2 weeks Ago
A case before the Supreme Court could not only resurrect a controversial oil train project in Utah but forever narrow the scope of one of America’s most important environmental laws. The conservative-led high court on Tuesday will hear arguments in Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, Colorado, in which developers of the $3 billion, 88-mile proposed Uinta Basin Railway petitioned the court to weigh in on whether federal agencies are required to consider adjacent, downstream environmental impacts when permitting projects.
The stalled rail line would connect Utah’s remote, oil-rich Uinta Basin to the national rail system, giving local producers an easier way to ship their waxy crude oil to Gulf Coast refineries. The Seven County Infrastructure Coalition, an interlocal agency composed of seven mineral-rich counties in eastern Utah, and other project backers have argued the rail line would provide local communities a much-need economic boost. Opponents in neighboring Colorado and beyond say it is a disaster waiting to happen, as it would lead to a dramatic increase in oil trains running between Utah and the Gulf Coast, including along a 100-mile stretch of the Colorado River and its headwaters, the primary water source for about 40 million people.
The project has been on ice since August 2023, when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.
C. Circuit vacated federal regulators’ approval of a key permit, ruling that the Surface Transportation Board violated the law by failing to properly consider climate and other environmental impacts. That decision stemmed from a lawsuit that Eagle County, Colorado, and several environmental organizations brought against the railroad in 2022.
While the lower court rejected a motion from railway developers to rehear the case late last year, the Supreme Court agreed to pick it up in June. At issue is the National Environmental Policy Act, a 54-year-old law that protects air, water and land by requiring federal agencies to conduct detailed environmental assessments of major infrastructure projects. The question before the Supreme Court is whether NEPA requires regulators to consider environmental impacts “beyond the proximate effects of the action over which the agency has regulatory authority.
” In an August brief , attorneys for the Seven County Infrastructure Coalition accused the lower court of taking “a distinctly (and unduly) capacious view of NEPA’s scope” and said “the best way for [the Supreme Court] to send a clear signal that such NEPA abuse will not be tolerated is to affirmatively hold that [the Surface Transportation Board’s environmental assessment] here passes NEPA muster.” “There is simply no role under NEPA’s text and this Court’s precedents for stymying development projects based on environmental effects that are so wildly remote in geography and time,” the brief reads. In their own brief in October, attorneys for Eagle County argued that the appeals court properly concluded that the Surface Transportation Board “failed to take the requisite hard look” at downline environmental impacts, including the risk of wildfires, oil spills and derailments that could result from increased rail traffic.
And it accused project developers of working to “dramatically remake NEPA.” “An agency cannot ignore a particular environmental effect of its own decision merely because another agency might have some jurisdiction over that issue,” the county brief states. The petition is the first NEPA case the Supreme Court has taken up since 2004.
It comes just months after the conservative supermajority on the high court overturned a 40-year precedent that afforded government agencies broad discretion to craft regulation, effectively shifting federal regulatory power to judges. In a surprise move last week, Justice Neil Gorsuch recused himself from the Utah oil train case. While Gorsuch did not specify a reason for the decision, it came amid growing calls that he step aside due to his personal ties to Colorado oil and gas billionaire Philip Anschutz, whose company recently filed a friend-of-the-court brief in support of limiting NEPA’s scope, The New York Times reported .
The fight over NEPA’s future has drawn widespread interest, with state attorneys general, elected lawmakers, industry groups, environmental organizations and others filing more than two dozen friend-of-the-court briefs. Writing in support of the railroad, the American Forest Resource Council, a timber industry trade association, repeatedly condemned what it called “anti-use” groups. “For decades, anti-development (or, ‘anti-use’) interests have wielded NEPA as a weapon to cut down responsible resource-management activities that are in the public interest,” the council wrote.
In its own amicus brief in support of railroad opponents, the Howard University School of Law Civil Rights Clinic wrote that project backers were “attacking NEPA as little more than red tape” and inviting the Supreme Court to “invent new, bright-line limitations on the statute’s scope.” “NEPA has proven to be a vital civil rights tool that empowers those who have historically been excluded from decisionmaking processes,” it wrote. “NEPA ensures that all people with a stake in federal action — regardless of race, color, national origin, tribal affiliation, or income — can have a voice.
” The incoming Trump administration, which has vowed to all but abandon climate action at the federal level, has a history of meddling with NEPA in an effort to fast-track pipelines, power plants and other infrastructure projects. In 2020, the Trump administration finalized a sweeping overhaul of the environmental law — the first major update to the law in more than four decades — that limited public input on such projects and allowed federal agencies to ignore climate change when reviewing them. Don't let this be the end of the free press.
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