Latest news with #NationalEnvironmentalPolicyAct
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Opinion - We need to simplify environmental permits to boost their impact
In the clash between the competing pro-petroleum and pro-climate visions of the economy, few policy issues are as misunderstood and complicated as our nation's environmental permitting systems. The number of permitting actions is enormous. During a single presidential term, approximately 1.5 million permitting, informal review, and consultation processes are overseen under just five environmental and historic preservation laws. Many of these cover minor actions that would never have required permits in the 1970s and 1980s. Consider the National Environmental Policy Act. Roughly 400,000 'categorical exclusions' are processed under this law each presidential term, compared to about 1,000 major reviews called 'environmental impact statements.' An exclusion isn't an absence of review; instead, it is akin to a simpler kind of permit. There are categorical exclusions to cover summer picnics by federal agencies, a 90- to 120-day exclusion process for a loan to replace powerlines across North Dakota wheat fields, or exclusions for every Agriculture Department grant to a farmer. Most exclusions involve minimal staff hours and are completed in weeks to months, making it hard to object to any one review. But collectively, their issuance requires hundreds of staff and millions of days of project delays. Over four years, about a million similar, small permit processes will run their course under the Endangered Species Act, Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act and especially the National Historic Preservation Act. Yet almost all the attention on reform has focused on the small number of 'big' permits. For example, President Biden's permitting team reported cutting 25 percent off the average processing time for those 1,000 major environmental impact statements, compared to the first Trump administration, whose permits were also faster than the administration of Obama. On big permits, Democratic administrations have favored adding staff to write and review documents. That strategy works, but it can be hard to maintain, particularly if agency budgets get cut. And most of the laborious steps to finish an impact statement remained unchanged, with some becoming more expansive. Republicans tend to favor the wholesale elimination of major permits — at least for fossil fuel infrastructure — and cutting staff. That pattern showed up across President Trump's executive orders. If maintained by courts and Congress, those orders would eliminate some National Environmental Policy Act regulations and skip most requirements to protect clean water and endangered wildlife by calling permit issuance an emergency. Democrats are increasingly flirting with exemptions for different categories of projects — wind and solar instead of oil and gas, for example. A problem with taking away major permits is that they often have very significant impacts on things that communities in both red and blue states value. Permit reviews can produce much less harmful outcomes. Addressing the millions of smaller permits is a missed opportunity with fewer downsides. First, we should entirely eliminate thousands of small permits by defining the actions they cover as not 'major federal actions' — the original, intended scope of the National Environmental Policy Act. For instance, a provision in proposed permitting legislation redefines all grants and loans this way. This change would benefit thousands of towns, cities, nonprofits and businesses that receive federal funding and wouldn't affect public input because few categorical exclusions ever involve the public in the first place. Second, we can improve remaining small permit processes by expanding reforms that have proven successful in dramatically accelerating timelines and reducing workload while still avoiding or compensating for harms caused by projects. For example, government agencies are increasingly using technology-based 'dashboards' that allow anyone to track the status of an application and exactly which staff are reviewing it. Virginia has achieved the greatest success with this technology, alongside procedural reforms, delivering an expected 70 percent reduction in application review times for 200,000 state decisions over four years. The Department of Energy is piloting AI technologies that could allow more than 80 percent of small permit documents to be machine written. Self-permitting under general permits is another promising reform. Projects that agree to use what are effectively common-sense best practices to avoid harm are automatically approved if they submit the paperwork that proves those practices will be followed. General permits exist under clean water and wildlife laws, although the paperwork required to get these automatic approvals could still be significantly reduced. Offsets — which are opportunities to compensate for unavoidable environmental impacts — also help. Having a supply of pre-approved beneficial offsets has sped up some Clean Water Act permitting by 50 percent. We can't build everything Americans want without having any environmental effect, and having offsets available allows unavoidable harm to be balanced with benefits to similar environmental features nearby. The most important change needed to improve or eliminate millions of small procedures is a culture shift among both permitting agencies and permit applicants. Many government staff are dedicated public servants, but some view institutional caution as a mission and environmental permitting as a battleground instead of an opportunity to problem-solve with constituents. On the other side, many applicants blame agencies when they themselves have submitted flawed or incomplete applications, proposed unreasonable projects, or rejected the idea of regulatory oversight, failing to respect the reality that most Americans want to unlock growth while also stewarding the environment. Making a million small processes more agile, responsive and effective is a key step toward a government that strikes these balances, and that serves the needs of all Americans. Timothy Male is the executive director of the nonprofit Environmental Policy Innovation Center. Dave Owen is an environmental law expert at UC Law San Francisco, specializing in water, land use and administrative law. