Maybe I don't know the meaning of at-grade crossing but how could the trolleys be removed from the street?

I love wistfully staring at the gutted Budd factory on my SEPTA regional rail ride with too few cars because SEPTA has been ordered to inspect all of its 50-year old fleet that keeps catching on fire.

Fiona Apple

45/ ⚖️🌱The Court. "The human right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment is therefore inherent to other human rights. Under international law, the RtHE is essential to the enjoyment of other human rights."

"NEPA requires consideration of environmental impacts only if such consideration would result in information on which the agency could act." This conclusion by the concurrence flows from the Supreme Court's 2004 opinion DOT v. Public Citizen.

Concurring opinion by Sotomayor relies on agency's organic statute, which forbids consideration of the cargo carried on the railway. In other words, STB could not deny railway based on fact that it would be used primarily for crude oil.

Whether something is a "separate project" is again a factual question within the agency's discretion, says the majority.

According to the majority, the causal chain is broken by the fact that an effect is caused by a "separate project"--later in time, in a different location, proposed by a different entity, under the regulatory jurisdiction of another agency, etc.

On "reasonable foreseeability": "The effects from a separate project may be factually foreseeable, but that does not mean that those effects are relevant to the agency’s decisionmaking process or that it is reasonable to hold the agency responsible for those effects."

NEPA makes clear that agencies are required to weigh environmental consequences in their decisionmaking. That is the purpose of the statute.

. . . or perhaps that the agency erred because the governing statute did not allow the agency to weigh environmental consequences at all." Presumably this is also true of agency approvals? Environmental consequences are often arbitrarily discounted.

Another interesting quote: "[A] denied applicant may argue, among other things, that the agency acted unreasonably in denying approval by weighing environmental consequences too heavily in light of the agency’s governing statute and other relevant factors . . .

. . .(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."

Key quote on expanded agency deference: "So long as the EIS addresses environmental effects from the project at issue, courts should defer to agencies’ decisions about where to draw the line—including . . .

Gigantic vegan “cowgirl cookie” sold at (not made at) Mugshots Cafe in Philadelphia