The Supreme Court on Thursday narrowed the scope of National Environmental Policy Act reviews, finding such analyses should be simply "a procedural cross-check, not a substantive roadblock" for private and public projects.
The court reversed a decision from the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals that would have required the Surface Transportation Board, which regulates railroads, to consider impacts of refineries in Louisiana on other parts of the U.S. when approving an 88-mile rail line in Utah that would have been used for shipping oil.
Despite the STB preparing a 3,600-page environmental analysis for the project, the D.C. Circuit found that the agency failed to fully consider environmental effects of the oil that would be transported along the rail line. However, the Supreme Court ruled that the analysis merely needed to address the effects of the Utah rail line, not "the environmental effects of upstream oil drilling or downstream oil refining."
NEPA dates back to 1969 and requires federal agencies to analyze the environmental impacts of proposed projects. The law applies to all major federal actions and often is required before construction of a wide variety of projects listed by the judges, including railroads, airports, wind turbines, transmission lines, dams, highways, bridges, subways, stadiums, arenas and data centers. NEPA is also invoked when agricultural producers seek federal permits for activities ranging from grazing on public lands and building a crossing on a protected waterway.
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Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in the majority opinion, which was joined by four other justices, that courts should give "substantial deference" to agencies deciding the scope of NEPA reviews and "should not micromanage those agency choices so long as they fall within a broad zone of reasonableness."
The court's three liberal justices concurred that STB should not be responsible for the harms caused by the oil industry. But Sonia Sotomayor, who was joined by Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, criticized the majority for "unnecessarily grounding its analysis largely in policy." Instead, she said the decision "follows inexorably from our precedent."
Kavanaugh said some NEPA decisions made by courts have slowed down or blocked many projects, forcing agencies to spend more time crafting longer environmental impact statements. This, he said, has led to some project opponents using the law to block or delay projects that otherwise comply with environmental laws.
"The goal of the law is to inform agency decisionmaking, not to paralyze it," Kavanaugh wrote.
The five-member majority included Kavanaugh, Chief Justice John Roberts, and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Amy Coney Barrett.
Justice Neil Gorsuch recused himself from the case.
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