The Supreme Court on Thursday limited the scope of environmental reviews of major infrastructure projects in a decision that could speed up approvals of highways, airports and pipelines.
The decision is the latest setback for environmentalists at the conservative Supreme Court, which has in recent years shut down regulations intended to protect wetlands, for instance, and reduce air pollution wafting across state lines. President Donald Trump repeatedly slammed the government’s environmental review process as too cumbersome.
The National Environmental Policy Act, signed by President Richard Nixon, is considered one of the foundational environmental laws formed at the beginning of the modern environmental movement.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote the opinion for the court and there were no dissents. Ultimately, both liberal and conservative justices agreed with the bottom line decision.
Kavanaugh wrote that the environmental question at issue in the case – an 88-mile railway that would carry waxy crude oil from the Uinta Basin in Utah to existing rail networks – was “not close.”
“Courts should afford substantial deference and should not micromanage those agency choices so long as they fall within a broad zone of reasonableness,” Kavanaugh wrote.
“Simply stated, NEPA is a procedural cross-check, not a substantive roadblock,” he later added. “The goal of the law is to inform agency decisionmaking, not to paralyze it.”
Justice Neil Gorsuch, a conservative, recused himself from the case. He did not explain his decision to back away from the appeal but the move came after Democrats on Capitol Hill argued that Denver-based billionaire Philip Anschutz, a longtime ally of Gorsuch, had a financial interest in the outcome of the case.
The court’s three liberals – Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson – agreed with the outcome of the case but had different reasoning. Writing for the three, Sotomayor said that such environmental reviews conducted by federal agencies should be limited to their own expertise. The Surface Transportation Board, which conducted the review in this case, is primarily focused on transportation projects, not oil refining.
“Under NEPA, agencies must consider the environmental impacts for which their decisions would be responsible,” Sotomayor wrote. “Here, the board correctly determined it would not be responsible for the consequences of oil production upstream or downstream from the railway because it could not lawfully consider those consequences as part of the approval process.”
