Inside Big Greens’ Legal War To Dismantle Oil And Gas Leasing

Environmental groups are waging a war of attrition against the Department of the Interior’s oil and gas leasing programs.

They’re unleashing an onslaught of court challenges and scoring legal settlements to stop federal mineral leasing in its tracks in an effort to staunch climate change. [bold, links added]

Environmentalists have perhaps never before shared as much ideological kinship with a sitting president as they do with Joe Biden, who sees risks associated with climate change as “existential.”

Biden’s administration intends for the U.S. power sector to be carbon-free by 2035 and is on record supporting restrictions up to and including an end to federal mineral leasing.

Even so, green groups unhappy with what they view as Biden’s insufficiently restrictive administration of the onshore and offshore leasing programs have carried over their strategy from previous, less “green” presidencies.

That includes leveling a host of legal actions against new leases and drilling permits.

In June, green groups sued the Bureau of Land Management over its approval of more than 3,500 drilling permits since March 2021 on leases in New Mexico and Wyoming.

The complaint argued the permits threaten to damage ecosystems and threaten “climate-imperiled” species in violation of the Endangered Species Act.

It also accused the Bureau of Land Management of violating the National Environmental Policy Act in approving the applications by “[failing] to take a hard look at cumulative GHG emissions.” …

Days later, a cohort of 10 green groups, including two parties to the drilling permitting suit, filed a complaint against the government for holding lease sales covering acreage in eight Western states.

These sales were the first and, to date, only series of onshore oil and gas lease sales offered since Biden took office.

They were announced in April and carried out throughout the month of June in compliance with a court ruling that enjoined the Interior Department from pausing new leasing, something Biden ordered during his first week in office.

Plaintiff environmental groups put forward a similar legal theory as that offered in the complaint against the BLM’s permitting approvals.

The bureau “continues to recklessly lease large swaths of the western United States to oil and gas development without comprehensively reviewing these connected actions and analyzing the severity of the resulting climate impacts from the addition of thousands of tons of GHG emissions into the atmosphere,” the plaintiffs argued.

More specifically, they argued the BLM’s establishment of distinct environmental assessments for each sale, rather than putting them together in a single, comprehensive environmental impact statement, violated NEPA “by diluting the impacts of these leases in the context of its Leasing Program while also failing to take a hard look at the cumulative climate impacts from these sales.”

Jeremy Nichols of WildEarth Guardians, a Western lands-focused environmental NGO that is participating in both lawsuits, said the group is “trying to drive a higher level of accountability” at Interior and the BLM and to get the agency to more deliberately consider the “climate consequences” of leasing.

“What this all boils down to is the agency is failing to account for the cumulative, big-picture impacts of its oil and gas leasing and drilling permitting program,” Nichols, the climate and energy program director for the group, told the Washington Examiner. “This is not a matter of one well or one lease. It’s a matter of the agency’s collective leasing program and its collective drilling permitting program.”

The recent suits are subplots to a larger and defining storyline of Biden’s tenure, where green constituencies have been holding Interior to account for his campaign promises to restrict new leasing.

Biden made a range of different pledges on the campaign trail concerning mineral extraction on federal lands.

His climate change platform provided for “banning new oil and gas permitting on public lands and waters,” implying an end to new rights-of-way and to new applications for permits to drill on existing leases.

Biden also told voters during a 2020 Democratic primary debate he supported “no more drilling on federal lands, no more drilling, including offshore,” while he also pledged to end new leasing of federal lands and waters.

Those pledges set the stage for one of Biden’s first executive actions as president: a “pause” on all new oil and gas leasing. Biden ordered all new leasing to be paused beginning Jan. 27, 2021, pending a comprehensive review of the program.

Industry groups and Republican-led states subsequently filed separate legal challenges against the leasing pause, and U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty, a nominee of former President Donald Trump, awarded the plaintiff states an initial victory in June 2021 by placing a preliminary injunction against the leasing pause.

Interior subsequently moved forward with procedural steps to hold Lease Sale 257 in the Gulf of Mexico, as well as the Western-state onshore lease sales challenged by WildEarth Guardians and the others, in compliance with the injunction.

Interior’s offering Lease Sale 257 sparked what became one of the biggest legal victories for environmentalists of Biden’s tenure.

Groups challenged the lease sale in court, accusing the administration of stepping on Biden’s leasing pledges and violating NEPA.

Judge Rudolph Contreras, a nominee of former President Barack Obama, vacated the sale.

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, a part of the Interior Department that oversees offshore leasing in the Outer Continental Shelf, “acted arbitrarily and capriciously” in excluding foreign consumption from the greenhouse gas emissions calculations put together during the environmental review of the sale.

The Biden administration has been selective in where it appeals leasing-related rulings. It appealed Doughty’s injunction stopping the leasing pause, a decision which the judge recently backed up in August with a permanent injunction.

However, it declined to appeal Contreras’s ruling invalidating 257 alongside oil and gas interests, who asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to take a second look.

The selective appeals are one way the Biden administration has been able to align itself with green interests while simultaneously transgressing them by holding lease sales.

At the same time, the administration has also been doing a form of penance for Trump-era leasing work, pledging to go back and revisit leasing decisions made during the previous administration.

Read rest at Examiner