The Trump administration’s pro-drilling policy took a blow when a federal judge ordered a halt to oil and gas exploration on more than 300,000 acres in Wyoming, saying the government must account for its cumulative effect on global climate change.
The ruling came in a lawsuit filed by a pair of environmental conservation groups against the Obama administration in 2016, challenging the Bureau of Land Management’s decision to lease federal lands for energy development in Wyoming, Utah and Colorado. It stressed the difference between assessing environmental impacts in isolation and measuring their collective impact.
“It is a big deal insofar as it’s going to force the government to think more completely and large-scale about the climate consequences of land management,” University of Pittsburgh law professor Joshua Galperin said of the ruling. “And it’s not such a big deal in that it doesn’t necessarily stop oil and gas drilling even in this case.” The statute under which the groups sued, the National Environmental Policy Act, merely promotes conservation, while other federal laws, such as the Clean Air Act, actually restrict specific actions. Ultimately, “it doesn’t stop them from doing what they want to do,” Galperin said of NEPA. “Given the national, cumulative nature of climate change, considering each individual drilling project in a vacuum deprives the agency and the public of the context necessary to evaluate oil and gas drilling on federal land before irretrievably committing to that drilling,” U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras said in a 60-page decision Tuesday night...MORE
And the R's did nothing to amend NEPA when they controlled both Houses of Congress and the White House.
1 comment:
Just illustrates the great need to reform our "justice" system. It is a huge mistake to allow one communist judge to shut down a business based on a hoax.
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