Wild Virginia v. Council on Environmental Quality

The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the dismissal of environmental groups’ lawsuit challenging the 2020 amendments to the Council on Environmental Quality’s (CEQ’s) National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) regulations. The Fourth Circuit found that challenges regarding direct, indirect, and cumulative effects, and reasonable alternatives to the extent they were required to prioritize applicants’ goals were moot due to CEQ’s adoption in 2022 of a rule that returned the regulatory language related to these issues to essentially what was in place prior to the 2020 rule. The Fourth Circuit further concluded that the plaintiffs lacked standing to assert claims related to the 2020 rule’s requirements for public comments and that the plaintiffs’ remaining claims were not ripe.

Environmental groups filed a notice of appeal of the order of the federal district court for the Western District of Virginia dismissing their lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s amendment of the Council on Environmental Quality’s regulations implementing NEPA. The district court held that the plaintiffs did not have standing and that their claims were not ripe.

The federal district court for the Western District of Virginia dismissed without prejudice a lawsuit brought by environmental groups to challenge the Council on Environmental Quality’s (CEQ’s) 2020 amendments to the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) regulations. The court concluded that the groups’ claims were not justiciable both because the claims were not ripe and because the groups did not have standing. With respect to ripeness, the court found that “[t]he potential applications and outcomes of the regulatory changes adopted are simply too attenuated and speculative to allow for a full understanding and consideration of how they may impact the plaintiffs.” The court noted that each federal agency would have to adopt its own NEPA procedures before CEQ’s regulatory amendments could be applied to any particular federal action, and further noted that following the change in administrations, CEQ was “actively reconsidering” the 2020 amendments and had directed agencies not to use resources to develop their own procedures. With respect to standing, the court found that the environmental groups’ alleged environmental, procedural, and information injuries were too speculative to satisfy the constitutional injury-in-fact requirement.