Friends of the Earth v. Haaland

In an unpublished judgment, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals held that a case challenging Lease Sale 257 for the development of oil and gas resources in the Gulf of Mexico was moot because the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) included instructions for the Secretary of the Interior to issue leases to the high bidders. A district court had vacated the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s record of decision in January 2022 for failure to comply with NEPA. Because the legislative act mooted the case, the D.C. Circuit vacated the January 2022 district court order and remanded with instructions to dismiss. The D.C. Circuit rejected environmental groups’ arguments that a live controversy remained. The court concluded that the IRA did not condition issuance of the leases on the outcome of the appeal of the January 2022 order; that the IRA made clear that issuance of the leases was nondiscretionary and no longer subject to NEPA; and that the IRA did not intrude on the judiciary’s independence.

On January 27, 2022, the federal district court for the District of Columbia vacated a lease sale for oil and gas production and development on 80.8 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico. After first rejecting arguments that the case was not ripe for judicial review, the court found that the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) had arbitrarily decided not to consider foreign oil consumption in its evaluation of greenhouse gas emissions of a no action alternative pursuant to the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The district court noted that both the <a href="https://climatecasechart.com/case/center-for-biological-diversity-v-zinke-3/">Ninth Circuit</a> and the federal district court for the <a href="https://climatecasechart.com/case/sovereign-inupiat-for-a-living-arctic-v-bureau-of-land-management/">District of Alaska</a> had previously found that the same analysis—which reached the “counterintuitive conclusion” that total greenhouse gas emissions would be higher if no lease sales took place even though the model predicted a decrease in foreign oil consumption in the absence of the lease sales—was arbitrary and capricious. In this case, the district court found that BOEM was required either to provide a quantitative estimate of downstream greenhouse gas emissions resulting from the reduced foreign consumption or to provide a more specific explanation of why it could not do so. The court also said BOEM’s argument that it could not have calculated the emissions was undercut by the inclusion of such an estimate in a draft environmental impact statement (EIS) for another lease sale a few weeks after releasing the record of decision for this lease sale. In addition, the court noted that a reasoned explanation was “especially crucial where, as here, the agency has varied so dramatically in its approach over the past year”—the Trump administration announced the lease sale in January 2021, the Biden administration rescinded it after President Biden took office, and then the Biden administration issued a new Determination of NEPA Adequacy based on the same NEPA analysis and reinstated the lease sale in August 2021 (after a federal court in Louisiana <a href="https://climatecasechart.com/case/louisiana-v-biden-2/">enjoined</a> the Biden administration from implementing a “pause” on new oil and gas leasing in offshore waters). The court also found that the Determination of NEPA Adequacy was procedurally defective because BOEM could not rely on it “to cure the errors in the underlying EISs” identified by the Ninth Circuit and District of Alaska unless it circulated a draft for public comment. The court rejected the plaintiff’s contentions that certain new information required preparation of a supplemental EIS, including scientific studies regarding the need to keep global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius and “the counterproductive role of oil and gas leasing to reaching that goal,” and evidence regarding potential conflicts between the lease sale and efforts to develop offshore wind. The court found that vacatur was the appropriate remedy because “the disruptive consequences of vacatur do not outweigh the seriousness of the NEPA error in this case and the need for the agency to get it right.”