Five Steps Back - How America’s Supreme Court Sacrificed Environmental Protection for Oil

The Supreme Court of the United States ruled on Thursday that a multibillion-dollar oil railroad project in the state of Utah may proceed - despite massive environmental concerns, despite open climate consequences, despite everything science has warned about for decades. The ruling: 8 to 0. The message: Environmental protection no longer has a place in the United States. This was not a ruling. It was a capitulation.

Im Mittelpunkt steht die Uinta Basin Railway, eine 142 Kilometer lange Schienenverbindung durch Wüsten, Felsen und Ölfelder. Sie soll künftig Abertausende Tonnen Rohöl aus einem der entlegensten Teile Utahs auf den Weltmarkt bringen – ein Geschenk für die Fossilindustrie, ein Todesstoß für das Klima. Das Ende einer Schutzidee

Even worse than the project itself is what the ruling entails - a massive weakening of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) - that law, in place since 1970, meant to ensure that infrastructure projects are reviewed for their environmental impacts.

But for the highest court in the US, it will now suffice if authorities only assess the immediate effects - not the long-term damage, not the CO₂ in the atmosphere, not the fires, not the creeping poison in air and water.

"NEPA is a procedural tool, not a roadblock," wrote Justice Brett Kavanaugh, backed by Trump’s conservative majority. What sounds like technocracy here is in truth a retreat into the fossil age.

While Europe, Canada, or even China debate carbon pricing, restoration, and emissions caps, the US is tearing down its own safeguards - piece by piece, ruling by ruling. President Trump recently announced that environmental reviews will be shortened "to just a few weeks" - procedures that used to take a year should, in his logic, become mere formalities.

The Supreme Court is now providing the legitimacy. What is being sold as a legal decision is in fact a blank check for destruction. The world has to pay the price

It is not just the deserts of Utah that lose here. It is the whole world. Because what burns in America heats the planet. What is extracted in Utah is refined in Houston, loaded onto tankers, and burned in coastal regions. "Our air is getting dirtier, our waters poisoned, our future devalued," says Wendy Park from the Center for Biological Diversity. And what is called law at the highest level of the US government is in truth political obedience to the oil industry.

Even Justice Sonia Sotomayor, part of the liberal wing, agreed with the ruling - though with a different legal rationale. Only Neil Gorsuch, otherwise reliably conservative, was absent - ironically because he had once represented one of the project’s main beneficiaries, billionaire Philip Anschutz, in court. But it would be naïve to still hope for integrity in this context. This judiciary has made its decision - against the environment, against future generations, against global responsibility.

Five steps back

This ruling is more than just a step in the wrong direction. It is a regression. A regression to a time when growth was everything and destruction was never priced in. It is five steps back:

Back to fossil dreams

Back to total market deregulation

Back to the subjugation of science

Back to the disempowerment of the law

Back to a politics that prefers to cut down forests rather than have debates

Who will stop America?

If a country like the United States - once seen as a moral world leader - now openly embraces exploitation, who is left to hold the line? How can we tell others that CO₂ must be reduced, habitats protected, and environmental laws strengthened, when the biggest emitter of the last century declares itself a destroyer?

It is not just a legal decision that was made - it is a global warning.