In a ruling with sweeping implications for environmental law and infrastructure development, the US Supreme Court recently overturned a lower court decision that had halted the Uinta Basin Railway—a proposed rail line linking Utah’s oil-rich Uinta Basin to the national freight network.
The high court’s decision not only revived a major energy project but also corrected a troubling trend: the misuse of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) to obstruct economic development through ever-expanding regulatory demands.
The legal battle was years in the making. In 2021, the US Surface Transportation Board (STB) approved the railway, which would serve an area accounting for 85 percent of Utah’s oil and gas production. But in 2023, the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia blocked the project, ruling that its environmental impact statement (EIS) was insufficient. “It is clear that the Board failed to adequately consider the Rail Policies and ‘articulate a satisfactory explanation for its action,’” the court wrote.
The Seven County Infrastructure Coalition—a group of eastern Utah counties backing the railway—vowed to appeal. Meanwhile, environmental activists hailed the ruling, calling the project “a financial boondoggle and a climate bomb.”
Their celebration, however, was short-lived.
Last month, in Seven County Infrastructure Coalition et al v. Eagle County, Colorado, the Supreme Court unanimously overturned the DC appeals court in a ruling that will rein in judicial overreach under NEPA—a law that environmental groups and judicial activists have used not as a constitutional tool for environmental safeguards, but as a means to delay or derail infrastructure and energy projects altogether.
Who Gets to Decide?
Though environmental groups labeled the Uinta Basin Railway project a “climate bomb,” it’s important to note that the project was simply a proposed railway. The proposed project doesn’t involve new drilling permits or additional oil wells, just an 88-mile stretch of railroad through an expanse of desert. But as the Salt Lake Tribune noted, the project stood to triple oil exports from the basin—from 90,000 barrels a day to as much as 350,000.
In other words, the primary sin of the project was that it would result in increased output and transportation of oil and natural gas, which environmental groups argued could harm the environment.
At the center of the legal dispute is NEPA, the 1970 law signed by President Richard Nixon that requires federal agencies to examine the environmental impacts of infrastructure projects.
In the Seven County case, the STB concluded that the economic benefits of the railway project outweighed its environmental costs. The DC court said the STB couldn’t know if this was actually the case, since it did not sufficiently analyze the “upstream” and “downstream” environmental impacts of increased oil and natural gas transportation and production.
The STB, however, said these matters were out of its jurisdiction, stating it had “no authority … over development of oil and gas in the Basin nor any authority to control or mitigate the impacts of any such development.”
“Severe Difficulties” Satisfying Courts
Like many constitutional issues, the Seven County case comes down to a simple question: who gets to decide?
This is not always an easy question to answer. The US constitutional system was designed to be one of checks and balances, and recent history shows every branch of government has been prone to stepping outside of its constitutional authority.
Law professor Mario Loyola last year noted that the Seven County case is in some ways the mirror of the Supreme Court’s 2024 decision to abandon the “Chevron deference” doctrine, which had given agencies leeway in interpreting statutes. “If deciding questions of law is the province of courts under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA),” wrote Loyola, “technical and policy judgments are the competence of administrative agencies—so long as they are acting within their jurisdiction and expertise.”
By overturning the DC Circuit, the high court affirmed that judges cannot impose open-ended environmental mandates beyond their statutory authority.
Loyola makes a good point. Courts should retain primary authority when it comes to interpreting the law, while agencies should be granted leeway in making technical or policy decisions—provided they operate within the bounds of the law. Historically, however, this has not been the way NEPA has been enforced.
Writing at The Atlantic, Nicholas Bagley points out that almost immediately following the passage of NEPA, the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit took executive branch officials to task for approving a nuclear plant in Maryland without taking sufficient consideration of potential environmental harms. A flood of court orders followed.
“Within a couple of years, judges blocked construction of a huge oil pipeline in Alaska; delayed highway construction in Arlington, Virginia; and stopped a new dam in Arkansas,” Bagley writes. “Orders halting projects such as nuclear-power plants and forest-timber sales soon became routine.”
In response, federal agencies beefed up bureaucracy. Thousands of experts were hired, environmental reviews became longer, and public review times were extended. Bagley argues these changes were healthy to a certain extent, but came with costs. “Within just a few years,” he writes, “close observers were warning that agencies faced ‘severe difficulties’ in their efforts to satisfy the courts.”
The Uinta Basin Railway is an example of the “severe difficulties” federal agencies face in approving even minor infrastructure projects.
Consider that the STB initiated its environmental impact statement in June of 2019. An initial draft was released in October 2020, which was followed by a four-month public comment period that included half a dozen public meetings. By the time the EIS was completed in August 2021, it was 3,600 pages long and included 1,900 public comments.
The STB spent 26 months on its EIS only to have a federal court say it was “insufficient”—all over an 88-mile railroad through the desert.
A Supreme Reversal
When litigation is included, the environmental and legal process for building Utah’s small rail line will have taken longer than it took the federal government to construct the Hoover Dam.
For decades, scholars have criticized the EPA for overreach—and often with good reason. But activist courts have also played a major role. Indeed, NEPA had become one of the most powerful weapons environmental activists (and judges) possessed for killing infrastructure projects. Bagley notes that for judges “taken with the promise of the nascent environmental movement,” NEPA was “a perfect tool.”
Fortunately, in an 8-0 decision (Justice Neil Gorsuch did not participate), the Supreme Court reminded lower courts of their proper role in a monumental ruling on May 29, emphasizing that it is federal agencies—not judges—that are responsible for evaluating the environmental impacts of projects:
Under NEPA, agencies must consider the environmental impacts for which their decisions would be responsible. 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.
Those words came not from Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who authored the majority opinion, but from Justice Sonia Sotomayor—arguably the most liberal member of the Court—writing in a concurring opinion joined by Justices Kagan and Jackson.
Environmental groups that wrongly view fossil fuels as inherently harmful may bristle at Sotomayor’s decision. But the Court rightly held that NEPA was never intended to serve as “a substantive roadblock” to economic development. Yet that’s exactly what NEPA became, as environmental groups turned to the courts to halt projects they opposed under the guise of judicial review.
For years, some federal courts played along, taking “an aggressive role in policing agency compliance” and effectively paralyzing executive agencies. The Court’s majority offered a reset, laying out a more “straightforward” framework for NEPA cases going forward.
“Courts should review an agency’s EIS to check that it addresses the environmental effects of the project at hand. The EIS need not address the effects of separate projects,” Kavanaugh wrote. “In conducting that review, courts should afford substantial deference to the agency as to the scope and contents of the EIS.”
The Court’s ruling couldn’t come at a more critical time. The US faces an uncertain energy future. To avoid a surge in energy costs, the country must access its resources and rapidly expand its power capacity.
The Supreme Court’s ruling is a step in this direction. At the same time, it restores a measure of constitutional clarity. By overturning the DC Circuit, the high court affirmed that judges cannot impose open-ended environmental mandates beyond their statutory authority.
NEPA may indeed have been “the perfect tool” for environmental groups seeking to thwart infrastructure projects they opposed—but after the court’s ruling, they’ll have to dig deeper into their toolbox.
