Supreme Court weighs limits on key federal environmental law
Justices on the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday appeared generally willing to strike a blow against a key federal environmental law in a case brought by Coloradans against a controversial Utah oil-train project — but they struggled to reach a consensus on exactly how to define the new limits they might impose on the law.
Petitioners in the case, Seven County Infrastructure Coalition vs. Eagle County, are asking the justices to reverse a lower court ruling against approval of the Uinta Basin Railway, an 88-mile railroad project in eastern Utah that Coloradans and environmental advocates sued to stop.
The railway would connect the Uinta Basin oil field to the national rail network, allowing drillers there to dramatically ramp up production of crude oil to be shipped in tanker cars to refineries on the Gulf Coast — a route that runs directly through the Colorado River Valley and the Denver metro area. The project would constitute one of the largest sustained efforts to transport oil by rail ever undertaken in the U.S., singlehandedly more than doubling the 2022 nationwide total, and resulting in up to a tenfold increase in hazmat rail shipments through central Colorado.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit sided with Colorado’s Eagle County and five environmental groups, ruling last year that the project’s approval contained “numerous” and “significant” violations of the National Environmental Policy Act. But the Utah county governments behind the project successfully petitioned for a review by the conservative-dominated Supreme Court.
https://washingtonstatestandard.com/2024/12/10/supreme-court-weighs-limits-on-key-federal-environmental-law/