US Supreme Court eases key environmental law to speed development projects

Business Standard

30-05-2025

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.