The Supreme Court on Thursday narrowed the scope of environmental reviews required for major infrastructure projects, a ruling that could accelerate the approval process for highways, airports, and pipelines.
The decision marks another defeat for environmental advocates at the conservative-leaning Court, which has previously rolled back protections for wetlands and curtailed efforts to limit cross-state air pollution. President Donald Trump has long criticized the federal environmental review process as overly burdensome and a barrier to development.
At issue was the National Environmental Policy Act, a landmark law signed by President Richard Nixon that has served as a cornerstone of federal environmental oversight since the early days of the modern environmental movement, CNN reported.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh authored the unanimous opinion, with no dissents from the bench. Both liberal and conservative justices concurred with the final outcome.
Kavanaugh wrote that the environmental issue at the heart of the case—an 88-mile railway intended to transport waxy crude oil from Utah’s Uinta Basin to existing rail lines—was “not close,” indicating a clear-cut decision in the Court’s view.
“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 without providing a reason. His decision followed calls from congressional Democrats, who pointed to a potential conflict of interest involving Denver-based billionaire Philip Anschutz, a longtime associate of Gorsuch, who reportedly had a financial stake in the case’s outcome.
The Court’s three liberal justices—Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson—concurred with the ruling but based their agreement on different reasoning. In an opinion written for the trio, Sotomayor argued that environmental reviews conducted by federal agencies should be confined to areas within their specific expertise.
She noted that the Surface Transportation Board, which oversaw the review in question, is primarily focused on transportation infrastructure, not the environmental impacts of oil refining, CNN said.
“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.”