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Supreme Court Deals a Body Blow to Bedrock Environmental Law
On Thursday, the Supreme Court dealt a body blow to America's bedrock environmental law, the National Environmental Policy Act. The court issued a unanimous decision that will buttress the Donald Trump administration's efforts to gut the law and fast track fossil fuel projects. Environmental advocates contend that the result of Thursday's opinion over a proposed oil train will be more Americans exposed to preventable environmental, health, and climate harms, a well as reduced public participation in key government decision-making. The largest and most immediate beneficiary is the fossil fuel industry. Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, Colorado is now the latest in a growing list of radical opinions issued by the Supreme Court that undercut the nation's foundational environmental and civil rights protections. At issue is the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The 1970 law requires federal agencies to consider the potential impacts on 'the human environment' prior to issuing authorizations for major projects, such as pipelines, refineries, and highways, and to inform and allow the public to weigh-in on its decision. The public is also empowered to bring legal action against the federal government if it fails to comply with these rules. 'NEPA has proven to be a vital civil rights tool that empowers those who have historically been excluded from decision-making processes,' writes the Howard University School of Law Civil Rights Clinic in a friend of the court brief. '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.' Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote the opinion for the conservative supermajority, ruling to severely circumscribe the law to focus only on the most immediate impacts of a given project. Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a concurring opinion joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, agreeing with the majority's decision to reject a lower-court ruling, but arguing for a much more limited finding in the case. Justice Neil Gorsuch recused himself, likely due to his fossil fuel industry ties. 'It really underscores the extent to which seemingly unanimous opinions can actually conceal a lot of disagreement,' constitutional law professor Leah Litman of the University of Michigan Law School tells me. Litman is the author of Lawless: How the Supreme Court Runs on Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories, and Bad Vibes and a cohost of the popular Supreme Court podcast, Strict Scrutiny. 'It's clear that the three Democratic appointees diverge pretty sharply from the majority opinion in their views about NEPA. They fault the majority opinion for writing unnecessarily broadly.' 'The court certainly ruled against the plaintiffs, but it went far beyond that to mount a broad attack on NEPA itself,' says Sambhav Sankar, senior vice president for programs for the environmental law firm Earthjustice, a respondent in the case. 'This administration is going to treat this ruling as permission to ignore the environment entirely as it promotes fossil fuels, attacks clean energy, tries to roll back sensible pollution regulations, [and] claim that it can entirely ignore the reality of climate change when it makes its decisions.' The Seven County case involves a dispute over construction of a new 88-mile stretch of railway to carry 'waxy' crude oil out of Utah's Uinta Basin by connecting to an existing national railway. The oil would travel from Utah through Colorado, and on to Texas and Louisiana where the oil would be refined. Eagle County, Colorado, and five environmental organizations argued that, in granting authorization for the Uinta Basin Railway, the federal U.S. Surface Transportation Board during the previous Trump administration failed to conduct a full analysis required under NEPA. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit largely agreed. It found that the board ignored key 'upstream' and 'downstream' harms, such as from increased oil production in Utah, from increased rail traffic in Colorado, and increased refining in the Gulf Coast. The proponents of the railway appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. The case has drawn the attention of the nation's most powerful legal operatives, from the conservative lawyers group, the Federalist Society, to the nation's largest oil industry and business lobbies, including the American Petroleum Institute and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The majority opinion leans heavily on the amicus brief submitted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the world's largest business organization, which often spends more money on federal lobbying than any other group. ExxonMobil holds a leadership position in the Chamber. Justice