WASHINGTON (Washington Insider Magazine) – A federal judge has dismissed a proposal to lease thousands of acres in the Gulf of Mexico for oil and gas drilling, claiming that the Biden administration failed to consider the lease’s impact on global warming greenhouse gas emissions, thereby breaking a key environmental rule.
U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras’ order in Washington on Thursday remands the planned lease sale to the Interior Department for further consideration. The judge said Interior will have to determine whether to proceed with the sale following a revised review, cancel it, or take other actions.
Environmentalists applauded the decision, saying it provided President Joe Biden the opportunity to fulfill a campaign promise to end offshore leasing in federal territories. The decision came one year after Vice President Joe Biden imposed a federal leasing freeze as part of his initiatives to tackle climate change.
ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP and Shell proposed a total of $192 million in November for drilling rights on federal oilfields in the Gulf of Mexico.
Interior neglected to assess the greenhouse gas emissions that would arise from the lease sale, according to Contreras’ 68-page order, breaching the National Environmental Policy Act, a foundational environmental legislation.
Environmental evaluations of the lease auction, undertaken under former President Donald Trump and confirmed by Biden, came to the surprising conclusion that producing and releasing more oil and gas from the Gulf would produce less climate-changing harmful emissions than leaving it alone.
Environmentalists challenged similar arguments in two other instances in Alaska, and federal judges rejected them.
Officials at the federal level have subsequently modified their emissions modeling procedures, but it is too late for the November sale to employ them.
According to NBC News, the National Ocean Industries Association, which oversees the offshore industry, lambasted the decision, saying that U.S. oil and gas production is critical to lowering inflation and improving national security.
Another wave of oil and gas sales has been proposed by the government in Montana, Colorado, Wyoming and other states. Despite the fact that officials at the Interior Department concluded that burning the fuels might result in billions and billions of dollars in possible future climate impacts, they went ahead with the project.
According to the US Geological Survey, releases from burning and mining natural resources from federal waters account for nearly a quarter of all carbon dioxide emissions in the United States.
