Editor’s Note: Law Week Colorado edits court opinion summaries for style and, when necessary, length.
Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County
Under federal law, new railroad construction and operation must first be approved by the U.S. Surface Transportation Board. In 2020, the Seven County Infrastructure Coalition applied to the board for approval of an 88-mile railroad line connecting Utah’s oil-rich Uinta Basin to the national freight rail network, facilitating the transportation of crude oil to refineries along the Gulf Coast. As part of its project review, the board prepared an environmental impact statement that addressed significant environmental effects of the project and identified feasible alternatives that could mitigate those effects, as required by the National Environmental Policy Act.
The board issued a draft EIS and invited public comment.
After holding six public meetings and collecting more than 1,900 comments, the board prepared a 3,600-page EIS that analyzed numerous impacts of the railway’s construction and operation. Relevant here, the EIS noted, but didn’t fully analyze, the potential environmental effects of increased upstream oil drilling in the Uinta Basin and increased downstream refining of crude oil. The board subsequently approved the railroad line, concluding that the project’s transportation and economic benefits outweighed its environmental impacts. Petitions challenging the board’s action were filed in the D.C. Circuit by a Colorado county and several environmental organizations. The D.C. Circuit found “numerous NEPA violations arising from the EIS.”
Specifically, the D. C. Circuit held that the board impermissibly limited its analysis of the environmental effects from upstream oil drilling and downstream oil refining projects, concluding that those effects were reasonably foreseeable impacts that the EIS should have analyzed more extensively. Based on the deficiencies it found in the EIS, the D.C. Circuit vacated both the EIS and the board’s final approval order.
The U.S. Supreme Court held that the D.C. Circuit failed to afford the board the substantial judicial deference required in NEPA cases and incorrectly interpreted NEPA to require the board to consider the environmental effects of upstream and downstream projects that are separate in time or place from the Uinta Basin Railway.
The high court clarified that NEPA ensures that agencies and the public are aware of the environmental consequences of certain proposed infrastructure projects. As a purely procedural statute, the court wrote that NEPA doesn’t mandate particular results, but simply prescribes the necessary process for an agency’s environmental review of a project. It asserted that some federal courts reviewing NEPA cases have assumed an aggressive role in policing agency compliance with NEPA, and haven’t applied NEPA with the judicial deference demanded by the statutory text and the Supreme Court’s cases.
The Supreme Court wrote that judicial deference in NEPA cases extends to an agency’s determination of what details are relevant in an EIS. While NEPA requires an EIS to be detailed, and the meaning of “detailed” is a legal question as discussed in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the high court found that what details need to be included in any given EIS is a factual determination for the agency.
Contrary to the D.C. Circuit’s NEPA analysis, the U.S. Supreme Court found that the board’s determination that its EIS need not evaluate possible environmental effects from upstream and downstream projects separate from the Uinta Basin Railway complied with NEPA’s procedural requirements, particularly NEPA’s textually mandated focus on the proposed action under agency review. While indirect environmental effects of the project itself may fall within NEPA’s scope even if they might extend outside the geographical territory of the project or materialize later in time, the Supreme Court wrote that the fact that the project might foreseeably lead to the construction or increased use of a separate project does not mean the agency must consider that separate project’s environmental effects. The court opined that this is particularly true where, as here, those separate projects fall outside the agency’s regulatory authority.
The high court also cautioned that NEPA doesn’t 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 Supreme Court reversed and remanded.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh delivered the opinion of the court, in which Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito Jr and Amy Coney Barrett joined. Justice Sonia Sotomayor filed an opinion concurring in the judgment, in which Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson joined. Justice Neil Gorsuch took no part in the consideration or decision of the case.