A judge invalidated the largest offshore oil and gas lease sale in the nation's history because the government failed to take climate change into account.
The Biden administration acted in a way that was incomprehensible and irrational when it conducted an auction of more than 80 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico, according to a ruling by a judge in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. The judge said that the Interior Department failed to fully analyze the climate effects of burning the oil and gas from the leases.
Over the past year, a number of rulings have required the government to conduct a more robust study of climate change effects before approving fossil fuel development. The analysts said that the decisions would ensure that future administrations are not able to ignore or downplay global warming.
"This would not have been true 10 years ago for climate analysis," said Richard Lazarus, a professor of environmental law at Harvard University. He said that courts are forcing government agencies to include a very robust andholistic analysis of climate in their decision-making.
About 25 percent of the country's greenhouse gases come from fossil fuel emissions on public lands and in federal waters.
The rights to drill in 1.7 million acres were offered by the government in the lease sale. The leases haven't been issued yet.
The government relied on an outdated and flawed analysis from the Trump administration to argue that not holding the lease sale would result in higher greenhouse gas emissions because oil companies overseas would increase their production to fill a vacuum in the market.
He ordered a new study under the NEPA, which says the government must consider ecological damage when deciding whether to permit drilling and construction projects.
Judges for the United States Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit and the District Court for the District of Alaska have reached the same conclusion in lease sales cases in the past two years.
The president of the National Wildlife Foundation said that this is continuing to set an established precedent that NEPA requires a greenhouse gas analysis.
The director of the energy law center at Louisiana State University said that having to show the impacts of climate change doesn't mean fossil fuel development will stop.
In a lease sale decision, a future administration could show the full impacts of climate change and still decide that economic benefits outweigh the climate dangers.
Mr. Hall said that an administration more friendly to the fossil fuel industry could still go forward.
The Biden administration has to decide whether to appeal the ruling.
Mr. Biden promised to stop issuing new leases for drilling on public lands. He signed an executive order to stop the issuing of new leases. After Republican attorneys general from 13 states sued, a federal judge in Louisiana ruled that the administration must hold lease sales in the Gulf that had already been scheduled by the Trump administration.
The Interior Department could have done more to prevent or reduce the size of the lease sale, but the Biden administration went ahead with it.
The Interior Department was reviewing the decision, according to a spokeswoman.
There are serious deficiencies in the federal oil and gas program.
Analysts said they expected the ruling to stand.
Mr. Lazarus said that they were not spilling a lot of tears over this one, since it was a big lease sale done by Trump.
The question is whether the oil companies that purchased leases, the trade groups representing them, or the Republican states that sued the Biden administration could appeal.
Mr. Hall thought they could.
He said that the defendants would have standing to appeal.
In a statement, the Louisiana solicitor general said the state wasexploring potential legal remedies to the court decision.
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