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Climate

NEPA Takes a Hit From the Supreme Court

On the environmental reviews, Microsoft’s emissions, and solar on farmland

Matthew Zeitlin •
05/30/2025
NEPA Takes a Hit From the Supreme Court
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Current conditions: Enormous wildfires in Manitoba, Canada, will send smoke into the Midwestern U.S. and Great Plains this weekend • Northwest England is officially experiencing a drought after receiving its third lowest rainfall since 1871 • Thunderstorms are brewing in Washington, D.C., where the Federal Court of Appeals paused an earlier ruling throwing out much of Trump’s tariff agenda.

THE TOP FIVE

1. NEPA takes a hit

The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that courts should show more deference to agencies when hearing lawsuits over environmental reviews.

The case concerned a proposed 88-mile train line in Utah that would connect its Uinta Basin (and its oil resources) with the national rail network. Environmental groups and local governments claimed that the environmental impact statement submitted by the federal Surface Transportation Board did not pay enough attention to the effects of increased oil drilling and refining that the rail line could induce. The D.C. Circuit agreed, vacating the EIS; the Supreme Court did not, overturning the D.C. Circuit in an 8-0 decision.

The National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, requires the federal government to study the environmental impact of its actions. The D.C. Circuit “failed to afford the Board the substantial judicial deference required in NEPA cases and incorrectly interpreted NEPA to require the Board to consider the environmental effects of upstream and downstream projects that are separate in time or place,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote for the court.

The court’s decision could sharply limit the ability of the judicial branch to question environmental reviews by agencies under NEPA, and could pave the way for more certain and faster approvals for infrastructure projects.

At least, that’s what Kavanaugh hopes. The current NEPA process, he writes, foists “delay upon delay” on developers and agencies, so “fewer projects make it to the finish line. Indeed, fewer projects make it to the starting line.”

Map of the approved railway route.Map of the approved railway route.Source: Uinta Basin Railway Final Environmental Impact Statement

2. Trump targets solar on farmland

The Department of Agriculture is planning to retool a popular financing program, Rural Energy for America, to discourage solar development on agricultural land, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman exclusively reported.

“Farmland should be for agricultural production, not solar production,” a USDA spokesperson told Heatmap. The comments echoed a USDA report released last week criticizing the use of solar on agricultural land. The report said that the USDA will “disincentivize the use of federal funding at USDA for solar panels to be installed on productive farmland through prioritization points and regulatory action.” The USDA will also “call on state and local governments to work alongside USDA on local solutions.”

3. Oil companies sued over heat death

The daughter of a woman who died during the Pacific Northwest “Heat Dome” in 2021 sued seven oil and companies for wrongful death in Washington state court, The New York Times reported Thursday.

“The suit alleges that they failed to warn the public of the dangers of the planet-warming emissions produced by their products and that they funded decades-long campaigns to obscure the scientific consensus on global warming,” according to Times reporter David Gelles.

Several cities and states have brought suits making similar claims that oil and gas companies misled the public about the threat of climate change. Earlier this week, a German court threw out a suit from a Peruvian farmer against a German utility, which claimed that the utility’s commissions helped put his town at risk from glacial flooding.

The seven companies named in the lawsuit are Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Shell, BP, ConocoPhillips, Phillips 66, and Olympic Pipeline Company, a subsidiary managed by BP. None of them commented on the suit.

4. Microsoft emits more

Tech giant Microsoft disclosed in its annual sustainability report that its carbon emissions have grown by 23.4% since 2020, even as the company has a goal to become “carbon negative” by 2030. The upside to the figures is that the growth in emissions was due to a much larger increase in energy use and business activity, not from using dirtier energy. In that same time period, Microsoft’s revenue has grown 71%, and its energy use has grown 168%.

“It has become clear that our journey towards being carbon negative is a marathon,” the report read. The company said it had contracted 34 gigawatts of non-emitting power generation and had agreements to procure 30 million metric tons of carbon removal.

The company has set out to reduce its indirect Scope 3 emissions “by more than half” by 2030 from the 11.5 million metric tons it reported in 2020, as its Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions fall to close to zero. It will become “carbon negative,” it hopes, by purchasing carbon removal.

Microsoft attempts to reduce emissions in its supply chain by procuring low- or no-carbon fuels and construction materials. Last week the tech giant signed a purchasing agreement with Sublime Systems for 600,000 tons of low-carbon cement.

5. Second SMR design approved

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced it had approved a 77-megawatt small modular reactor design. This is the second SMR design approved by the NRC, following approval of a smaller design in 2020. Both are products of the SMR company NuScale, and neither has yet been deployed. A project to build the earlier design in Idaho was abandoned in 2023.

The NRC review was set to be completed in July of this year. Coming in ahead of scheduled demonstrates “the agency’s commitment to safely and efficiently enable new, advanced reactor technology,” the Commission said in a press release.

Congress and the Biden and Trump administrations have pushed the NRC to move faster and to encourage the development of small modular reactors. No SMR has been built in the United States, nor is there any current plan to do so that has been publicly disclosed. NuScale’s chief executive told Bloomberg that he hopes to have a deal signed by the end of the year and an operational plant by the end of the decade.

THE KICKER

Tesla veteran Drew Baglino’s Heron Power raised a $38 million round of Series A funding for a new product designed to replace “legacy transformers and power converters by directly connecting rapidly growing megawatt-scale solar, batteries, and AI data centers to medium voltage transmission,” Baglino wrote on X.

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Matthew Zeitlin profile image

Matthew Zeitlin

Matthew is a correspondent at Heatmap. Previously he was an economics reporter at Grid, where he covered macroeconomics and energy, and a business reporter at BuzzFeed News, where he covered finance. He has written for The New York Times, the Guardian, Barron's, and New York Magazine.

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AM Briefing

‘Starting to Fray’

On Greenland’s deepsea mining ban, Indonesia floating nuclear, and a solar boom

Alexander C. Kaufman
10/19/2026
Data center construction.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Current conditions: Hurricane Trudy has weakened from its peak as a Category 2 storm but still threatens up to 8 inches of rain as it swirls off Baja California • A nor’easter is howling through the Mid-Atlantic this week, hammering the coast with winds of up to 70 miles per hour • A humid overcast has settled over Paris this week as French authorities struggle to regain control after protests over living costs gave way to anarchic riots.


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1. America’s AI infrastructure boom ‘is starting to fray’

At least 47 major data center projects have been delayed, withdrawn, or blocked so far this year, according to data the regulatory intelligence service RegLayer shared with the Financial Times — and that may be a “conservative estimate.” Just 35% of planned data centers are “credible,” analysts told the newspaper, as more than 1,000 communities across the United States now have restrictions on artificial intelligence infrastructure. The data comes as investors look increasingly jittery about AI following ChatGPT-maker OpenAI’s missing a key revenue metric this year.

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What would happen to Project Jupiter if the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act is passed?

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10/16/2026
Project Jupiter.
Heatmap Illustration/Project Jupiter, Library of Congress

One of the nation’s largest data centers is struggling under permitting woes. So let’s play a game: would the bipartisan permitting bill in Congress make the path easier, or might the federal legislation be irrelevant to large hyperscalers under development today?

Meet Project Jupiter, a mega project in southern New Mexico in Dona Ana County under development by Oracle and OpenAI, with financial backing from SoftBank and political support from the Trump administration for being a part of Stargate, a major Trump administration public-private initiative boosting AI development. Project Jupiter would be one of the largest data centers in the country if completed and currently is expected to run on a microgrid powered by fuel cells converting gas to electricity, which the developers claim will burn much cleaner than a typical off-grid gas turbine power plant.

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Hotspots

The Trump Administration Is Still Messing with Offshore Wind Farms

And more of the week’s top news around project fights.

Jael Holzman
10/16/2026
The United States.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

1. New England (and Maryland) – The Trump administration is still messing with offshore wind farms, even while trying to pass a permitting reform deal. Examining the court filings reveals why they may feel empowered to do it — and I’m not sure how this ends.

  • Last Friday, in a legal case brought by anti-wind activists, the Justice Department submitted a motion in federal court to send the construction and operations plan for Orsted’s Revolution Wind project in New England back to the Interior Department for more analysis. On Wednesday, the DOJ entered a similar motion in another case challenging the construction and operations plan for U.S. Wind’s MarWin project off the coast of Maryland in a lawsuit brought by the state’s coastal community of Ocean City.
  • Trump’s actions led some to question whether the president was sabotaging the deal, and others to claim the media coverage itself was an attempt to kill it. Going further, supporters of the bipartisan bill claimed the DOJ's motions were precisely why the bill should become law, implying it would guard offshore wind farms against this sort of maneuver.
  • However, for the bill’s backers, it’s worth considering why the Trump administration believes it has the legal authority to do this. It’s also time to ask whether the bill would actually protect these wind farms against this tactic.
  • To answer those questions, you have to rewind. On May 1, 2025, the Interior Department withdrew a Biden solicitor’s opinion instructing the agency to “strike a rational balance” between wind power and fishing interests. This revocation document is technically not in effect at the moment; one year later, a federal court ruled the opinion was potentially illegal as a part of a preliminary injunction on five anti-renewables actions requested by solar and wind trade groups. The Trump administration is contesting that ruling, and the administration has filed a notice of appeal.
  • In August, despite that opinion being in doubt, a federal judge granted Trump permission under the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act to remand the construction and operations plan for the now-defunct Atlantic Shores offshore wind farm in the waters of New Jersey. U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb specifically wrote that Atlantic Shores failed to demonstrate the federal government had limitations under OSCLA on revisiting these plans and that the injunction from the litigation on appeal “did not prohibit all reevaluation of agency action.”
  • In the recent Revolution and MarWin filings, Trump’s Justice Department argues the construction and operations plans should be remanded under OSCLA without being vacated. The DOJ motions include claims that previous decision documents did not adequately explain impacts to commercial fishing and other industries that use OSCLA waters. It’s not clear if the administration will win these motions.
  • The bipartisan permitting bill would bar the Interior Department and other federal agencies from taking “any new action that would revoke, rescind, withdraw, terminate, suspend, amend, or alter a federal authorization or permit in effect on or after September 16, 2026,” or “any other action to interfere with or prevent the construction or operation at full capacity of a project that has secured all necessary federal authorizations and permits.” The restriction exempts cases where “the agency is required to take such action by order of a court.” As I wrote in our lengthy piece explaining the bill, this provision has a damages component that allows companies impacted by violations to pursue financial compensation.
  • Here’s the billion-dollar question I expect we won’t have answered unless the bill language is enacted and then litigated: Would the court order exception apply to rulings that grant these motions? Or would the developers be able to sue for damages?

2. Columbia County, N.Y. – New York’s renewable energy permitting office has rejected an upstate solar farm on farmland as a House Democrat representing the area joined hands with the Trump administration in publicly railing against the project.

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