May 29 (UPI) — The Supreme Court unanimously reversed a ruling from a lower court Thursday that had stopped a proposed Utah railroad line based on possible environmental effects for which it wouldn’t be directly responsible.
“We reverse,” wrote Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh in the case, in regard to a previous decision by the U.S. Court Of Appeals for D.C., which had halted a group of local Utah counties from the creation of a railroad to move oil in 2020.
The counties, aligned as the Seven County Infrastructure Coalition, had applied to the U. S. Surface Transportation Board to create an 88-mile rail line that would connect Utah’s oil-rich Uinta Basin to the national freight rail network, in order to transport crude oil to refineries along the Gulf Coast.
Despite the preparation and presentation of an environmental impact statement, or EIS, as required by federal law via the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, the project was derailed by a lawsuit. Eagle County, Colo., along with a contingent of environmental groups, sued on the basis that the coalition’s EIS didn’t properly analyze the potential impacts of increased oil drilling in the Uinta Basin and subsequent crude oil refinement.
The Board had approved the project, but the U.S. Court Of Appeals for D.C. ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, on a judgement that declared the EIS violated NEPA due to its lack of information in regard to the drilling and refinement and vacated the whole project.
Kavanaugh wrote that the “D.C. Circuit failed to afford the Board the substantial judicial deference required in NEPA cases and incorrectly interpreted NEPA to require the Board to consider the environmental effects of upstream and downstream projects that are separate in time or place from the [proposed] Uinta Basin Railway.”
He further called the creation of NEPA a “legislative acorn,” which he says grew into a “judicial oak that has hindered infrastructure development ‘under the guise” of just a little more process.”
Kavanaugh wrote that Supreme Court’s reversal of the D.C. Court’s ruling served as a “course correction of sorts” that would bring judicial review under NEPA back in line with “common sense.”
Justice Neil Gorsuch recused himself from the case due to his links to the owner of an oil and gas procurement company who had included a brief of support that backed the Seven County Infrastructure Coalition.
