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This is the final installment in our series of posts about the causation issue under NEPA. In our previous post, we laid out NEPA’s purposes and why analogies to tort law can misfire because that area of law has very different purposes. Today, building on our recent working paper, we explain the functional approach to causation that we believe courts should apply.

Overall, the Supreme Court has articulated a functional approach that is based on the purposes of NEPA, based on the structure and text of the statute. Today’s post will lay the foundation by discussing NEPA’s purposes and how they differ from those of another area of law often used as an analogy, tort law.

NEPA requires that agencies consider the environmental effects of their projects, but the petitioners in the Seven Counties case raise hairsplitting arguments to exclude obvious effects due to technicalities. We consider their arguments one by one.

In what could turn out to be another loss for environmental protection in the Supreme Court, the Court is about to decide a major case about the scope of the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA). The case, Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, has important implications for issues such as whether NEPA covers climate change impacts. The same groups that succeeded in drastically cutting back on federal wetlands jurisdiction a few years ago are hoping to do the same thing to environmental impact statements. This post will provide the key background on the case.

On November 1, the North Carolina Utilities Commission issued its carbon plan order, two months in advance of the filing deadline. The order reflects an earlier settlement agreement among the Public Staff, Duke Energy, and Walmart that allows Duke Energy to build four new methane gas units while marginally increasing the amount of solar, battery storage, and wind resources in its proposed carbon reduction plan. Critically, the selected plan (known as Portfolio 3) fails to meet the 2030 interim carbon reduction timeline in House Bill 951 — the state’s carbon reduction law — and likely delays compliance to 2035.

The Project 2025 report is 920 pages long, but only a few portions have gotten much public attention. The report’s significance is precisely that it goes beyond a few headline proposals to set a comprehensive agenda for a second Trump administration. There are dozens of significant proposals relating to energy and the environment. Although I can’t talk about all of them here, I want to flag a few of these sleeper provisions. They involve reduced protection for endangered species, eliminating energy efficiency rules, blocking new transmission lines, changing electricity regulation to favor fossil fuels, weakening air pollution rules, and encouraging sale of gas guzzlers.

On September 17, the Center for Progressive Reform published a new policy brief, Rising to the Challenge: How State Public Utilities Commissions Can Use the Inflation Reduction Act to Advance Clean Energy. This brief examines the ability of public utilities commissions (PUCs) to incorporate Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) funding into their energy planning processes in order to expand the uptake of renewable energy resources at a lower cost to consumers.

The summer of 2024 will be remembered for many things, but here at the Center for Progressive Reform, what most struck us was that it was the year that the administrative state broke through into public consciousness. From the unexpected virality of, and backlash against, Project 2025 — a massive right-wing legal manifesto as aggressive as it was arcane — to the Supreme Court regulatory rulings that made headlines for weeks, this year’s political news drove home that the work we do to protect the environment, the workforce, and public health matters very much to we, the people when these things are under attack. In this context, we approach the task of inviting new members to join us in our work with seriousness, but also with much excitement. This spring, we reviewed nearly two dozen exceptional candidates from the fields of law and public policy. Today, we are pleased to announce that we have a cohort of three excellent scholars to add to our ranks.

Building clean energy infrastructure quickly will be critical to avoiding the worst impacts of climate change while bolstering grid resilience and flexibility. Much of the discourse portrays infrastructure deployment as plagued by bureaucratic and legal holdups that should be eliminated or drastically curtailed in service of faster development — with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) often taking sole blame for these delays. But is that really where the problem is? Our analyses suggest that solely blaming NEPA for permitting delays overlooks other contributing factors.