MAY 30, 2025 |
Photo – Uinta Basin Railway logo – Courtesy Uinta Basin Railway website
Governor Mark Gordon applauded Thursday’s ruling by the United States Supreme Court limiting the scope of environmental reviews of infrastructure projects. The Court ruled that under the National Environmental Protection Act federal agencies are not required to consider indirect impacts of an infrastructure project.
Environmental groups had used NEPA to stop projects in recent years.
In September 2024, Wyoming and 23 other states filed an amicus brief in support of the petitioners. Governor Gordon said in a statement:
“This is a welcome decision and fits exactly with my longstanding belief that NEPA has been co-opted to obstruct development wherever and whenever. Its valuable use as a tool to understand the environmental impacts of proposed actions has been diminished.”
Governor Gordon applauded the Supreme Court for what he characterized as a “law that has been abused for too long and for resetting it so it may no longer be utilized as a roadblock to responsible use of our resources.”
In Thursday’s 8-0 ruling, the Supreme Court narrowed the scope of environmental review under one of the nation’s bedrock environmental laws.
According to the ruling, the high court determined NEPA reviews do not need to consider certain upstream or downstream impacts of infrastructure projects, ranging from highways to pipelines.
At issue in the case was a federal government’s assessment of a proposed railway line to ship oil in Utah.
A lower court ruled the government’s review was inadequate because it did not fully consider the impacts of increased oil production and refining that could occur as a result of the railway project. The majority opinion, written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, disagreed.
Yesterday’s opinion also reins in federal courts from blocking projects along similar grounds. “NEPA does not allow courts, ‘under the guise of judicial review’ of agency compliance with NEPA, to delay or block agency projects based on the environmental effects of other projects separate from the project at hand,” the majority opinion reads.
The court’s liberal justices reached the same conclusion as their conservative counterparts — that the Surface Transportation Board did not need to consider the environmental impacts of drilling upstream or refining downstream.
Kavanaugh was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Amy Coney Barrett. Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a separate, concurring opinion joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Justice Neil Gorsuch recused himself from the case.
The proposed railroad at the center of the case is called the Uinta Basin Railway. The 88-mile rail line connects Utah to a national train network that will connect it to refineries along the Gulf of Mexico. Environmental groups and a Colorado county sued, arguing the federal review of the project was inadequate. An attorney for the Sierra Club lamented the high court had “scored one for the oil companies.”
Wyoming Congresswoman Harriet Hageman celebrated the decision, saying, “Environmentalists, for years, destroyed development in the U.S., aided by judicial misapplication of NEPA.”
