By a 3:2 majority the Supreme Court has ruled that when carrying out an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), in this case for a proposed oil drilling, the ‘downstream’ impacts have to be considered in that assessment.
The Supreme Court say that for an oil drilling, that has to include what is going to be done with the oil.
It was agreed that much of it would be burned, so the climate impacts of that use needed to have been considered at the application stage.
As this hadn’t been done the consent for the drilling was quashed, and a new broader EIA will have to be carried out before the decision can sensibly be revisited.
