Supreme Court urged to limit NEPA climate reviews

Red states, Republican legislators and industry groups are rallying behind a request for the Supreme Court to limit the scope of federal climate reviews of projects like highways and pipelines.

The case — which the justices will hear next term — asks the justices to rule that an agency’s National Environmental Policy Act analysis cannot encompass possible effects of a project that the agency does not have direct authority to regulate. At the heart of the fight is the Surface Transportation Board’s NEPA review of an 88-mile railway designed to carry crude oil from Utah’s Uinta Basin.

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court received more than a dozen friends of the court briefs backing a request by the Seven County Infrastructure Coalition, an independent arm of the Utah state government, to find that the Surface Transportation Board need not consider the climate and environmental impacts of additional oil production that would be triggered by the rail project.

The litigation “implies basic principles of cooperative federalism,” said Louisiana Attorney General Elizabeth Murrill in an amicus brief joined by 23 other Republican-led states.