War on fossil fuel: 9th Circuit hands greens another victory

Natural gas, once lauded by environmentalists as the "good fossil fuel," now is derided as dirty, dangerous and running amok. "The bigger recent news is that one of the most powerful environmental lobbies, the Sierra Club, is mounting a major campaign to kill the industry," the Wall Street Journal reported, back on May 31. "The battle plan is called 'Beyond Natural Gas,' and Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune announced the goal in an interview with the National Journal this month: 'We're going to be preventing new gas plants from being built wherever we can.' " It thus should come as no surprise that a contingent of conservation groups and Indian tribes sued the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in federal court, recently, arguing the agencies didn't do enough to protect the habitat of the Lahontan cutthroat trout and other federally protected fish when they allowed Ruby Pipeline LLC to build a $3 billion, 678-mile natural gas pipeline across Northern Nevada. The 42-inch pipe connects the gas shale fields of Opal, Wyo., to a distribution terminal in Mali, Ore. Last week, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled in favor of the Center for Biological Diversity, the Summit Lake Paiute Tribe of Nevada, Defenders of Wildlife, Great Basin Resource Watch, the Sierra Club's Toiyabe Chapter, et al., ordering the BLM to vacate the decision that allowed the pipeline's construction in 2010. The court also directed the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to rewrite its biological opinion for the project, holding that was key to the BLM's flawed record of decision-making...But let's not be naive. This is just part of a full-court press designed to slow or stall development of the resources and technologies that would reduce energy costs and thus help America's economy and population grow. This country needs more judges who are skeptical of such means-to-an-end litigation, for which we all pay dearly...more