Opinion ID: 3005368
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Failure to Preserve NEPA Claims for Less Than

Text: Whole-Pipeline Review Sierra Club has failed to preserve its claim that the several easement actions, verifications and ITS, taken together, amount to a single federal action that requires its own NEPA analysis. We assume arguendo that the Corps’s and Bureau’s discrete easement actions and verifications incorporating the ITS were all component parts of the same federal action, but Sierra Club has failed to preserve an argument that the government was required to perform a unified NEPA analysis on anything less than the entire Flanagan South pipeline. As discussed below, Sierra Club has consistently argued only that some agency should have conducted a pipeline-wide NEPA assessment. In the district court, Sierra Club’s contention that the easements, verifications, and ITS should have been considered together under NEPA was an intermediate step in its argument that 32 there should have been one, coordinated NEPA review that encompassed the balance of the pipeline—including sections not otherwise subject to federal review or authorization. The district court record makes clear that whole-pipeline review was the only theory of NEPA deficiency that Sierra Club pursued. Sierra Club’s claim that the agencies were required to assess the entire Flanagan South project underlay all the NEPA claims in its complaint. See, e.g., Compl. ¶ 5 (objecting that the alleged actions “triggered Defendants’ NEPA obligations,” but “none of the Defendant agencies prepared either an [EA] or an [EIS] for the entire Project pursuant to NEPA”), ¶ 7 (“In short, . . . this massive pipeline has been authorized . . . without any NEPA review of the extensive environmental impacts of the entire pipeline . . . .”). In seeking preliminary relief, Sierra Club argued that the crux of its NEPA claims was that the federal government was obligated to scope a NEPA analysis to the entire pipeline.5 The district court remarked in its preliminary injunction ruling that the gravamen of Sierra Club’s NEPA claims was that the agencies had a collective obligation to perform environmental 5 In its briefing in support of its motion for a preliminary injunction, Sierra Club contended that the “Flanagan South Pipeline is a major federal action” and framed the agencies’ alleged NEPA violations as stemming from a failure to assess the impacts of Flanagan South as a whole. Mot. for Prelim. Inj., No. 1:13-cv-1239 KBJ (Sept. 4, 2013), ECF No. 14, at 13. Sierra Club repeatedly objected that no agency had prepared NEPA analysis scoped to the “entire” project. E.g., id. at 5, 8, 19-21, 28, 38; Pls. Reply (Sept. 23, 2013), ECF No. 34, at 1-2, 7-10, 19-21. At the preliminary injunction hearing, too, Sierra Club underscored its position that “[t]he question is whether any federal agency has to look at the entire oil pipeline in its [NEPA analysis].” Tr. of Prelim. Inj. Hr’g (Sept. 27, 2013), ECF No. 91, at 11; see also id. at 12 (“The law. . . requires an agency to consider the entire [pipeline] . . . .”). 33 review of the entire pipeline. Sierra Club v. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 990 F. Supp. 2d 9, 13 (D.D.C. 2013). Later, aware of the court’s framing of its case, Sierra Club continued at the summary judgment phase to press the same theory exclusively.6 We will not reverse the judgment of the district court based on the argument, not advanced below, that an agency unlawfully failed to perform NEPA analysis on sections of Flanagan South short of the entire length of the pipeline. See, e.g., Potter v. District of Columbia, 558 F.3d 542, 547 (D.C. Cir. 2009) (limiting our review to “only those arguments that were made in the district court, absent exceptional circumstances”). That claim is forfeited. Therefore, the only NEPA question preserved for our consideration is whether the federal actions of verifying the Pipeline’s water crossings under Nationwide Permit 12, incorporating the ITS, and granting the easements to cross federal lands required NEPA analysis of the entire Flanagan South pipeline. D. Inapplicability of the Connected Actions, Cumulative Actions, and Corps-Specific NEPA Regulations In contending that the federal actions within the verification and easement areas required the government also to assess the rest of the pipeline under NEPA, Sierra Club invokes the doctrines of “connected actions” and “cumulative actions” delineated in the CEQ regulations. See 40 C.F.R. §§ 1508.25(a)(1)-(2), 1508.7.7 It also invokes Corps-specific 6 See, e.g., Pls. Mot. for Summ. J., No. 1:13-cv-1239 KBJ (Dec 9, 2013), ECF No. 61, at 2, 13, 15-16, 45; Pls. Reply (Jan. 27, 2014), ECF No. 75, at 1, 3, 7. 7 Those regulations dictate the appropriate scope of EAs as well as EISs. See Del. Riverkeeper Network v. FERC, 753 F.3d 1304, 1314 34 NEPA scoping regulations. See 33 C.F.R. § 325 App. B. None of those bases supports Sierra Club’s claim.
