By Bracewell.
On December 10, 2024, the US Supreme Court heard oral argument in Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, the first major National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) case to reach the Supreme Court in nearly two decades. The Court’s questioning suggests it is considering either curtailing the scope of NEPA review or guiding lower courts to less searching, more deferential reviews of assessments under NEPA — or both.
The Fight About NEPA’s Scope
The question before the court is whether NEPA requires an agency to evaluate environmental impacts beyond the proximate effects of the action over which the agency has regulatory authority. Under NEPA, federal agencies have an obligation to evaluate the environmental impacts of a federal action that are “reasonably foreseeable†effects of the action. The Seven County petitioners assert that lower courts have gone too far in requiring that agencies address ever more remote upstream and downstream effects, despite the Court’s 2004 holding in the Public Citizen case that “where an agency has no ability to prevent a certain effect due to its limited statutory authority over the relevant actions, the agency cannot be considered a legally relevant ‘cause’ of the effect.†In Seven County, the Supreme Court has an opportunity to clarify the proper scope of agency review under NEPA, and in doing so it may also offer guidance on how searching a court’s review of NEPA compliance should be.
The infrastructure project at the center of the litigation is a proposed 88-mile-long railway in Utah’s Uinta Basin.
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