The US supreme court on Thursday backed a multibillion-dollar oil railroad expansion in Utah, endorsing a scaled-back interpretation of a key environmental law that could pave the way for faster fossil fuel expansion.
In a unanimous ruling, the supreme court justices overturned a lower court’s decision that had halted the fossil fuel project on the grounds that an environmental impact assessment by a federal agency had been too limited in scope.
Thursday’s ruling upends five decades of legal precedent by limiting the scope of the National Environmental Policy Act (Nepa) – the country’s landmark environmental legislation passed by Congress and signed by Richard Nixon in 1970.
“This ruling hands fossil fuel developers a hall pass to continue to destroy our climate. The supreme court’s decision endangers local communities, many of them Indigenous and rural, in favor of the dirty energy status quo. It weakens communities’ ability to stop harmful developments, ignores the cumulative harm of polluting projects, and gives federal agencies even more power to rubber-stamp infrastructure that threatens our water, air and climate,” said Ashfaq Khalfan, Oxfam America’s director of climate justice.
“After the hottest year on record, when the US should be improving environmental safeguards and empowering frontline communities, this decision is a giant step backwards.”
The case centers on the Uinta Basin Railway, a proposed 88-mile (142-km) expansion in north-eastern Utah that would connect oil and gas producers to the broader rail network and allow them to access larger markets.
The proposed railway would transport up to 350,000 barrels of waxy crude oil a day from the sparsely populated Uinta Basin through the Colorado Rockies to refineries on the Gulf coast. If completed, the railway would more than quadruple oil production in the Uinta Basin, by linking the oilfields to national rail networks and a handful of refineries in Texas and Louisiana.
The project is backed by a coalition of seven Utah counties and an infrastructure investment group, but Thursday’s ruling will be seen as a major victory for the fossil fuel industry more broadly, which has for decades lobbied against Nepa.
“Our bedrock environmental laws, like Nepa, are meant to ensure people are protected from corporate polluters. Regrettably, the supreme court has scored one for the oil companies who don’t want you to look too closely at the harm their product will do to Black and brown communities in Cancer Alley … Today’s decision will undoubtedly help the fossil fuel industry,” said Sierra Club senior attorney Nathaniel Shoaff.
The case tested the scope of environmental impact studies that federal agencies must conduct under a US law called the National Environmental Policy Act, enacted in 1970 to prevent environmental harms that might result from major projects. The law mandates that agencies examine the “reasonably foreseeable” effects of a project.
The supreme court heard arguments on 10 December in the case, which has been closely watched by companies and environmental groups for how the ruling might affect a wider range of infrastructure and energy projects.
Environmental reviews that are too broad in scope can add years to the regulatory timeline, risking a project’s viability and future infrastructure development, according to companies and business trade groups.
The Surface Transportation Board, which has regulatory authority over new railroad lines, issued an environmental impact statement and approved the railway proposal in 2021.
The Center for Biological Diversity and other environmental groups sued over approval, as did Colorado’s Eagle county, which noted that the project would increase train traffic in its region and double traffic on an existing rail line along the Colorado River.
The US court of appeals for the District of Columbia circuit ruled in favor of the challengers in 2023, concluding that the environmental review inadequately analyzed the effects of increased oil production in the basin as well as downstream, where the oil would be refined.
Joe Biden’s administration had backed the railway coalition in the case, as did the state of Utah.
Fifteen other states supported the challengers. Colorado said its economy relies on outdoor recreation, and that the project raises the risk of leaks, spills or rail car accidents near the Colorado River’s headwaters.
Conservative justice Neil Gorsuch recused himself from the case after some Democratic lawmakers urged his withdrawal because businessman Philip Anschutz, his former legal client, had a financial interest in its outcome.
