In an 8-0 ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court last Thursday issued a landmark decision that limits the authority of federal judges to block infrastructure projects based on potential indirect effects of other projects. This is a key decision reining in the scope of analysis that an agency must prepare under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).
This was a limited, but crucial ruling, saying that courts cannot “…delay or block projects based on the environmental effects of other projects separate from the project at hand.”
The case, Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, considered a proposed 88-mile railroad line that will connect and transport crude oil from oil fields in northern Utah to refineries in Louisiana and Texas. Environmental groups told the Court that the federal agencies that approved the project failed to consider its broader environmental impacts.
The proposed rail line would quadruple production at Utah’s largest oil and gas fields. The U.S. Surface Transportation Board released a 3,600 page EIS saying the project’s “substantial transportation and economic benefits” outweighed the environmental effects. But environmentalists challenged the decision claiming the analysis should have also taken into account the impacts of increasing oil production upstream and increasing oil refinery operations downstream.
The Supreme Court disagreed and overturned the lower court’s decision. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote the majority opinion and stated: “NEPA does not allow 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,”
“Courts should afford substantial deference and should not micromanage those agency choices so long as they fall within a broad zone of reasonableness,” he continued.
Justice Kavanaugh continued by saying agencies should not be expected to consider the environmental impact of any project aside from the one they are currently working on, “even if” the environmental impacts “might extend outside the geographical territory of the project or materialize later in time,” according to Marc Morano with Climate Depot, a project of CFACT.
“The fact that the projects might foreseeably lead to the construction or increased use of a separate project does not mean the agency must consider that separate project’s environmental effects,” the court continued.
Environmentalists complained loudly that, for years, lower courts have demanded consideration of the effects of projects like liquefied natural gas export terminals and rail lines and pipelines that move the products to account for the climate effects of fossil fuels. Those considerations appear to no longer persuade this current Supreme Court, nor the Trump administration.
The Supreme Court firmly rejected the environmentalists position and held that “The D. C. Circuit failed to afford the Board the substantial judicial deference required in NEPA cases and incorrectly interpreted NEPA to require the Board to consider the environmental effects of upstream and downstream projects that are separate in time or place from the Uinta Basin Railway.”