Environmentalists Argue Federal Government Failed to Analyze Social Costs of Fossil Fuel Emissions from Drilling Leases

“Federal public lands used for fossil fuel extraction contribute 24% of the United States’ Greenhouse Emissions,” according to 10 environmental groups in their ongoing lawsuit against the U.S. Department of the Interior, Secretary of the Interior Debra Haaland, the Bureau of Land Management (BoLM), and BoLM Director Tracy Stone-Manning (Dakota Resource or Council, et al, v. U.S. Department of the Interior, et al., D. D.C., No. 1:22-cv-1853 ).

Their lawsuit seeks to invalidate 173 oil and gas leases approved in June 2022 across eight states:  Colorado, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, and Utah, and Wyoming. 

Plaintiffs include: Dakota Resource Center, Center for Biological Diversity, Citizens for a Healthy Community, Living Rivers & Colorado Riverkeeper, Montana Environmental Information Center, Rio Grande Waterkeeper, Sierra Club, Waterkeeper Alliance, Western Waterheads Project, and WildEarth Guardians.

The environmental groups argue the BoLM is in violation of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) 42 U.S.C. § 4321, for failing to make efforts to prevent or eliminate damage to the environment and biosphere. The groups also argue that Secretary Haaland failed to follow the instructions of the Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA) 43 U.S.C. § 1701, which requires her office to “take any action necessary to prevent unnecessary or undue degradations of the land.”

Five states have intervened for the defendants: Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Utah, and Wyoming. Defendants, through Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen, argued in their answer filed Oct. 21, 2022, the complaint failed to state a claim upon which relief could be granted, the plaintiffs lacked standing, that plaintiffs failed to exhaust their administrative remedies, and that the intervening states reserve the right to further amend pleadings throughout the course of litigation.

In January 2021 the newly-transitioned Biden Administration issued Executive Order 14008 requiring the Interior Department to place a “pause” on all new oil and gas leases and required the BoLM produce a report containing a review and reconsiderations of Interior’s leasing program. Louisiana challenged the order’s “pause” in Louisiana v. Biden, 543 F. Suppl. 3d 388, 410 (W.D. La. 2021) and won, reversing the order’s policy on oil and gas leases but kept the order’s requirement for the Interior Department to produce its report on leasing practices.

Interior published a 14-page report on Nov. 27, 2021, that highlighted recommendations for fiscal reforms but contained no analysis of the leasing program’s climate impacts. This report failed to acknowledge the BoLM’s recent acknowledgments of collaborative scientific research conducted by the federal multiagency Council of Environmental Quality in 2012, 2015, and in 2020, that revealed significant social costs incurred by greenhouse gas emissions. The BoLM acknowledged that lands under their management contained 96,100 actively producing oil or gas wells. This makes the BoLM responsible for managing lands producing as much as 7% of the country’s oil needs and 8% of its gas needs.

The coalition filed a motion for summary judgment on March 9, 2023, asking the judge to conclude the matter before greenhouse gas emissions from these lease sites curtail efforts by the United States to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. The coalition also addressed the defendants’ affirmative defense that plaintiffs lacked standing to allege injury for damage to aesthetic and recreational values of the land. The groups argued that “actual environmental harm from complained-of activity need not be shown,” citing Friends of the Earth v. Laidlaw, 528 U.S. 167, 180-81 (2000).

The environmental groups argued that the BoLM failed to follow NEPA by filing six separate Environmental Assessments that did not take into account the project’s at-large social costs. The BoLM failed to produce an impact report to the public about estimated greenhouse gas emissions generated throughout various stages of managing land containing active gas and oil production. Under Conner v. Burford, 848 F.2d 1441, 1451 (9th Cir. 1998), the groups argue the BoLM failed to comply with NEPA by streamlining the sale process and not properly conducting an environmental impact study for the 162 lease sites as an entire project rather than on a state-by-state basis. Under Conner, “[a] sale of an oil and gas lease represents an irreversible and irretrievable commitment of resources.” The environmental groups also point blame at Secretary Haaland for failing to follow instructions provided by the FLPMA regarding the management of federal lands.

FLPMA instructs the Secretary of the Interior to consider multiple federal land management principles, including: the combination of balanced and diverse resources; needs of future generations for renewable and nonrenewable resources, recreation, range, timber, minerals, watershed, wildlife and fish; and the mutual, scientific, and historical value of the lands. The environmentalists insinuate that Haaland should have directed Interior to invalidate the lease sales and ordered the BoLM to restart the oil and gas lease assessment process in order to be NEPA compliant. The defendants’ answer to this motion is expected in the coming days.