On Thursday, the Supreme Court dealt a body blow to America’s bedrock environmental law, the National Environmental Policy Act. The court issued a unanimous decision that will buttress the Donald Trump administration’s efforts to gut the law and fast track fossil fuel projects.

Environmental advocates contend that the result of Thursday’s opinion over a proposed oil train will be more Americans exposed to preventable environmental, health, and climate harms, a well as reduced public participation in key government decision-making. The largest and most immediate beneficiary is the fossil fuel industry.

Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, Colorado is now the latest in a growing list of radical opinions issued by the Supreme Court that undercut the nation’s foundational environmental and civil rights protections.

At issue is the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The 1970 law requires federal agencies to consider the potential impacts on “the human environment” prior to issuing authorizations for major projects, such as pipelines, refineries, and highways, and to inform and allow the public to weigh-in on its decision. The public is also empowered to bring legal action against the federal government if it fails to comply with these rules.

“NEPA has proven to be a vital civil rights tool that empowers those who have historically been excluded from decision-making processes,” writes the Howard University School of Law Civil Rights Clinic in a friend of the court brief. “NEPA ensures that all people with a stake in federal action — regardless of race, color, national origin, tribal affiliation, or income — can have a voice.”

Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote the opinion for the conservative supermajority, ruling to severely circumscribe the law to focus only on the most immediate impacts of a given project. The liberals agreed with the conservatives — to an extent. Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a concurring opinion joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, agreeing with the majority’s decision to reject a lower-court ruling, but arguing for a much more limited finding in the case. Justice Neil Gorsuch recused himself, likely due to his fossil fuel industry ties.

“It really underscores the extent to which seemingly unanimous opinions can actually conceal a lot of disagreement,” constitutional law professor Leah Litman of the University of Michigan Law School tells me. Litman is the author of Lawless: How the Supreme Court Runs on Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories, and Bad Vibes and a cohost of the popular Supreme Court podcast, Strict Scrutiny. “It’s clear that the three Democratic appointees diverge pretty sharply from the majority opinion in their views about NEPA. They fault the majority opinion for writing unnecessarily broadly.”

“The court certainly ruled against the plaintiffs, but it went far beyond that to mount a broad attack on NEPA itself,” says Sambhav Sankar, senior vice president for programs for the environmental law firm Earthjustice, a respondent in the case. “This administration is going to treat this ruling as permission to ignore the environment entirely as it promotes fossil fuels, attacks clean energy, tries to roll back sensible pollution regulations, [and] claim that it can entirely ignore the reality of climate change when it makes its decisions.”

The Seven County case involves a dispute over construction of a new 88-mile stretch of railway to carry “waxy” crude oil out of Utah’s Uinta Basin by connecting to an existing national railway. The oil would travel from Utah through Colorado, and on to Texas and Louisiana where the oil would be refined.

Eagle County, Colorado, and five environmental organizations argued that, in granting authorization for the Uinta Basin Railway, the federal U.S. Surface Transportation Board during the previous Trump administration failed to conduct a full analysis required under NEPA. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit largely agreed. It found that the board ignored key “upstream” and “downstream” harms, such as from increased oil production in Utah, from increased rail traffic in Colorado, and increased refining in the Gulf Coast. The proponents of the railway appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The case has drawn the attention of the nation’s most powerful legal operatives, from the conservative lawyers group, the Federalist Society, to the nation’s largest oil industry and business lobbies, including the American Petroleum Institute and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

The majority opinion leans heavily on the amicus brief submitted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the world’s largest business organization, which often spends more money on federal lobbying than any other group. ExxonMobil holds a leadership position in the Chamber. Justice Samuel Alito participated in the decision despite owning stock in several oil and gas companies as recently as September 2024 and recusing himself from prior fossil fuel-related cases, presumably because of these potential conflicts. Last term, Alito agreed with the Chamber in 73 percent of cases.

Justice Kavanaugh quotes the Chamber in describing NEPA as “a 1970 legislative acorn [that] has grown over the years into a judicial oak that has hindered infrastructure development.” The opinion then describes new limits on the scope of NEPA, allowing that “an agency may decline to evaluate environmental effects from separate projects upstream or downstream from the project at issue” particularly where “those separate projects fall outside the agency’s regulatory authority.” In an effort to limit future litigation, the opinion then calls for significant deference to be given by the courts to the government agency conducting the NEPA review.

The effect of the ruling is to allow agencies to focus their analysis only on the immediate project proposal before them — in this case, the 88 miles of new rail. Major infrastructure projects, however, rarely have such circumscribed effects, particularly when considering impacts such as greenhouse gas emissions.

Backers of the railway, for example, anticipate its construction will facilitate a quintupling of overall oil production in the Uinta Basin, creating a new colossal oil fracking hub. Uinta’s oil is described as “waxy oil” due to its uniquely thick viscosity and must be heated to be transported.

