Environmental Analysis Is Off the Rails
The Supreme Court got it right
The Supreme Court delivered a unanimous decision this week reinstating the Uinta Basin Railway project, and frankly, it’s about time someone applied analytical rigor to environmental impact assessments. After examining the project’s bloated 3,500-page Environmental Impact Statement (thanks, Claude!) and its tortuous development process, which dates back to over a century, I can report that this case represents everything wrong with the application of NEPA (the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969)—and why the Court was correct to call it out.
The proposed railway runs through Duchesne County, Utah, a county with a population of fewer than 20,000 people. The largest town, Roosevelt, has a population of fewer than 7,000 people. It’s situated in a beautiful high desert location with a lot to offer, but it’s sparsely populated, with the local economy heavily reliant on tourism and mining. To give you a sense of the place, here’s a local sign:
A Case Study in Bureaucratic Excess
Let’s start with the numbers that should embarrass everyone involved. To put it in perspective, the proposed Uinta Basin Railway is an 88-mile freight rail line (roughly the distance across New Jersey from New York to Philadelphia), taking a route that was first surveyed in 1902. Here’s the project’s timeline:
2012: The Utah DOT determined that infrastructure should be constructed to transport crude oil to established refineries on the Gulf Coast, with rail being the safest and cleanest alternative.
2013: Consultants analyzed 26 routes and determined the best route, which included the construction of a 10-mile tunnel.
2016: Due to unacceptable costs, Utah DOT abandoned the project.
2019: A coalition of Utah counties revisited the consultant’s cost analysis, partnering with a railroad construction company to input more accurate cost assumptions
Reopening the project resulted in an additional 30 months of environmental analysis, spanning from initial scoping to final decision,1 and encompassing over 3,500 pages of documentation, including its own website.
Multiple comment period extensions were requested due to technical website failures2. Nevertheless, the project was approved for construction.
Repeated legal challenges by ecogrifters and project supporters ultimately reached the Supreme Court.
To put this in perspective, in the 1860s, Americans built 1,900 miles of transcontinental railroad in just six years using mainly picks and shovels. In this instance, Americans took 30 months to analyze 88 miles of track, with not a single mile constructed. And this is progress? Yes, protecting the environment is essential, and we’ve made tragic mistakes in the past; there are inevitable trade-offs in any decision. This is a prime example of paralysis by analysis.
To give you a sense of scale, the Environmental Impact Statement’s Chapter 3.7 on air quality alone spans 39 pages—nearly half a page per mile of track. This includes a detailed analysis of whether two trains passing the same location within an hour might briefly exceed nitrogen dioxide standards at the right-of-way boundary (50 feet on either side of the track), where it is unlikely that humans would be hanging out anyway.3
The Real Analytical Question: Scope 3 Emissions
Buried within this bureaucratic mountain lies a genuinely important question that deserves serious consideration: Should oil production projects be held responsible for the emissions resulting from the combustion of the oil they produce? Or should that end up on the carbon ‘income statement’ of the consumers of the oil?
The numbers frame the issue. According to the EIS, the railway itself would generate approximately 155,000 metric tons of CO₂ annually from locomotive operations.4 However, the oil transported on that railway would ultimately generate around 40 million metric tons when burned by refineries, power plants, and end users, exceeding the direct (Scope 1 and Scope 2) emissions by about a factor of 250 times.5
Environmental groups argue these “Scope 3” emissions reflect the project’s actual climate impact. The Supreme Court disagreed, with predictable indignant outrage from eco-grifters. But the analytical reasons why matter far beyond freight rail in the desert.
The Substitution Error
Let us examine where environmental analysis typically goes off the rails (pun intended): The underlying assumption is that increased production automatically leads to increased global consumption. The Uinta Basin EIS exemplifies this egregious analytical error.
Let’s look at the case in point. The basin currently produces approximately 88,000 barrels of “waxy crude” per day. This type of crude oil solidifies at 100°F, so it requires heated transport.6 These transportation constraints force producers to accept steep price discounts, making expanded production uneconomical. The railway would alleviate these constraints, potentially enabling production to quadruple to 350,000 barrels per day, thereby improving the local economy and providing cheaper, domestically produced energy.
But here’s the question the 3,500-page EIS never adequately addresses: Is it correct to equate these 262,000 additional barrels extracted as incremental to global oil consumed, or would the Utah crude displace higher-cost production elsewhere?