Samuel Alito participated in the decision despite owning stock in several oil and gas companies as recently as September 2024 and recusing himself from prior fossil fuel-related cases, presumably because of these potential conflicts. Last term, Alito agreed with the Chamber in 73 percent of cases. Justice Kavanaugh quotes the Chamber in describing NEPA as 'a 1970 legislative acorn [that] has grown over the years into a judicial oak that has hindered infrastructure development.' The opinion then describes new limits on the scope of NEPA, allowing that 'an agency may decline to evaluate environmental effects from separate projects upstream or downstream from the project at issue' particularly where 'those separate projects fall outside the agency's regulatory authority.' In an effort to limit future litigation, the opinion then calls for significant deference to be given by the courts to the government agency conducting the NEPA review. The effect of the ruling is to allow agencies to focus their analysis only on the immediate project proposal before them — in this case, the 88 miles of new rail. Major infrastructure projects, however, rarely have such circumscribed effects, particularly when considering impacts such as greenhouse gas emissions. Backers of the railway, for example, anticipate its construction will facilitate a quintupling of overall oil production in the Uinta Basin, creating a new colossal oil fracking hub. Uinta's oil is described as 'waxy oil' due to its uniquely thick viscosity and must be heated to be transported. The Uinta Railway would carry an estimated 350,000 new barrels of this waxy oil per day, sent in two-mile-long trains hauling 110 oil tanker cars, from Utah and on to Colorado, through an at-times treacherous 100-mile track along the Colorado River. It would travel down to refineries located in some of the hardest-hit environmental justice communities in Texas and Louisiana's Cancer Alley, in areas already overburdened by pollution. Opponents predict health harms from increased pollution for people living in states along the entire route. They cite increased pollution from more oil fracking in Utah and the risk of train derailments leading to oil spills into the Colorado River, which would threaten the drinking water supply of 40 million people in seven states across the Southwest, including 30 Native American Tribes. The climate impacts of burning an extra 350,000 barrels of oil a day would produce 53 million tons of carbon dioxide, roughly the equivalent of six coal-powered power plants. Writing a letter in opposition to the railway, communities in Louisiana where the oil would be refined say, 'We have worked hard to reduce the disproportionate burdens of pollution and environmental injustice on our communities caused by the fossil fuel industry. The massive influx of oil via train from Utah will only make our situation worse.' The majority opinion seeks to limit NEPA review to a consideration of only the immediate impacts on people and the environment along the 88-miles of new railway. 'It is disastrous,' says Wendy Park of the ruling. Park is a senior attorney at the national environmental protection organization, the Center for Biological Diversity, another respondent in the case. She has personally been litigating against the Uinta Basin Railway since 2018. The ruling 'draws artificial boundaries around the scope of NEPA review, ignoring decades of precedent and the plain language of NEPA, which says that agencies are required to consider the reasonably foreseeable effects of their proposed actions. This decision essentially allows agencies to bury their head in the sand and ignore harmful effects to air, water, and wildlife, and it will mean more pollution, more habitat destruction, more unhealthy communities.' 'This decision will embolden agencies to ignore the climate consequences of their proposed actions.' Park adds, 'It is probably just the worst possible outcome that we could have imagined.' A key reason for Park's concern is the context within which the ruling is taking place. The Trump administration is actively working to gut NEPA by taking out its legs. In April, the administration repealed the regulations used to implement the law across federal agencies. The administration also told agencies that they should no longer consider climate, environmental justice, or cumulative impacts of operations when conducting their analyses. 'Basically, the administration is stripping all substance from NEPA,' Andrew Mergen tells me. Mergen spent some three decades at the environmental division of the Department of Justice and has likely litigated more NEPA cases than any other lawyer in history. He is the Faculty Director of the Emmett Environmental Law & Policy Clinic at Harvard Law School. He describes Seven Counties as the most significant NEPA case in twenty years. Mergen calls NEPA, 'a profoundly important statute' and 'the most copied and emulated environmental statute of all time,' influencing the way the states, other countries, and international financial institutions approach environmental disclosures. 