Grijalva, Sen. Markey Lead Amicus Brief to SCOTUS Affirming NEPA’s Role in Assessing Climate Change, Environmental Justice
WASHINGTON – Today, U.S. House Natural Resources Committee Ranking Member Raúl M. Grijalva (D-Ariz.) and U.S. Senator Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) filed an amicus brief signed by a total of 30 Members of Congress to the U.S. Supreme Court, in the case of Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, Colorado.
The lawmakers filed the amicus brief to support the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which has been critical in ensuring that federal agencies consider climate change and environmental justice impacts in federal decision-making, including permitting decisions for fossil fuel projects. Federal courts have repeatedly affirmed the role of NEPA in assessing the impacts of climate change, including in the case now before the U.S. Supreme Court.
In the amicus brief, the lawmakers highlight that, contrary to the petitioners’ assertion, Congress specifically intended for NEPA to provide a proactive, coordinated, holistic assessment of both upstream and downstream environmental impacts of federal decisions, like climate change impacts. They write, “Congress never meant for NEPA to be a ‘narrow,’ ministerial, box-checking formality. To the contrary, NEPA became law because, pre-NEPA, environmental policy was ‘too narrow, too limited, and too specialized.’ There was simply no sense of interagency coordination or collaboration. What NEPA did, then, was ‘supplement existing, but narrow and fractionated, congressional declarations’ by establishing an ‘orderly, rational, and constructive’ procedure for considering the environment in agency decision-making.”
The lawmakers further affirm the congressional intent of NEPA, pointing to the many legislative reforms that have altered NEPA, yet kept its core purpose of comprehensively assessing environmental impacts intact.
BACKGROUND
Last year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit found that NEPA required federal agencies to properly consider climate change impacts for a proposed rail line to move crude oil extracted from the Uinta Basin in Utah to refineries in the Gulf Coast. The railway expansion is estimated to increase oil production by five-fold, or roughly 350,000 barrels a day, generating significant carbon emissions. The fossil fuel industry appealed the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that federal agencies should not fully consider the project’s impacts on climate change or the health of those living in communities near oil refineries served by the rail line, many of which are already overburdened by industry pollution. The industry’s argument runs counter to the role of NEPA in requiring federal agencies to consider the reasonably foreseeable environmental impacts of proposed projects in their decision-making.
READ the lawmakers’ amicus brief here.
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