Supreme Court upholds permit for $8 billion pipeline under Appalachian Trail

The Supreme Court on Monday upheld a permit for a controversial $8 billion gas pipeline that would tunnel below the famed Appalachian Trail. The 7-2 opinion handed a defeat to environmental groups who challenged the Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP), which would carry natural gas some 600 miles from West Virginia to North Carolina. The decision to uphold the permit resolves a complex bureaucratic dispute involving multiple U.S. environmental agencies and overlapping legal authorities. The justices held that the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) had been duly authorized to greenlight the project, rejecting the challengers’ claim that power over the affected land lay elsewhere. The dispute stemmed from the Department of the Interior’s decision to make the National Park Service (NPS) responsible for the Appalachian Trail. Prior to the court’s Monday decision, the question of whether this move also transferred authority of lands underneath the trail had been an open one. But Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the majority, said the administrative arrangement did not remove the USFS’s power to permit construction under the trail. “Accordingly, the Forest Service had the authority to issue the permit here,” wrote Thomas, whose majority opinion cut across ideological lines. Thomas was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh — fellow members of the court's conservative wing — as well as liberal Justices Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Two of the court’s liberals, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, dissented. "For decades, more than 50 other pipelines have safely crossed the trail without disturbing its public use. The Atlantic Coast Pipeline will be no different," ACP spokeswoman Ann Nallo said by email, reiterating the company's plans to be in operation by 2022...MORE