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WASHINGTON – A judge’s verdict this week override Analysts said on Friday that the largest offshore oil and gas lease sale in the country’s history shows that regulatory decisions that ignore global warming are increasingly vulnerable to legal challenges as the government fails to take climate change into account.
Judge Rudolph Contreras of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia ruled Thursday that the Biden administration acted “arbitrarily and capriciously” when it held an auction of more than 80 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico. The judge said the Home Office has not fully analyzed the climate impacts of burning oil and gas from leases.
The decision is one of several instances in the past year where a court has requested the government to conduct a more robust study of the effects of climate change before approving fossil fuel development. Cumulatively, the decisions will ensure that future administrations can no longer ignore or underestimate global warming, analysts said.
“This wouldn’t have been true 10 years ago for climate analysis,” said Richard Lazarus, a professor of environmental law at Harvard University. He said it was a “huge win” for courts to force government agencies to add “a very robust and holistic climate analysis” as part of the decision-making process on whether to drill on public lands and waters.
Emissions from fossil fuel extraction on public lands and federal waters are approximately 25 percent the country’s greenhouse gases.
Shell, BP, Chevron and Exxon Mobil offered $192 million in the November 17 lease sale for approximately 1.7 million acres of drilling rights in the government’s proposed area. The leases have not yet been made.
Judge Contreras argued that the government relied on an outdated and flawed analysis of the Trump administration, that failure to sell leases would lead to higher greenhouse gas emissions because overseas oil companies would increase production to fill the gap in the market.
He called reliance on this analysis a “serious failure” and ordered a new study under the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, that said the government should consider ecological damage when deciding whether to allow drilling and construction projects.
Based on a similar analysis, the judge came to the same conclusion as the judges of both the 9th District Court of Appeals for the 9th District of the United States and the District Court of Alaska in cases involving rental sales over the past two years.
“This continues to set an established precedent that NEPA requires a greenhouse gas analysis,” said Collin O’Mara, president of the National Wildlife Foundation. “This continues to show the damage we’ve done by allowing the federal lease to continue.”
Keith Hall, director of the energy law center at Louisiana State University, warned that showing the effects of climate change does not mean that fossil fuel development will come to a standstill.
A future administration might show the full implications of climate change in a rental sale decision and still legally decide that the economic benefits outweigh the climate hazards.
“A friendlier management to the fossil fuel industry can still move forward,” Mr Hall said. “Weighing the pros and cons is ultimately a policy decision.”
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The Biden administration is currently in an awkward situation deciding whether to appeal the decision.
As a candidate, Mr. Biden has pledged to stop issuing new leases to drill on public lands and federal waters. Shortly after taking office, signed an executive order to pause the issuance of new leases. But after Republican attorneys general from 13 states filed suit, a federal judge in Louisiana blocked that order and also ruled that the administration must hold preplanned lease sales in the Gulf by the Trump administration.
The Biden administration made progress with the sale in November, despite arguments from environmental activists that the Interior Department could do more to prevent or reduce rental sales.
Interior Department spokeswoman Melissa Schwartz said in a statement that the agency is reviewing the decision.
“We have documented serious shortcomings in the federal oil and gas program,” Ms Schwartz said. “Especially in the face of the climate crisis, we need to take the time to make important and long overdue programmatic reforms.”
Analysts said they expected the Biden administration to keep power afloat.
“They don’t shed a lot of tears over this because there was a huge lease sale by Trump and they obviously wanted to stop it,” Mr Lazarus said.
That raises the question of whether oil companies that buy leases, the trade groups that represent them, or Republican states suing the Biden administration’s efforts to block new leases can appeal.
Mr Hall said he believed they could do it.
“The defendants were impressed enough to appeal,” he said.
Louisiana attorney general Elizabeth Murrill said in a statement that the state was “exploring potential legal avenues” to the court order.
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