmental law, along with statutes like the Clean Water Act and Endangered Species Act. Specifically, it requires agencies to consider the environmental implications of their actions.
The Supreme Court’s 8-0 opinion, with Justice Neil M. Gorsuch recusing himself, wasauthored by Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh andsaid the lower court ruling amounted to micromanaging agency decisions.
Reading excerpts from the bench, Kavanaugh said “overly intrusive judicial review” leads to “delay upon delay” and higher costs, noting that the review for the rail line spanned 3,600 pages yet an appeals court still found it deficient.
NEPA, he said, is intended to “simply inform decision-making, not to paralyze it.”
“In sum, when assessing significant environmental effects and feasible alternatives for purposes of NEPA, an agency will invariably make a series of fact-dependent, context-specific, and policy-laden choices about the depth and breadth of its inquiry,” Kavanaugh wrote. “Courts should afford substantial deference and should not micromanage those agency choices so long as they fall within a broad zone of reasonableness.”
The court’s three liberals concurred with the majority, but offered alternative reasons. Writing for the group, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said agencies do not have to weigh environmental impacts that fall outside their regulatory authority.
“An agency need not consider every conceivable environmental consequence of a proposed federal action,” Sotomayor wrote. “Rather, agencies need only analyze environmental impacts for which their decision would be (at least in part) ‘responsible.’ ”
Seven local counties and oil interests say the Utah project would boost the region’s economy, which has been hampered by the lack of transportation options in a mountainous region the size of Maryland. Currently, oil from the basin is trucked out over high mountain roads.
Groups representing the fossil fuel and logging industries applauded the ruling.
“Congress did not design NEPA for judges to hamstring new infrastructure and construction projects,” Amy Andryszak, president and CEO of the Interstate Natural Gas Association of America, said in a statement.
Nick Smith, a spokesman for the American Forest Resource Council, said that environmental groups have “weaponized” NEPA when suing to stop logging.
“These lawsuits mistakenly demand exhaustive analysis of every hypothetical alternative and remote impact, stretching NEPA documents into the thousands of pages and dragging reviews on for five or more years – even then facing renewed legal challenges,” Smith said in an email. “We are hopeful this ruling sets a clear precedent for restoring common sense to environmental reviews.”
Environmentalists and academics differed on the ruling’s significance.
Sam Sankar, a senior vice president with Earthjustice who represented one of the parties opposed to the rail line, said “the court is giving agencies a green light to put blinders on and not see foreseeable consequences of projects.” He added the ruling is “essentially saying that an administration that doesn’t believe in climate change is allowed to avoid talking about it entirely.”
Wendy Park, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, agreed,saying “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.”
Yet Michael Burger, executive director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School, said the decision is “far from the worst-case scenario.”
He said the ruling would still allow agencies to consider the downstream impacts of oil and gas leasing, such as the greenhouse gas emissions that would be generated by burning oil after it has been extracted.
As is customary for Supreme Court justices, Gorsuch did not offer a reason for his decision to recuse from the case. Liberal groups had highlighted his ties to billionaire Philip Anschutz, whose Anschutz Exploration Corporation has interests in the Uinta Basin. Anschutz was a client of Gorsuch’s law firm before Gorsuch was nominated to the Supreme Court.
President Donald Trump used his first term to make sweeping changes to NEPA that he said would make it easier to build new projects. On Wednesday, the White House Council on Environmental Quality withdrew Biden-era guidance that directed federal agencies to consider projects’ contributions to climate change.
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Ann E. Marimow contributed to this report.