'The NEPA process results in countless projects that are redesigned in a way that avoid stupid, ill-intentioned, unnecessary harms to the environment.' He recently co-authored a paper (and shared another) dispelling many myths about NEPA and environmental permitting as the objects of undo infrastructure obstruction. He supports deference to agency experts in decision-making, but questions the Supreme Court's timing, because 'those people are, by and large, gone, the agencies are being hollowed out,' because 'Trump is in the process of completely gutting the federal agencies.' There is also more than a little bit of irony in the majority's adoption of agency deference, given its repeatedly articulated disdain for federal agencies as the backbone of the 'administrative state.' Less than one year ago, the Supreme Court's ultraconservative supermajority ruled to overturn the Chevron doctrine, which had instructed courts to generally show deference to how federal agencies implement and enforce the law. The case, known as Loper Bright, was argued by lawyer Paul Clement. Clement also argued on behalf of the railway in Seven Counties, this time asking for more agency deference, which the majority agreed to. Mergen also shares the concerns voiced by the environmental justice community of constraining NEPA's lens. 'For decades, Black, Latinx, and Indigenous communities have borne the brunt of environmental hazards, breathing in polluted air, living near toxic waste, and facing the worst effects of climate change. NEPA has served as a key tool for advocates to combat these injustices,' said Lourdes M. Rosado, President and General Counsel, LatinoJustice in a statement. 'Rolling back NEPA's regulations is an outright attack on communities of color.' Responding to Thursday's ruling, John Beard, Jr. who lives in Port Arthur, Texas — a small majority Black and Hispanic community and the site of a Valero refinery expected to receive the new Uinta Basin Railway oil trains — asks me, 'Who is ultimately going to be held responsible if these NEPA concerns are not addressed and looked at? That's the question.' Beard says that the matter is ultimately about the lives and health of people in his community and all along the rail, and the ruling 'seems to be a way of deferring responsibility and marginalizing those communities that are going to be adversely affected, so that their voice can't be heard.' 'At the end of the day, [the conservative justices] are hostile to industry regulation, and particularly regulation of polluters and the fossil fuel industry,' says Litman, the Lawless author. If that means that the justices have to come up with 'made-up' rationales to explain away their twists and turns of logic, they will, she explains. Michael Burger is the Executive Director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University. He argues that the impact of the ruling will be determined by how it is interpreted by the courts, but a likely casualty will be future consideration of the climate. 'The legacy of this case is going to depend on how it's treated by agencies and courts in the future,' he says. 'Certainly, it seems geared toward granting this administration in particular greater leeway to go faster in fossil fuel development and to do less environmental review than it otherwise would have had to do.' He adds, 'I don't think there's any question that this decision will result in less climate-related disclosure in NEPA reviews.' 'Right now, the courts are the only thing standing between the planet, the people, and an administration that essentially represents the fossil fuel industry and other polluters, Earthjustice lawyer Sankar warns. The Supreme Court's ruling will have far reaching impacts on U.S. environmental, public health, environmental justice, and climate policy for decades to come, particularly when combined with Trump's simultaneous decimation of the law. But the ruling does not greenlight the Uinta Basin Railway. It returns the case to the lower court for further review under more limited parameters. The railway is then subject to additional permitting and reviews before it can be built and faces innumerable internal hurdles, including a perennial lack of funding and a missing rail operator. The Seven County Infrastructure Coalition is the public partner of the Uinta Basin Railway. It is an independent political subdivision of the state of Utah composed of seven Utah counties. The Coalition held its most recent public meeting on May 8 at the Carbon County Commission Chambers in remote Price, Utah, which I attended via Zoom. Board Co-Chair Jack Lytle presided over the meeting and is a dead ringer for actor Sam Elliott, who, among other classic western characters, plays The Stranger in The Big Lebowski. Tall, wiry, and lanky with a shock of white hair and a mustache to match, Lytle even has the baritone voice and cowboy drawl to match Elliott's. There was an almost giddy excitement at the meeting on the fervent expectation that a favorable Supreme Court ruling was on the horizon. 'It's very exciting times,' Executive Director Keith Heaton said repeatedly. But there was also a more sober recognition that the rail project had largely been in stasis as the court cases proceeded, and it was now time to rapidly get things moving again. The first step is to secure federally subsidized tax-exempt bonds to pay for construction of the rail. In 2017, the same year that the Seven County Infrastructure Coalition took up the idea of oil train, Utah State Treasurer David Damschen questioned if the coalition's hefty appropriations of federal dollars were resulting in any material benefits for the rural communities it was designed to help, noting the 'significant' salaries and fees paid to board members and consultants, including lawyers and engineers, with little to show in outcomes, the Salt Lake City Tribune reported. On May 8, the coalition's financial advisor, Cody Deeter, seemed to confront these same concerns, explaining that the benefits of applying bonds to pay for the Railway include providing the coalition with 'political legitimacy throughout the state to show that you are, in fact, doing what your charter suggested you would