The U.S. Supreme Court on May 29 gave a boost to a proposed railroad to transport crude oil in Utah, narrowing the reach of a federal environmental impact law used to block the project.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote the court’s 8–0 opinion in Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County. Justice Neil Gorsuch had recused himself from the case.
The court ruled that the federal environmental review process need not take into account the broader impact of a project on the environment, and that enough had already been done in the case to satisfy legal requirements.
During oral argument for the case on Dec. 10, 2024, the Biden administration opposed environmentalist groups that did not want the 88-mile rail line to be built to connect the shale oil-rich Uinta Basin region in northeastern Utah to the national rail network and out-of-state oil refineries.
The groups, who were the respondents before the Supreme Court, argued that the rules under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) governing federal agencies’ assessment of the potential environmental impact of projects require federal agencies to look at the “reasonably foreseeable” impact of major decisions.
The lead petitioner is a coalition comprising seven Utah counties. Uinta Basin Railway LLC, the other petitioner, was created to build the rail line.
Eagle County, Colorado, is the lead respondent, and others include the Center for Biological Diversity.
In the new ruling, Kavanaugh wrote that NEPA does not require that the downstream impacts of a project be taken into account.
An environmental review, known as an environmental impact statement, or EIS, “did not need to address the environmental effects of upstream oil drilling or downstream oil refining. Rather, it needed to address only the effects of the 88-mile railroad line,” he said.
Kavanaugh described NEPA as “a purely procedural statute that … simply requires an agency to prepare an EIS—in essence, a report.”
“Importantly, NEPA does not require the agency to weigh environmental consequences in any particular way,” he wrote.
“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 case goes back to 2020, when the coalition asked the federal Surface Transportation Board to exempt the project from formal application requirements. The coalition asked the board to conditionally approve its exemption petition on the merits of the project, subject to the environmental impact process required by NEPA.
Over the opposition of environmentalist groups, the board gave preliminary approval to the exemption petition in January 2021. The groups sought reconsideration of the decision, which was denied.
By September 2021, the board had issued an environmental impact statement, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had released its biological impact opinion. The board released its final exemption decision in December 2021, finding that the merits of the transportation project outweighed its environmental effects.
The environmentalist groups appealed, seeking a review of the board’s exemption orders and the environmental and biological impact opinions and claiming that the board violated NEPA and the Endangered Species Act.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled in favor of the challengers in August 2023, finding the board violated NEPA. The appellate court found that the environmental and biological impact opinions were of poor quality and failed to properly examine the project application.
Kavanaugh wrote in the new opinion that some courts have misapplied the statute, and this has led to “overly intrusive (and unpredictable) review in NEPA cases.”
NEPA, which is “a modest procedural requirement,” has become “a blunt and haphazard tool employed by project opponents … to try to stop or at least slow down new infrastructure and construction projects.”
Kavanaugh’s opinion was joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, Justice Samuel Alito, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, and Chief Justice John Roberts.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote separately to concur with the judgment but provide different reasons for doing so. Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson joined her opinion.
The Supreme Court reversed the ruling of the D.C. Circuit, sending the case back to that court “for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.”
This article by Matthew Vadum appeared May 29, 2025, in The Epoch Times.
Photo: Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh