posted on December 17, 2025 by Chris Thomas
Seven months ago the U.S. Supreme Court rebuked lower courts for failing to provide sufficient deference to agency environmental reviews under the National Environmental Policy Act in Seven County Infrastructure Coal. v. Eagle County, 605 U.S. 168 (2025). The Court’s May 29 ruling – which called for a dramatic “course correction” – followed years of complaints that reviewing courts had engaged in too much second-guessing of agency environmental assessments and environmental impact statements. Justice Kavanaugh’s majority opinion called deference to agency review the “central” and “bedrock” principle of NEPA, claims under which are litigated under the Administrative Procedures Act.
Given normal appellate time frames, only a handful of cases have made their way to the courts of appeal. Thus far, however, both the courts of appeal and the district courts appear to be heeding the Supreme Court’s message. The true test, of course, will come when the Ninth and Tenth Circuits – whose territory includes a disproportionate amount of public and tribal land and accordingly numerous NEPA triggers – begin issuing opinions squarely addressing Seven County.
Because of the unique appellate path for NEPA cases against the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, several of the initial appellate opinions have arisen out of challenges to environmental review of gas pipelines. Both the Fifth Circuit and the D.C. Circuit have heard and rejected such challenges, relying heavily on Seven County.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit closely followed Seven County while rejecting challenges by Riverkeeper to an environmental impact statement prepared by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in connection with a gas pipeline expansion in Gas Transmission Nw, LLC v. FERC, 157 F. 4th 674 (5th Cir. 2025). The Fifth Circuit rejected arguments by Riverkeeper that the EIS should have been supplemented, further evaluated a no-action alternative, and should have considered the impact of compressors separately approved. Rightly or not, those are the sorts of arguments that sometimes gained traction in the courts in years past. But the Fifth Circuit dismissed them summarily, staying that “these arguments fall flat in the wake of Seven County” and “run headfirst into Seven County.”
The D.C. Circuit Court of appeals likewise heavily relied on Seven County in rejecting a NEPA challenge to another gas pipeline project – this one to service the Tennessee Valley Authority – in Sierra Club v. FERC, 153 F.4th 1295 (D.C. Cir. 2025). While rejecting the Sierra Club’s complaints about the scope of the project’s EIS, the Court concluded: “After Seven County, the era of searching NEPA review is over – or at least is should be.”
The D.C. Circuit applied the same analysis while rejecting the NEPA challenge to another pipeline impact statement in Sierra Club v. FERC, 145 F.4th 74 (D.C. Cir. 2025), stating: “Following the Supreme Court’s decision in Seven County, FERC reasonably drew the line at the Border Facility and was not required to evaluate environmental effects from separate projects upstream and downstream.”
Appellate courts thus far have expressed no sympathy to arguments that Seven County’s holding must be interpreted narrowly. In Cascadia Wildlands v. BLM, 153 F. 4th 869 (9th Cir. 2025), the Ninth Circuit rejected the argument that Seven County deference did not apply to environmental assessments: “Although Seven County Infrastructure Coalition involved a different NEPA posture from the case before us – it arose in the context of evaluating plaintiffs’ challenge to an EIS rather than an EA – we find its teaching fully applicable here.” 153 F.4th at 903. In a case that actually turned on whether a project was sufficiently federal for NEPA to be triggered, the Eleventh Circuit nonetheless embraced Seven County’s admonition that lower courts be cautious about issuing injunctive relief in Friends of the Everglades, Inc. v. Noem, 2025 WL 2598567 (11th Cir. Sept. 4, 2025). There, a split panel stayed the district court’s injunction against the State of Florida’s conversion of a regional airport to the “Alligator Alcatraz” detention center for housing federal immigration detainees.