do.' The price of the railway has ballooned over the years. Originally priced at $1.4 billion, it is closer to $3.4 billion today, 70 percent of which is to be paid for with the federal bonds. Bond attorney, Tim Stratton, whose fee, he explained, is $600 an hour, said 'given the passage of time, supply chain, issues, inflation, those sorts of things, the estimated costs have changed on the rail project' with the developer now asking the coalition 'to go with a dollar amount of $2.4 billion instead of the original $2 billion' for the bond request. If the coalition receives the request, it will effectively zero-out the U.S. Department of Transportation's Private Activity Bond program, which has exactly $2.4 billion left out of its original $30 billion allocation made in 2006. Originally known as Drexel Hamilton Infrastructure Partners, LP and then DHIP Group, the opaque Florida-based private asset manager that owns the Uinta Basin Railway now does business under its subsidiary's name, Uinta Basin Railway Holdings, LLC. It is also now the sole corporate partner after Texas-based Rio Grande Pacific Corporation, a private railroad holding company that was to be the rail operator, pulled out of the project back in 2023. Two years ago, the Seven County Infrastructure Coalition's effort to apply for bonds was met with a fierce public backlash, which is sure to be repeated when the coalition brings the proposal to a public meeting planned for June. Deeda Seed is the senior Utah campaigner for the Center for Biological Diversity where she has been leading organizing efforts against the Uinta Basin Railway for five years. 'If we don't have a healthy environment, what do we have?' Seed asks me from her home in Salt Lake City, Utah. 'From our perspective, from the community perspective, we're going to continue to fight the railway project, we're not going away,' Seed says. More from Rolling Stone Elon Used So Much Ketamine He Couldn't Pee Right: Report Senator Dismisses Medicaid Cuts Killing People: 'Well, We're All Going to Die' Vets Are Working Out of Closets Because of Trump's Nonsensical War on the VA Best of Rolling Stone The Useful Idiots New Guide to the Most Stoned Moments of the 2020 Presidential Campaign Anatomy of a Fake News Scandal The Radical Crusade of Mike Pence
The Hill
3 days ago
- Politics
- The Hill
We need to simplify environmental permits to boost their impact
In the clash between the competing pro-petroleum and pro-climate visions of the economy, few policy issues are as misunderstood and complicated as our nation's environmental permitting systems. The number of permitting actions is enormous. During a single presidential term, approximately 1.5 million permitting, informal review, and consultation processes are overseen under just five environmental and historic preservation laws. Many of these cover minor actions that would never have required permits in the 1970s and 1980s. Consider the National Environmental Policy Act. Roughly 400,000 'categorical exclusions' are processed under this law each presidential term, compared to about 1,000 major reviews called 'environmental impact statements.' An exclusion isn't an absence of review; instead, it is akin to a simpler kind of permit. There are categorical exclusions to cover summer picnics by federal agencies, a 90- to 120-day exclusion process for a loan to replace powerlines across North Dakota wheat fields, or exclusions for every Agriculture Department grant to a farmer. Most exclusions involve minimal staff hours and are completed in weeks to months, making it hard to object to any one review. But collectively, their issuance requires hundreds of staff and millions of days of project delays. Over four years, about a million similar, small permit processes will run their course under the Endangered Species Act, Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act and especially the National Historic Preservation Act. Yet almost all the attention on reform has focused on the small number of 'big' permits. For example, President Biden's permitting team reported cutting 25 percent off the average processing time for those 1,000 major environmental impact statements, compared to the first Trump administration, whose permits were also faster than the administration of Obama. On big permits, Democratic administrations have favored adding staff to write and review documents. That strategy works, but it can be hard to maintain, particularly if agency budgets get cut. And most of the laborious steps to finish an impact statement remained unchanged, with some becoming more expansive. Republicans tend to favor the wholesale elimination of major permits — at least for fossil fuel infrastructure — and cutting staff. That pattern showed up across President Trump's executive orders. If maintained by courts and Congress, those orders would eliminate some National Environmental Policy Act regulations and skip most requirements to protect clean water and endangered wildlife by calling permit issuance an emergency. Democrats are increasingly flirting with exemptions for different categories of projects — wind and solar instead of oil and gas, for example. A problem with taking away major permits is that they often have very significant impacts on things that communities in both red and blue states value. Permit reviews can produce much less harmful outcomes. Addressing the millions of smaller permits is a missed opportunity with fewer downsides. First, we should entirely eliminate thousands of small permits by defining the actions they cover as not 'major federal actions' — the original, intended scope of the National Environmental Policy