Supreme Court backs Utah oil railroad expansion and scales back a key environmental law
Supreme Court backs Utah oil railroad expansion and scales back a key environmental law
Supreme Court scales back a key environmental law in a ruling that could speed development projects
The 8-0 decision comes after an appeal to the high court from backers of the project, which is aimed at quadrupling oil production in the remote area of sandstone and sagebrush.
Environmental groups said the decision would have sweeping impacts on National Environmental Policy Act reviews across the country. The Trump administration has already said it’s speeding up that process after the president vowed to boost U.S. oil and gas development.
Environmental groups and a Colorado county had argued that regulators must consider a broad range of potential impacts when they consider new development, such as increased wildfire risk, the effect of additional crude oil production from the area and increased refining in Gulf states.
The justices, though, found that regulators were right to consider the direct effects of the project, rather than the wider upstream and downstream impact. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote that courts should defer to regulators on “where to draw the line” on what factors to take into account. Four other conservative justices joined his opinion.
Sometimes legal decisions are spurred by events but have little to do with those events. This appears to be a case where the initial arguments that they disagreed with, were that studies should take into account a wide range of what-ifs, not just what would actually happen.
Whether that's reasonable to me or not, the justices felt a federal law couldn't be interpreted to mean "and what if an earthquake happened?" as blocking something if for example, there was no evidence for frequent or serious earthquakes. That's my interpretation.
Personally, I'm continually disappointed in this court for obvious reasons, but the knee-jerk hating on them does have nuance, whether we want to know about it or not.
Under almost any other federal administration I'd agree with you, but the current one has the morality of a rock and should not, in it's current state, have any say in the matter.
Yeah, I know. It’s really pathetic.