WASHINGTON, DC – Following today’s decision at the Supreme Court in Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, a case in which the Supreme Court considered whether the National Environmental Policy Act requires federal agencies to study all the reasonably foreseeable environmental effects of proposed projects before approving them, Constitutional Accountability Center Senior Appellate Counsel Miriam Becker-Cohen issued the following reaction:

Today’s decision will have drastic negative consequences for our natural environment. The Court gave the green light to a major railroad project despite the Surface Transportation Board’s failure to consider all the reasonably foreseeable environmental effects of the project—including increased oil drilling and refining made possible by the project. This narrow construction of the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, is at odds with that statute’s text and history, as well as contemporaneous and consistent interpretations of NEPA by the agency charged with administering it.

At the same time, the public should not overread this decision. The Court reached it primarily through deference to the Surface Transportation Board—reviewing the Board’s decision only to ensure that it was not “arbitrary and capricious.” And although the Court held that the reasonably foreseeable effects of separate projects, like oil drilling and refining, need not be considered in NEPA environmental reviews, it made clear that “the environmental effects of the project at issue” may still “fall within NEPA even if those effects might extend outside the geographical territory of the project or might materialize later in time.”