Friends of the Earth U.S. v. Export-Import Bank of the United States

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the denial of a preliminary injunction halting the disbursement of loan funds by the Export-Import Bank of the United States (EXIM) for the Mozambique Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) Project. After the initial approval of the loan during the first Trump administration, work on the project halted in 2021 due to violent attacks in the area. In 2025, EXIM approved an amendment to the loan agreement after the project’s operator decided to resume work. Friends of the Earth U.S. and Justiça Ambiental challenged the 2025 approval. The D.C. Circuit agreed with the district court that the plaintiffs did not have organizational standing based either on EXIM’s failure to offer an opportunity to participate in notice and comment concerning the 2025 amendment or on the allegedly increased burden that the project would cause to the plaintiff organizations’ services. The D.C. Circuit also agreed with the district court that the organizations did not have informational standing based on their purported entitlement to EXIM’s economic analyses. Although the D.C. Circuit found that the record supported the organizations’ informational standing based on the alleged failure to provide environmental information, including National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) disclosures, the appellate court found that the organizations did not demonstrate a likelihood of success on the merits of their NEPA claim. The D.C. Circuit cited NEPA’s exclusion of “extraterritorial activities or decisions, which means agency activities or decisions with effects located entirely outside of the jurisdiction of the United States.” The court was not persuaded by the organizations’ contention that the Mozambique LNG Project would result in indirect domestic effects, including increased carbon emissions. Citing the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2025 opinion in Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, the D.C. Circuit found that the organizations did not show the “reasonably close causal relationship” between the Project and the “asserted downstream or attenuated effects in the United States” that would be required in order for NEPA to apply. The D.C. Circuit also found that circumstances had not triggered EXIM’s obligation to disclose environmental information under its Environmental and Social Due Diligence Procedures. One judge dissented from the majority’s conclusion that the organizations had informational standing under NEPA; he would have concluded that they could not establish such standing because “they seek information about effects that Congress has expressly excluded from NEPA’s reach.” The dissenting opinion stated that the plaintiffs’ assertion that the project’s estimated 13 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions would “significantly contribute to climate change” was “precisely the kind of attenuated causal chain that NEPA does not reach” because “[a]ny net effect on emissions turns on inherently unknowable market responses affecting production and consumption, the independent decisions of foreign purchasers, the operations of foreign facilities, the dispersion of emissions through the global atmosphere, and the climate’s response over time.” The dissent further stated that “[a] causal chain dependent on so many intervening variables, independent actors, and uncertain consequences is the paradigmatic remote ripple beyond NEPA’s effects inquiry.”