Voices: Why our group of Utah physicians sued to stop the Uinta Basin Railway

In the winters of 2012 and 2013, researchers from the University of Colorado measured VOCs (chemicals like benzene, ethyl benzene, xylene and toluene) over the Uinta Basin and made a frightening discovery: Levels of these chemicals were 200 times background levels, as much as would be expected from the emissions of 100 million cars, about the same number as all the cars registered in the United States.

In some areas, benzene concentrations were 10,000 times higher than is typical for an urban area. Almost all of it was from the oil and gas industry. These VOCs are highly toxic in and of themselves, as carcinogens and reproductive and developmental toxins, but they are also precursors of ozone, a notorious problem in the basin for many years.

Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment (UPHE) took national reporters — including Rolling Stone’s Paul Solotaroff — on a tour of the basin in 2015 while we did our own measurements of VOCs. When we got within a few hundred yards of a fracking pond, the fumes were physically overpowering, forcing us to literally run backwards away from the pond. Solotaroff told me he lost his sense of smell for over a month afterwards. At other sights, we saw toxic fracking waste water being sprayed through sprinklers into the atmosphere as if it was just watering a golf course. Colorado’s conclusions were no surprise to us — we already knew this is a pollution nightmare.

Whenever you have a pollution nightmare, you will have a public health nightmare if you look hard enough or wait long enough. A spike in neonatal deaths in the Vernal area in the early half of the 2010s was one piece of evidence that there were already serious consequences to the basin’s dangerous atmosphere.

Oil production in Utah, mostly from the Basin, has increased by more than 85% between 2013 and 2024. But the entire purpose of the Uinta Basin Railway is to increase oil production further still, about 400%. The Uinta Basin would go from a pollution nightmare to essentially becoming uninhabitable.

In their ruling greenlighting the railway, the U.S. Supreme Court dismembered the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) — the first major piece of environmental legislation passed by Congress in 1969 — regarded as the “Magna Carta” of federal environmental laws. At the time, environmentalism was still little more than a boutique crusade. Since then, thousands of times over, scientists have proven that environmental protection has become a matter of health or illness, life or death, of preserving an inhabitable climate or surrendering our children’s future. And the importance of NEPA in all that has been magnified many times over.

Section 101 of NEPA requires national policy “to use all practicable means and measures, including financial and technical assistance, in a manner calculated to foster and promote the general welfare, to create and maintain conditions under which man and nature can exist in productive harmony … and other requirements of present and future generations of Americans.”

Defying all previous court rulings for the last 56 years, this Supreme Court’s ruling made a mockery of promoting “the general welfare” or fulfilling “requirements of present and future generations” with their highly politicized ruling.

What is the “general welfare” of future generations if it’s not breathable air and a livable planet?

It is our belief that the companies investing in more Uinta Basin crude oil infrastructure via the railway are doing so solely on the basis of whether it’s profitable for them essentially in a 10-year time frame, not for what’s in the long-term interests of the community. When that profit evaporates those companies and their jobs will disappear as well. Then what? The boom and bust cycle of dirty energy is a defining feature of a resource extraction based economy.

Consistent with their tunnel vision and shortsighted priorities, from the governor on down, Utah’s political leaders cheered the Supreme Court’s decision. Their love for dirty energy is much like a patient addicted to smoking cigarettes: Yes, there’s an initial satisfying nicotine buzz, but over time, addiction to the pollution from cigarettes, like any other pollution, comes at a substantial cost to one’s health, well-being and even lifestyle. And for many it is eventually fatal.

That is exactly what Utah is courting with this myopic infatuation with fossil fuel money. Their exuberance reflects a value system that we all should find impossible to defend.

Because of the staggering pollution and the climate consequences of the railway, UPHE felt compelled to become a plaintiff in this lawsuit. In celebrating the ruling, the governor contemptuously dismissed the plaintiffs as “extremist groups.” If a commitment to empirical evidence, a scientific-based world view, protecting human health, the common good and the future of humankind are denigrated as “extremist,” it’s an honor to be labeled as such. Despite the court’s ruling, our efforts will continue.

Brian Moench, M.D., is the president of Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment.

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