Carbon dioxide is added to the atmosphere when oil is burned from a well in Wyoming. It is almost impossible to draw a line from one source of pollution to another.
The environmentalists want the government to do something.
A group of organizations sued the Biden administration on Wednesday, accusing them of failing to consider the harms caused by oil and gas drilling on public lands.
More than 3,500 drilling permits issued during the Biden administration could be revoked if the coalition succeeds in using the protections under the act.
Climate change is a catastrophe for the planet in every way, according to the Center for Biological Diversity. The lawsuit was filed in the District of Columbia.
Sign up for the Climate Forward newsletter, for Times subscribers only. Your must-read guide to the climate crisis.He said that fossil fuel leasing on public lands needs to be stopped.
The spokesman for the Interior Department wouldn't say anything about the case.
Oil and gas industry officials said that the government already conducts environmental analyses for every drilling permit issued. The officials said that the lawsuit would hurt the economy.
Kathleen Sgamma is the president of the Western Energy Alliance, which represents oil and gas companies.
She said that the courts are being used to deny Americans energy and drive up prices because Congress can't change the law. Shutting down federal oil and natural gas doesn't address climate change, it just shifts the production to private lands.
If global warming is to stay within safe limits, nations must stop developing new oil and gas fields and build new coal-fired power plants.
The lawsuit is the latest skirmish by environmentalists who want to keep fossil fuels in the ground and force President Biden to stop new oil and gas drilling. Legal challenges from Republican-led states and the oil industry have prevented Mr. Biden from suspending new leases.
The Biden administration is expected to hold its first lease sales for drilling on public lands in Colorado, Montana, North Dakota, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming. 80 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico have been opened for drilling.
The case faces long odds, but experts said it could force the government to rethink how it evaluates the potential for climate harm from new drilling permits.
The 2008 legal opinion written by David Bernhardt, who was chief counsel at the Department of Interior under Bush, is at the center of the suit. The Interior Department does not have to study the impact of a proposed action on an animal or plant.
Mr. Bernhardt wrote that "science cannot say that a tiny incremental global temperature rise that might be produced by an action under consideration would manifest itself in the location of a listed species"
Scientists and environmentalists said that the position remains the same. It is an impossible standard to know which packet of cigarettes triggered a smoker's lung cancer.
John J. Wiens is an ecology and evolutionary biology teacher at the University of Arizona. One third of plant and animal species could be gone in 50 years due to climate change, according to a study published in 2020.
Climate change puts species at risk, according to Dr. Wiens. If we don't know that this particular well in Wyoming led to an extinction, it doesn't matter. The general pattern is something we know.
A common misrepresentation of climate science is the idea that a clear line from pollution to peril be required.
Great lake. Salt Lake City's air could be polluted by a bowl of toxic dust created by climate change and rapid population growth. There are no easy ways to avoid that outcome.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air. Scientists said the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere hit a new high. Humans pumped 36 billion tons of the planet-warming gas into the atmosphere in 2011.
The U.S. performance was poor. The Environmental Performance Index, published every two years by researchers at Yale and Columbia, found that the United States had fallen behind other countries in its fight against climate change.
It was very hot. Scientists say that global warming has made the heat wave in Pakistan and India more likely to happen in the future. Since preindustrial times, the chances of a heat wave in South Asia have increased by at least 30 times.
She said that the question of whether climate change increases the risk of extinction to the green sea turtle is settled. Ms. Wentz said that the real test should be if drilling would cause a lot of greenhouse gases to be released.
According to the Bureau of Land Management, oil and gas production on public lands emits 9 percent of the United States' greenhouse gases and 1 percent of the world's emissions. As much as 600 million tons of greenhouse gases will be released over the life span of the wells, according to the suit.
The National Environmental Policy Act requires the government to study the impacts on climate change by proposed projects but doesn't obligate an agency to deny a bridge or highway because of the consequences
There is a presumption that the agency should reexamine the project if it is found to endanger a threatened plant or animal.
Environmental groups said that requiring the government to understand the effects of rising emissions on a species could make it harder to get a drilling permit.
The legal opinion and an underlying memo from the director of the United States Geological Survey were written with an incredible amount of work and understanding of the law and the science.
Mark D.Myers, who was director of the U.S.G.S. in 2008 and wrote a memo detailing the challenges of linking emissions with its consequences, agreed. He said that the administration vetting the opinion was done with top scientists.
Fossil fuel emissions are a dire threat to the planet according to Mr. The wrong vehicle to accomplish a change in our global emissions patterns was described by him.
Holly D. Doremus is an environmental law professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
She said that it is difficult for any administration to say that they are decreasing the availability of fossil fuels.
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