Act. For instance, a provision in proposed permitting legislation redefines all grants and loans this way. This change would benefit thousands of towns, cities, nonprofits and businesses that receive federal funding and wouldn't affect public input because few categorical exclusions ever involve the public in the first place. Second, we can improve remaining small permit processes by expanding reforms that have proven successful in dramatically accelerating timelines and reducing workload while still avoiding or compensating for harms caused by projects. For example, government agencies are increasingly using technology-based 'dashboards' that allow anyone to track the status of an application and exactly which staff are reviewing it. Virginia has achieved the greatest success with this technology, alongside procedural reforms, delivering an expected 70 percent reduction in application review times for 200,000 state decisions over four years. The Department of Energy is piloting AI technologies that could allow more than 80 percent of small permit documents to be machine written. Self-permitting under general permits is another promising reform. Projects that agree to use what are effectively common-sense best practices to avoid harm are automatically approved if they submit the paperwork that proves those practices will be followed. General permits exist under clean water and wildlife laws, although the paperwork required to get these automatic approvals could still be significantly reduced. Offsets — which are opportunities to compensate for unavoidable environmental impacts — also help. Having a supply of pre-approved beneficial offsets has sped up some Clean Water Act permitting by 50 percent. We can't build everything Americans want without having any environmental effect, and having offsets available allows unavoidable harm to be balanced with benefits to similar environmental features nearby. The most important change needed to improve or eliminate millions of small procedures is a culture shift among both permitting agencies and permit applicants. Many government staff are dedicated public servants, but some view institutional caution as a mission and environmental permitting as a battleground instead of an opportunity to problem-solve with constituents. On the other side, many applicants blame agencies when they themselves have submitted flawed or incomplete applications, proposed unreasonable projects, or rejected the idea of regulatory oversight, failing to respect the reality that most Americans want to unlock growth while also stewarding the environment. Making a million small processes more agile, responsive and effective is a key step toward a government that strikes these balances, and that serves the needs of all Americans. Timothy Male is the executive director of the nonprofit Environmental Policy Innovation Center. Dave Owen is an environmental law expert at UC Law San Francisco, specializing in water, land use and administrative law.
Axios
3 days ago
- Politics
- Axios
Three takeaways from the Supreme Court's big NEPA ruling
Here are three takeaways from Thursday's Supreme Court ruling that put new limits on federal reviews of infrastructure and energy projects. Why it matters: Narrowing the National Environmental Policy Act's scope has giant implications for President Trump's pro-fossil "energy dominance" agenda. 1. This case is sneakily a huge deal. It wasn't among the highest-profile SCOTUS battles that touch environmental policy, like the "Chevron deference" and "major questions" rulings. But a spin through the docket shows that powerful K Street lobbies, environmentalists, and senior members of Congress all took keen interest. 2. It could have long-term climate policy effects. One thing to watch over the horizon is how much it curtails future presidents from stitching carbon emissions into project decisions. Biden-era officials were taking steps in that direction, though Trump 2.0 has been reversing them, such as this week's formal withdrawal of 2023 Council on Environmental Quality guidance. 3. It could have unpredictable effects. A hot center-left view these days is that NEPA (and other review layers) make it too hard to build anything — including low-carbon infrastructure. Aidan Mackenzie of the Institute for Progress, writing on X, shouts out Justice Brett Kavanaugh for being "full abundance-pilled." The Kavanaugh-written decision says NEPA thwarts all kinds of projects — including transmission and wind turbines. Check out Mackenzie's entire thread, which delves into what discretion agencies will and won't have under the ruling. Catch up quick: The case centered on federal approval of an 88-mile railway to carry oil from Utah's Uinta basin to larger rail networks and Gulf Coast refineries. It reverses an appellate ruling that regulators needed to weigh matters beyond the railway's direct effects, such as drilling impacts, refining pollution and climate change. "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," the 8-0 decision states. The court's three liberals issued a concurrence on the fresh limits on NEPA reviews weighing upstream and downstream project effects. But they ding the majority for "unnecessarily grounding its analysis largely in matters of policy." What they're saying: The American Petroleum Institute applauded the court's "long overdue steps to restore NEPA to its original intent." But API said "common-sense permitting reform" is still needed. On the flip side, the Center for Biological Diversity said the ruling "guarantees that bureaucrats can put their heads in the sand" on how projects affect ecosystems, wildlife and the climate.