The Uinta Railway would carry an estimated 350,000 new barrels of this waxy oil per day, sent in two-mile-long trains hauling 110 oil tanker cars, from Utah and on to Colorado, through an at-times treacherous 100-mile track along the Colorado River. It would travel down to refineries located in some of the hardest-hit environmental justice communities in Texas and Louisiana’s Cancer Alley, in areas already overburdened by pollution.

Opponents predict health harms from increased pollution for people living in states along the entire route. They cite increased pollution from more oil fracking in Utah and the risk of train derailments leading to oil spills into the Colorado River, which would threaten the drinking water supply of 40 million people in seven states across the Southwest, including 30 Native American Tribes. The climate impacts of burning an extra 350,000 barrels of oil a day would produce 53 million tons of carbon dioxide, roughly the equivalent of six coal-powered power plants.

Writing a letter in opposition to the railway, communities in Louisiana where the oil would be refined say, “We have worked hard to reduce the disproportionate burdens of pollution and environmental injustice on our communities caused by the fossil fuel industry. The massive influx of oil via train from Utah will only make our situation worse.”

The majority opinion seeks to limit NEPA review to a consideration of only the immediate impacts on people and the environment along the 88-miles of new railway.

“It is disastrous,” says Wendy Park of the ruling. Park is a senior attorney at the national environmental protection organization, the Center for Biological Diversity, another respondent in the case. She has personally been litigating against the Uinta Basin Railway since 2018. The ruling “draws artificial boundaries around the scope of NEPA review, ignoring decades of precedent and the plain language of NEPA, which says that agencies are required to consider the reasonably foreseeable effects of their proposed actions. This decision essentially allows agencies to bury their head in the sand and ignore harmful effects to air, water, and wildlife, and it will mean more pollution, more habitat destruction, more unhealthy communities.”

“This decision will embolden agencies to ignore the climate consequences of their proposed actions.” Park adds, “It is probably just the worst possible outcome that we could have imagined.”

A key reason for Park’s concern is the context within which the ruling is taking place. The Trump administration is actively working to gut NEPA by taking out its legs. In April, the administration repealed the regulations used to implement the law across federal agencies. The administration also told agencies that they should no longer consider climate, environmental justice, or cumulative impacts of operations when conducting their analyses.

“Basically, the administration is stripping all substance from NEPA,” Andrew Mergen tells me. Mergen spent some three decades at the environmental division of the Department of Justice and has likely litigated more NEPA cases than any other lawyer in history. He is the Faculty Director of the Emmett Environmental Law & Policy Clinic at Harvard Law School. He describes Seven Counties as the most significant NEPA case in twenty years.

Mergen calls NEPA, “a profoundly important statute” and “the most copied and emulated environmental statute of all time,” influencing the way the states, other countries, and international financial institutions approach environmental disclosures. “The NEPA process results in countless projects that are redesigned in a way that avoid stupid, ill-intentioned, unnecessary harms to the environment.” He recently co-authored a paper (and shared another) dispelling many myths about NEPA and environmental permitting as the objects of undo infrastructure obstruction.

He supports deference to agency experts in decision-making, but questions the Supreme Court’s timing, because “those people are, by and large, gone, the agencies are being hollowed out,” because “Trump is in the process of completely gutting the federal agencies.”

There is also more than a little bit of irony in the majority’s adoption of agency deference, given its repeatedly articulated disdain for federal agencies as the backbone of the “administrative state.” Less than one year ago, the Supreme Court’s ultraconservative supermajority ruled to overturn the Chevron doctrine, which had instructed courts to generally show deference to how federal agencies implement and enforce the law. The case, known as Loper Bright, was argued by lawyer Paul Clement. Clement also argued on behalf of the railway in Seven Counties, this time asking for more agency deference, which the majority agreed to.

Mergen also shares the concerns voiced by the environmental justice community of constraining NEPA’s lens.

“For decades, Black, Latinx, and Indigenous communities have borne the brunt of environmental hazards, breathing in polluted air, living near toxic waste, and facing the worst effects of climate change. NEPA has served as a key tool for advocates to combat these injustices,” said Lourdes M. Rosado, President and General Counsel, LatinoJustice in a statement. “Rolling back NEPA’s regulations is an outright attack on communities of color.”

Responding to Thursday’s ruling, John Beard, Jr. who lives in Port Arthur, Texas — a small majority Black and Hispanic community and the site of a Valero refinery expected to receive the new Uinta Basin Railway oil trains — asks me, “Who is ultimately going to be held responsible if these NEPA concerns are not addressed and looked at? That’s the question.”

Beard says that the matter is ultimately about the lives and health of people in his community and all along the rail, and the ruling “seems to be a way of deferring responsibility and marginalizing those communities that are going to be adversely affected, so that their voice can’t be heard.”

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