regulation, on which Sierra Club relies most heavily, does not dictate that NEPA review encompass private activity outside the scope of the sum of the geographically limited federal actions. The regulation provides, as relevant here, that “actions” must be analyzed together in the same assessment if they “[a]utomatically trigger other actions which may require environmental impact statements,” “[c]annot or will not proceed unless other actions are taken previously or simultaneously,” or if they are “interdependent parts of a larger action and depend on the larger action for their justification.” 40 C.F.R. § 1508.25(a)(1). The point of the connected actions doctrine is to prevent the government from “segment[ing]” its own “federal actions into separate projects and thereby fail[ing] to address the true scope and impact of the activities that should be under consideration.” Del. Riverkeeper, 753 F.3d at 1313. Delaware Riverkeeper illustrates the connected actions regulation’s anti-segmentation principle, and why it does not accomplish all that Sierra Club asks of it. Under Delaware Riverkeeper, an agency cannot segment NEPA review of projects that are “connected, contemporaneous, closely related, and interdependent,” when the entire project at issue is subject to federal review. Id. at 1308. In this case, the oil pipeline is undoubtedly a single “physically, functionally, and financially connected” project, but one in which less than five per cent is subject to federal review. See id. The Natural Gas Act requirement that natural gas pipelines be pre-certified for (D.C. Cir. 2014); Grand Canyon Trust, 290 F.3d at 346; Kern v. U.S. Bureau of Land Mgmt., 284 F.3d 1062, 1076 (9th Cir. 2002). 35 public convenience and necessity made the whole pipeline in Delaware Riverkeeper the subject of major federal action triggering NEPA. We held that FERC unlawfully segmented the requisite NEPA analysis by reviewing in separate portions a pipeline that “function[ed] together seamlessly.” Id. at 1307, 1311. Here, the project is an oil pipeline, however, so not subject to any such overall pipeline precertification.8 Sierra Club argues, in effect, that applying the connected actions regulation to the sum of other approvals Flanagan South did require draws into NEPA review the balance of the pipeline project that is not otherwise subject to agency action, thus subjecting it to the connected actions doctrine to the same extent as was the case in Delaware Riverkeeper. Sierra Club adds a step that the regulation does not support: The connected actions regulation requires agencies to review the picture as a whole rather than conduct separate NEPA reviews on pieces of an agency-action jigsaw puzzle; it does not add a multitude of private pieces to the puzzle and so require review of a much larger picture. That limitation is highlighted by the connected actions rule’s lack of reference to private parties— a reference present in the cumulative action regulation, which directs agencies to consider the cumulative impact of action by an “agency (Federal or non-Federal) or person.” Compare 40 C.F.R. § 1508.25(a)(1), with id. § 1508.7 (emphasis added). Background, private action is expressly encompassed in the cumulative action analysis in a way that it is not for connected action. 8 Pipelines transporting oil within the United States are not subject to any general requirement of federal governmental evaluation and approval. In that way, oil pipelines are less regulated than natural gas pipelines, which must be supported by a certificate of public convenience and necessity from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission before they may be built. 15 U.S.C. § 717f(c)(1)(A). See Del. Riverkeeper, 753 F.3d at 1307-10. 36 Sierra Club also invokes Karst Environmental Education & Protection, Inc. v. EPA, 475 F.3d 1291, 1296 (D.C. Cir. 2007), for the proposition that full-project NEPA review is required where federal agencies have substantial involvement in a private project such that it would not have been undertaken without the federal action. In Karst, we noted our dictum in Macht v. Skinner, 916 F.2d 13, 19 (D.C. Cir. 1990), approving of the Fourth Circuit’s approach in Maryland Conservation Council v. Gilchrist, 808 F.2d 1039 (4th Cir. 1986), to the “federalization theory.” See Karst 475 F.3d at 1296-97 (citing Macht, 916 F.2d at 14, 19). We went on in Karst, however, to observe that “we have no binding precedent adopting the federalization theory,” and we did not there apply it. 475 F.3d at 1297. Indeed, Macht, too, came out the other way, undercutting Sierra Club’s argument. The rail project in Macht was not subject to whole-project NEPA analysis because federal agencies had regulatory control over “only a negligible portion of the entire project.” 916 F.2d at 19. The same is true here. Sierra Club offers no persuasive explanation why the portions of the pipeline outside the verification and easement areas constitute “federal actions” and thus “should be under consideration.” Del. Riverkeeper, 753 F.3d at 1313. Rather, Sierra Club’s more modest claim at oral argument was that Delaware Riverkeeper and the connected action regulation require that “the federal actions in this case—the easements, the other areas within federal jurisdiction—those are connected” and so should have been analyzed together. Oral Arg. Rec. at 7:33-40.9 That is the accurate statement of the 9 See also Oral Arg. Rec. at 7:57-8:11 (similar concession by Sierra Club, recognizing the same limited holding in Hammond v. Norton, 370 F. Supp. 2d 226 (D.D.C. 2005), upon which it also relies). 37 connected actions doctrine, but, as noted above, the claim resting on it was not preserved.
regulation is no more helpful to Sierra Club. “Cumulative actions” are those that must be assessed together because they have “cumulatively significant impacts.” 40 C.F.R. § 1508.25(a)(2). A cumulative impact is that “which results from the incremental impact of the action when added to other past, present, and reasonably foreseeable future actions regardless of what agency (Federal or non-Federal) or person undertakes such other actions.” Id. § 1508.7. The cumulative actions doctrine is not concerned with geographic segmentation; if it were, it would be wholly redundant of the connected actions doctrine. See Coal. on Sensible Transp., Inc. v. Dole, 826 F.2d 60, 70-71 (D.C. Cir. 1987). Instead, it prevents agencies from ignoring the environmental effects of other actions, without regard to whether their author was federal, because those effects set the baseline state of affairs and thus the context in which the significance of proposed federal action must be evaluated. An agency deciding whether to approve construction of a replacement airport, for example, must consider the prospective impact of the airport’s added noise in the context of noise from other sources— including private sources not traceable to agency action. See Grand Canyon Trust, 290 F.3d at 346. Sierra Club’s argument is not, however, that the agencies’ NEPA analyses ignored the environmental impacts of cumulative actions on discrete swaths of the pipeline, but that they failed to analyze the entire length of the pipeline. The cumulative actions doctrine therefore does not advance Sierra Club’s case.