Basic energy economics demands the latter. Oil markets are global and price-sensitive, with total production nearly 100 million barrels per day. When lower-cost supplies become available, they displace higher-cost alternatives rather than expanding total demand. If Utah crude displaces Venezuelan heavy crude or Canadian oil sands—both of which are more carbon-intensive to produce—the net climate impact could be neutral or even beneficial. Additionally, rail transport is significantly more energy-efficient than trucking, which may result in lower emissions.
The Infinite Regress Problem
The Scope 3 question creates analytical problems extending far beyond Utah. If oil production projects must account for all downstream combustion, should:
Port expansions analyze emissions from every ship using them?
Should pipeline permits require a lifecycle assessment of every gas molecule that flows through them?
Do highway projects account for emissions from every truck driving on them?
Do electricity transmission lines bear responsibility for power plant emissions?
This leads to what philosophers call infinite regress—each link in the chain becomes responsible for every subsequent link, making rational impact assessment impossible. This, in a nutshell, is how ecogrifters paralyze our economy using the court system.
Fortunately, despite being a bunch of lawyers themselves, the Supreme Court unanimously recognized this philosophical trap. Federal environmental law requires analyzing reasonably foreseeable impacts directly caused by federal actions, not every conceivable downstream consequence. This problem permeates all Scope 3 calculations, allowing ample room for creative accounting and skulduggery, as I have pointed out earlier7.
The baseline
The EIS is correct in one aspect: Oil production will continue with or without the railway. The baseline assumes continued production at current levels using truck transport to existing rail terminals.8 On the one hand, this makes economic sense—oil doesn’t stay in the ground just because railways don’t exist yet. On the other hand, the baseline is fiction: the whole reason the rail line was proposed in the first place is to enable production increases that existing highways cannot support.
Consider the regional context: existing greenhouse gas emissions in the study area total 4.5 million metric tons annually.9 If railway-enabled production truly represented net global consumption increases, it would generate 4-12 times the region’s entire current emissions. That is implausible given global oil market dynamics.
Rail is better than road
There is another analytical wrinkle that the EIS briefly acknowledges but doesn’t fully explore: rail transport is less carbon-intensive. It produces roughly half the emissions of truck transport per barrel. For existing oil production, constructing a railway would lead to environmental improvements.
The EIS calculates that diverting existing truck routes to rail terminals would result in a 4,524 metric ton reduction in annual CO₂ emissions.10 Unfortunately, this potential benefit is obscured by the size of the imputed Scope 3 emissions, but it highlights the importance of conducting proper baseline analysis to understand actual environmental impacts. It doesn’t take 3,500 pages, it just takes thought. After all, I’ve done a complete reanalysis in this installment!
Analytical Rigor Matters
The Supreme Court’s decision doesn’t end environmental review, but courts are correct in demanding better analytical rigor within clearly defined boundaries. This should benefit both ecological protection and rational policymaking: The atmosphere doesn’t give a damn who is to blame. It only reacts to our collective emissions, so that should be the focus of any analysis. Any project that moves from road to rail will very likely lead to reduced emissions.11
Climate policy requires an understanding of actual emission changes, rather than hypothetical scenarios that overlook economic realities. When environmental analysis becomes unmoored from these realities, it loses credibility and effectiveness.
However, the actual analytical failure lies in treating market substitution as irrelevant to climate impact assessment. Until environmental review seriously grapples with these economic realities, we’ll continue to produce 3,500-page documents that obscure rather than illuminate actual ecological consequences.
Surface Transportation Board Final EIS timeline: June 19, 2019 (Notice of Intent) to December 15, 2021 (Final Decision). See https://www.uintabasinrailwayeis.com/DocumentsAndLinks.aspx.
Uinta Basin Railway EIS website, here. The original plan was to accept public comments for 45 days ending December 14, 2021. It ended 2 months late, out of an abundance of caution and deference to public commentary.
Final EIS Table 3.7-11, air quality modeling analysis at right-of-way boundary, p. 3.7-30. Downloadable here.
Final EIS Table 3.7-10, high rail traffic scenario emissions, p. 3.7-26.
The conversion is roughly 10 kg CO2 per gallon of crude, 42 gallons per barrel.
Utah’s crude is ‘waxy,’ which does not flow well when cold. It requires heated transport. See https://deq.utah.gov/general/petroleum
Final EIS Section 3.7.3.3, No-Action Alternative analysis
Final EIS Table 3.7-1, regional study area baseline emissions
Final EIS Table 3.7-4, emissions benefits from truck trip diversion
The DoT estimates that rail cargo can be moved 4 times more efficiently than with trucks, and a single operator can move much larger amounts of material. See https://railroads.dot.gov/rail-network-development/freight-rail-overview