Source link : https://las-vegas.news/supreme-court-docket-narrows-scope-of-environmental-evaluations-in-utah-railroad-case/
The Supreme Court docket has narrowed the scope of environmental evaluation below one of many nation’s bedrock environmental legal guidelines.
In an 8-0 ruling Thursday, the excessive court docket decided evaluations carried out below the Nationwide Environmental Coverage Act (NEPA) don’t want to contemplate sure upstream or downstream impacts of an infrastructure challenge.
The NEPA requires the federal government to contemplate the proposed impacts of assorted infrastructure initiatives, starting from highways to pipelines.
At concern within the case was a federal authorities’s evaluation of a proposed railway line to ship oil in Utah.
A decrease court docket dominated the federal government’s evaluation was insufficient as a result of it didn’t totally contemplate the impacts of elevated oil manufacturing and refining that might happen on account of the railway challenge. The bulk opinion, written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, disagreed.
“When the effects of an agency action arise from a separate project—for example, a possible future project or one that is geographically distinct from the project at hand—NEPA does not require the agency to evaluate the effects of that separate project,” he wrote.
Nonetheless, he wrote that environmental evaluation “may” embody the oblique impacts of a selected challenge.
“The environmental effects of the project at issue may fall within NEPA even if those effects might extend outside the geographical territory…
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Author : LasVegasNews
Publish date : 2025-05-30 04:56:00
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