Sierra Club v. U.S. Department of Energy

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals denied petitions for review challenging the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) approval of an application to export liquefied natural gas (LNG) from the Alaska LNG Project. The court noted that it had previously held that the environmental impact statement (EIS) prepared by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) for the Project complied with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). With respect to the only environmental impact not considered in the FERC EIS—downstream emissions—the D.C. Circuit concluded that other precedent and principles of judicial review foreclosed the petitioners’ contention that DOE’s supplemental EIS and final order approving the export application “inflated the uncertainty regarding the Project’s contribution to climate-changing [greenhouse gases] and claimed that uncertainty prevented it from drawing conclusions about the Project’s harms.” The court found that “overwhelming evidence” supported DOE’s finding that impacts of downstream emissions in foreign countries were not reasonably foreseeable. The court found that the failure to quantify such impacts therefore did not violate NEPA, and that the alleged failure to weigh such impacts in the public interest determination under the Natural Gas Act did not overcome the Natural Gas Act’s “presumption … in favor of granting export authorization.” The court also ruled that the petitioners were precluded from raising arguments about the Project’s upstream effects that they made or could have made in their challenges to the FERC EIS.

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