/>iOn May 29, 2025, the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, No. 23-975, 605 U.S. ___ (2025), sharply limiting the scope of environmental review obligations under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). In a unanimous ruling, the Court held that federal agencies may reasonably focus their environmental reviews on the direct impacts of the projects they are charged with reviewing. Agencies, the Court emphasized, are not required to consider the environmental ripple effects of unrelated or future projects—particularly those lying within the jurisdiction of other regulators.
In so doing, the Court swept aside a line of D.C. Circuit and lower court decisions that had gradually expanded NEPA’s reach, turning what was once a procedural check into an onerous, open-ended roadblock to project development. Under that now-rejected approach, agencies often found themselves compelled to analyze speculative downstream effects with little relevance to the core project under consideration.
The ruling returns NEPA to its statutory roots—as a procedural tool designed to inform agency decision-making, not paralyze it. The Court’s opinion expressly seeks to restore balance, cautioning against what Justice Kavanaugh called the transformation of NEPA into a “blunt and haphazard tool employed by project opponents” to stall or derail infrastructure development.
The Court’s ruling carries significant implications for environmental law and infrastructure development:
1. Clearer Constraints on Environmental Reviews: Seven County reinforces the principle that under NEPA, agencies are required to evaluate only the environmental effects of the specific project or action before them. NEPA does not require agencies to analyze the environmental impacts off separate projects that differ in time, location, or fall outside of the agency’s regulatory authority.
2. Agency Expertise: The Court stressed that reviewing courts must afford “substantial deference” to agencies under NEPA. Unlike Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo (2024), which limited deference to agency statutory interpretations, NEPA grants reviewing agencies discretion about “where to draw the line—including (i) how far to go in considering indirect environmental effects from the project at hand and (ii) whether to analyze environmental effects from other projects separate in time or place from the project at hand. “On those kinds of questions… agencies possess discretion and must have broad latitude to draw a ‘manageable line.’”
3. Greater Certainty for Infrastructure Development: By narrowing the scope of required environmental analysis, the decision reduces litigation risk for energy, transportation, and infrastructure projects—especially in the fossil fuel sector. It curtails the use of NEPA as a tool to delay projects through demands for broad climate or downstream pollution analysis. For example, an environmental review of a FERC-jurisdictional pipeline would generally not need to consider the downstream greenhouse gas emissions from the gas combustion facilities it supplies. As a result, we may see fewer NEPA challenges based on indirect or cumulative effects.
