Supreme Court curtails judicial scrutiny of environmental reviews

Roll Call -  The Supreme Court narrowed federal judicial scrutiny of environmental reviews by federal agencies, ruling Thursday that courts should defer to agency decisions about the scope and content of statements on the environmental effects of a project.

The decision also finds that while those agency impact statements need to address the environmental effects of the project at hand, the statements do not have to consider the effects of separate projects.

The court’s majority, in an opinion written by Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, found that an appellate court did not provide the U. S. Surface Transportation Board with “substantial judicial deference” in a case tied to the approval of an 88-mile stretch of railroad line in Utah.

The decision reversed a lower court ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which held that the board should have reviewed broader potential impacts from the Utah railroad project, including potential dangers to the Colorado River and impacts on Gulf Coast communities from increased oil drilling upstream and increased oil refining downstream.

But the Supreme Court found that appellate court incorrectly interpreted the National Environmental Policy Act, also known as NEPA, to require the board to consider “the environmental effects of upstream and downstream projects that are separate in time or place from the Uinta Basin Railway.”