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Business Standard
3 days ago
- Business
- Business Standard
US Supreme Court eases key environmental law to speed development projects
The Supreme Court on Thursday narrowed the scope of environmental reviews required for major infrastructure projects in a ruling that could accelerate development of railroads, highways and pipelines around the country. The 8-0 decision follows an appeal to the high court from backers of a multibillion-dollar oil railroad expansion project in Utah, which is aimed at quadrupling oil production in the remote area of sandstone and sagebrush. Environmental groups said the decision would have sweeping impacts on how the National Environmental Policy Act is applied. The landmark environmental law requires federal agencies to study the likely environmental impacts of government-funded projects in an often lengthy review process. President Donald Trump's administration has already said it's speeding up that process after the president in January declared a national energy emergency and vowed to boost US oil and gas production. Justice Brett Kavanaugh referred to the decision as a course correction in an opinion fully joined by four conservative colleagues. Congress did not design NEPA for judges to hamstring new infrastructure and construction projects, he wrote. The three liberal justices agreed the Utah project should get its approval, but they would have taken a narrower path. The justices reversed a lower court decision that required a more thorough environmental assessment and restored an important approval from federal regulators on the Surface Transportation Board. The board's chair, Patrick Fuchs, said the ruling reins in the scope of environmental reviews that are unnecessarily hindering infrastructure construction throughout the country. The case centres on the Uinta Basin Railway, a proposed 88-mile (142-kilometre) expansion that would connect the oil-rich region of northeast Utah to the national rail network, allowing oil and gas producers to access larger markets and sell to refineries near the Gulf of Mexico. The state's crude oil production was valued at USD 4.1 billion in 2024, according to a Utah Geological Survey report, and could increase substantially under the expansion project. Construction, though, does not appear to be imminent. Project leaders must win additional approvals and secure funding from private-sector partners before they can break ground, said Uinta Basin Railway spokesperson Melissa Cano. Environmental groups and a Colorado county had argued that regulators must consider a broad range of potential impacts when they consider new development, such as increased wildfire risk, the effect of additional crude oil production from the area and increased refining in Gulf Coast states. The justices, though, found that regulators were right to consider the direct effects of the project, rather than the wider upstream and downstream impacts. Kavanaugh wrote that courts should defer to regulators on where to draw the line on what factors to take into account. The goal of the law is to inform agency decision making, not to paralyse it, he said. The court's conservative majority has taken steps to curtail the power of federal regulators in other cases, however, including striking down the decades-old Chevron doctrine that made it easier for the federal government to set a wide range of regulations. Justice Sonia Sotomayor said in a concurrence that the court could have simply cleared the way for the railway approval by saying that regulators did not need to consider increased fossil fuel production tied to the project. Justice Neil Gorsuch did not participate in the case after facing calls to step aside over ties to Philip Anschutz, a Colorado billionaire whose ownership of oil wells in the area means he could benefit if the project goes through. Gorsuch, as a lawyer in private practice, had represented Anschutz. The ruling follows Trump's vow to boost drilling and shift away from former President Joe Biden's focus on renewable energy to combat climate change. The administration announced last month it's speeding up environmental reviews of projects required under the same law at the centre of the Utah case, compressing a process that typically takes a year or more into just weeks. The court's decision gives agencies a green light to ignore the reasonably foreseeable consequences of their decisions and avoid confronting them, said Sambhav Sankar, senior vice president of programmes at Earthjustice. Wendy Park, a senior attorney at the Centre for Biological Diversity, said opponents would continue to fight the Utah project. 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," she said. Utah Gov Spencer Cox, a Republican, said the ruling affirms a balanced approach to environmental oversight. He praised the railroad expansion as a critical infrastructure project that will help restore America's energy independence and bolster the state's rural economy. The project's public partner, a group of seven Utah counties, also applauded the ruling. It represents a turning point for rural Utah bringing safer, sustainable, more efficient transportation options, and opening new doors for investment and economic stability," said Keith Heaton, director of the Seven County Infrastructure Coalition.
