Utah's oil train gets U.S. Supreme Court blessing
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of a controversial Utah oil railway expansion that was initially denied in 2023 by the District of Columbia's U.S. Court of Appeals.
The decision was a unanimous 8-0, with Justice Neil Gorsuch recusing himself.
In 2021, the federal Surface Transportation Board, a federal agency that regulates rail transportation, approved the northeastern Utah expansion brought by seven Utah counties that would span along the Colorado River to refineries on the Gulf Coast.
Environmentalists argued that the agency had not adequately considered the environmental impact that the 88-mile railway would create, and that it would have broad implications for National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) reviews.
Following the Supreme Court's ruling, Wendy Park, a lawyer with the Center for Biological Diversity said it was a 'disastrous decision' and 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,' per The New York Times.
However, the federal agency conducted a more than 3,600-page environmental impact assessment to address any potential environmental effects.
In the Supreme Court ruling, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote that the D.C. court's denial of construction was leveraging environmental impact statements mandated by a federal law from 1970 to ultimately control federal agencies.
'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 opinion said, noting that the railway would grow the economy and create jobs on a national scale in the 'isolated Utah basin.'
When reviewing the D.C. Circuit's decision, Kavanaugh added that it did not allow the Transportation Board 'substantial judicial deference required in NEPA cases' and 'ordered the Board to address the environmental effects of projects separate in time or place from the construction and operation of the railroad line. But NEPA requires agencies to focus on the environmental effects of the project at issue.'
'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 opinion concluded, ultimately rejecting the lower court's ruling."
In response to the Supreme Court's decision, Utah lawmakers welcomed the decision, including Sen. John Curtis, whose platform generally spans environmental issues.
'The Supreme Court's unanimous ruling poses a firm and a clear message: NEPA is a 'procedural cross-check, not a substantive roadblock.' For too long, litigious groups have weaponized environmental reviews to stall critical projects—oil, gas, wind, solar, nuclear, and more," Curtis posted on social media.
'If we're serious about unleashing American energy, we need to give the sector what it needs most: predictable rules and freedom from arbitrary delays.'
Utah Gov. Spencer Cox responded to Curtis' post that shared a news story by The Associated Press, finding humor in its headline.
'The Court didn't 'scale back' a key environmental law, the court unanimously stopped an insane idea that doesn't exist anywhere in the law,' he wrote. 'Extreme leftist groups have been destroying our ability to do anything in this country and weaponizing what was once simple and straight-forward. The court just read and applied the actual law here.'
Rep. Mike Kennedy, who serves Utah's 3rd Congressional District, said the Supreme Court ruling was a 'significant advancement' to the country's energy production and a boost to rural economies.
'Prior to this ruling, NEPA was used by agencies and interest groups to delay or block projects, hindering growth in rural communities. By affirming the project's approval, the Court has empowered local and state governments to pursue development opportunities that directly benefit Utah residents,' he said on X.
Utah Sen. Mike Lee shared similar sentiments, touting the ruling as a 'victory for Utah and American energy dominance!'
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And yet I think it's also very obvious that that did not achieve what we were trying to achieve, that [it] did not necessarily correspond to human flourishing, did not correspond to a strengthening economy over time, that it certainly did not correspond to strengthening families and communities. And ultimately, it didn't correspond to a strong and healthy political system or democracy. And so there's obviously a lot of talk of, Okay, well, why isn't that right? Why did it go wrong? What do you do about it? The strange thing for someone like me is that American conservatism, certainly in my lifetime, has largely existed to reinforce the ideology you're rejecting here. Why do you think the political right has been blind for so long to the things you're fighting for now? There's a very interesting pivot point that you see around the time of the Reagan revolution. The coalition that Reagan assembled had these different elements. It had the social conservatives, who I would say are most closely aligned to a fundamentally conservative outlook on a lot of these questions. But then it brought to that the very libertarian free-market folks on the economic side, and the quite aggressive interventionist foreign policy hawks. And what all these folks had in common was they really hated communism and really wanted to win the Cold War and saw that as the existential crisis. But what happened is, within that coalition, a very libertarian free-market mindset was then imposed on the economic policy of the right of center, even when that was very much in tension with a lot of other conservative values. And you saw people writing about that from both sides. From one side, Friedrich Hayek, who is one of the ultimate carriers of this pre-market ideology, has a very famous essay titled 'Why I Am Not a Conservative,' emphasizing that what he calls faith in markets to solve problems and self-regulate was very much at odds with how conservatives looked at the world. And from the flip side, you had a lot of conservatives, folks like Yuval Levin, who prefer markets as a way of ordering the economy to other options, but recognize that markets are very much in tension with other values like family and community. And in some cases, markets even actively can undermine or erode the strength of those other institutions. Markets are also dependent on institutions. If you want markets to work well, you actually need constraints. You need institutional supports. And so that tension was always present. I think that the coalition made a lot of sense in the context of winning the Cold War. It made a lot of sense when markets in the middle of the late 20th century really did seem to be delivering on a lot of the things that conservatives really cared about. But I think it reached its expiration date and just lived on by inertia into the 2000s, into this era of radical embrace of free trade even with communist China and cutting taxes even in the face of big deficits. I can imagine a skeptical leftist hearing all of this and thinking it's just a rebranded democratic socialism. Why is that wrong? What makes this conservative? There's a real disconnect both on the ends and on the means. I think there's a very healthy contestation over what are the appropriate ends that we're actually building toward. And what you're seeing conservatives coming back to articulating a set of actual value judgments about, what do we think the good life consists of? I think there is a set of value judgments and preferences for, in many respects, quite traditional formations at the family level, at the community level. [For] saying that it is not merely a value-neutral