Tuesday Open Thread

4 thoughts on “Tuesday Open Thread”

1. CPR: US Supreme Court will hear Uinta oil train case that could limit bedrock environmental law

   At the center of the case is an argument over whether federal agencies must evaluate a project’s environmental effects that are outside of their authority to regulate. A ruling that limits the scope of environmental reviews could speed up federal permits for a wide range of projects, ranging from mines to solar farms.

   The Guardian suggests the case initially was limited, but now has potential disruptive impacts:

   Still, the railway’s backers persuaded the court to take the case to ostensibly resolve a narrow issue, on whether Nepa requires agencies to “study environmental effects that they do not regulate”. After it was accepted, the brief was expanded to argue for a “wholesale revision of how we do Nepa analysis”, according to Sankar.

   “If the court were to write that kind of an opinion, this could be one of the biggest environmental law cases of the last decade – right among this court’s environmental law busters on the Clean Water Act, and the Chevron doctrine.”

   Log in to Reply

   1. Part of the originalist nutjob SCOTUS majority's MO is to take cases it has no business taking and to take cases for broader purposes than the case itself would suggest.  The notion that there is any shred of fidelity to stare decisis is long gone with this lot of bad amateur historians in long black dresses

      Log in to Reply

2. Pete Kolbenschlag, weigh in please, if you still read Pols these days.

   Log in to Reply

3. In line with the corporate, “We do what we can get away with” attitude displayed here was this in today’s New York Times:
   https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/06/opinion/united-health-care-ceo-shooting.html

   Log in to Reply