Supreme Court limits environmental reviews of infrastructure projects
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SCOTUS Limits Environmental Reviews for Infrastructure
Above: Mirror Lake, Uinta Basin, Utah. Image copyright: Wikimedia Commons
The Spin
Pro-establishment narrative
The ruling is a necessary correction to overreaching environmental regulations that have unnecessarily delayed and increased costs for critical infrastructure projects. The decision will promote more efficient and effective NEPA reviews, allowing vital economic development while still maintaining reasonable environmental safeguards. The 3,600-page environmental review for an 88-mile railway demonstrates how excessive these requirements had become.
Establishment-critical narrative
This decision severely undermines America's bedrock environmental law and gives agencies the green light to ignore the foreseeable consequences of their decisions. The ruling will lead to increased pollution, intensified climate crises, and degraded public health, by allowing agencies to avoid considering the full scope of environmental impacts from major infrastructure projects.