choice — 'Would you rather get married and have kids or spend more money on vacations in Greece?' — that it is actually appropriate and necessary for the good society to say, No, one of these things is better than the other and more important and should be valued more highly. At the national level, you're also seeing a much more robust nationalism on the right of center. Conservatives recognize the importance of the nation and solidarity within the nation to functioning markets, to a functioning society, in a way that at least the modern left tends to resist in a lot of cases. Part of the case you're making is that there's an ongoing paradigm shift within American conservatism. When you look at what this administration is doing on the policy front, when you look at what the Republican Party is doing, do you see them moving in your direction? We're definitely moving in the right direction. On tariffs alone, [we could] spend a tremendous amount of time emphasizing the ways I think the problems that they're addressing, the direction they're trying to go, is the right one. On the specifics of how things are timed and what the levels are and so forth, what legal authorities you use for what, I have all sorts of thoughts on how it might be done better. But broadly speaking, to your question about the direction that things are headed, I think it's extraordinarily clear to me that the Republican Party and the conservative movement are shifting quite dramatically in this direction. One way to look at that is in terms of personnel. Trump has obviously been something of a constant over the last decade in Republican politics, but the distance from Mike Pence to JD Vance is pretty dramatic. The distance from [Secretaries of State] Rex Tillerson to Marco Rubio is pretty dramatic. The distance from the various secretaries of labor in the first term to a secretary of labor recommended by the Teamsters is pretty dramatic. Is it really, though? Rhetorically, yes. But substantively? If you want to know why I can't take this iteration of the GOP seriously, look at the domestic policy they just passed in the House. It's the same Republican Party. It's jammed up with a bunch of stuff that reflects conventional conservative priorities. It's not doing a whole lot to help working-class people. It's more tax cuts offset by more cuts to Medicaid and food stamps, which low-income people depend on. And the net result, as always, will be more upward redistribution of wealth. And on top of that, another $3 or $4 or $5 trillion tacked onto the deficit just for good measure. How can you look at that and feel like the GOP is genuinely pivoting in your direction? I've been extremely critical of the 'big, beautiful bill' — particularly of the deficit element — because I think if one is going to be a fiscal conservative, one has to not be adding to deficits right now. But a lot of the efforts to argue that things are not changing in the Republican Party strike me as a real disservice to people who are trying to understand where things are going. Elected political leaders are always going to be the lagging indicator of what's happening in any political party or political movement. They are by definition going to be the oldest, the ones who have been around the longest, the ones who have built their careers and ideologies and relationships around what was happening 20 or 30 years ago. And so if one wants to know what is passing in Congress today, then yes, you count the votes of the people in Congress today. If you want to know what's actually moving within a party or what's going to happen over a 10- or 15-year period, counting the votes today is just not what someone in good faith trying to understand the direction would do. The tariff regime, the trade war — that is a genuine shift. No doubt about it. It's not entirely clear to me how that helps poor and working-class people at the moment, but maybe I'm not seeing the whole picture. There's a very interesting economic debate to be had about whether it will work. I obviously have one very strong view. But it seems pretty clear to me that what they are trying to do is quite explicitly focused on the economic interests of workers. Another very interesting area — I mentioned some of the things that are going on on the labor front. One really interesting effort that's underway, and [Sen.] Josh Hawley is the leader of it, but Bernie Moreno, the new senator from Ohio, is the co-sponsor of it — they've taken the [proposed] PRO Act, which is the ultimate Democratic wish list of labor reforms, and they've chopped it up. And they've said, Look, some of these are perfectly legitimate and good ideas. Others of these we don't agree with. And we're going to start advancing the ones we think are good ideas. That's a dramatic shift in how you would see the Republican Party. I think you're seeing the same thing in the financial sector. There was a great example recently where a private equity firm that had bought out a bunch of paper plants was trying to shut down a paper plant in Ohio. And you literally had the Republican politicians out there at the rally with the union leaders, forcing a change and a commitment to at least keep the plant open for the rest of the year and try to find a transaction that would keep it open afterward. On family policy, in 2017 you had [then-Sens.] Marco Rubio and Mike Lee threatening to tank the entire tax cut bill to get an expanded child tax credit in it. Now it is an uncontroversial top priority that the child tax credit is not only kept at that level, but expanded further. And so even at the level of what is happening in legislation, it's clear that this is a very different party from 2017. If you look at who Trump has appointed, it's a very different set of appointments. If you look at the critical mass and sometimes center of gravity among the younger elected officials, the people coming into the Senate, it's a completely different set of priorities and policies from those who have been there for a long time. Like I said, I'm not convinced that the DNA of the party has changed, but I will grant that there are indications of a shift. I don't know what it's going to amount to, materially, but this is not the party of Mitt Romney. I think Trump has cultivated a very unique coalition, certainly much more working-class than the pre-Trump Republican Party. I don't know how much of that coalition is a function of Trump and how much of that coalition will fade when he fades. If the Republican Party does prove an unreliable vehicle for your movement, can you see a world in which you're working with Democrats? We do work with some Democrats. I think there are Democrats who are doing very good and interesting work. We recently had [Rep.] Jared Golden from Maine on the American Compass Podcast because he is the sponsor of the 10 percent global tariff legislation in Congress. One thing I always emphasize is that I think a healthy American politics is not one where one party gets everything right and dominates and the other one collapses into irrelevance. It's one where we actually have two healthy political parties that are both focused on the concerns and priorities of the typical American and are then contesting a lot of these very legitimate disagreements about ends and means. But based on what is happening in American politics today and the fundamental differences between conservatism and progressivism, I would expect that this is going to have the most success and salience and overlap in thinking on the right of center.
