WildEarth Guardians v. United States Bureau of Land Management

A federal district court in the District of Columbia granted the Bureau of Land Management’s motion to transfer a case involving challenges to coal leases to Wyoming, holding that the case could have been brought in Wyoming and public interests weighed decisively in favor of transfer.

WildEarth Guardians and Sierra Club filed an appeal in the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals of the decision of the federal district court for the District of Wyoming that upheld federal approvals for coal leases in the Powder River Basin in Wyoming. Among the claims rejected by the district court was a claim that the NEPA review had not given sufficient consideration to climate change impacts, including the effects of carbon dioxide from coal mining and combustion.

The federal district court for the District of Wyoming upheld federal approvals for two large coal leases in the Powder River Basin in Wyoming. The court’s decision in three consolidated cases rejected a number of claims by environmental groups, including that the review under NEPA had not given sufficient consideration to the leases’ impact on climate change. Citing the “very deferential” stance it was required to take, the court said the disclosure of the effects of greenhouse emissions was adequate, but suggested that “today the analysis likely could have been better given the development and acquisition of new knowledge and continuing scientific study.” The court noted that the agencies had not ignored the effects of coal combustion, but that uncertainty regarding such effects was created by the fact that the coal would enter the free marketplace rather than go to a particular power plant. The court also rejected claims under the Federal Land Policy Management Act, the National Forest Management Act, the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act, and the Mineral Leasing Act. The court did, however, reject an intervenor’s argument that the petitioners did not have standing to make claims that the agencies had failed to adequately consider climate change or greenhouse gas emissions.

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The Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) acted arbitrarily and capriciously when it concluded that issuance of four coal leases in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin would not result in higher national greenhouse gas emissions than declining to issue the leases. The leases extended the lives of two existing surface mines that account for approximately 19.7% of the U.S.’s annual domestic coal production. The Tenth Circuit rejected the argument that the environmental groups challenging the leases lacked standing, concluding that the plaintiffs were not required to assert a climate-related injury to challenge BLM’s analysis of climate impacts. The Tenth Circuit also said the plaintiffs retained their standing on appeal even though they had dropped their challenges regarding the adequacy of BLM’s consideration of the local environmental impacts that formed the basis for their alleged injuries. On the merits, the court held that BLM’s reliance on a “perfect substitution assumption”—that the same amount of coal would be sourced from elsewhere even if BLM did not issue the leases—to compare the greenhouse gas emissions for the no-action alternative and issuance of the leases lacked support in the record. The court also said, however, that “[e]ven if we could conclude that the agency had enough data before it to choose between the preferred and no action alternatives, we would still conclude this perfect substitution assumption arbitrary and capricious because the assumption itself is irrational (i.e., contrary to basic supply and demand principles).” The Tenth Circuit rejected, however, the plaintiffs’ contention that BLM’s failure to use “readily available” modeling tools to determine climate impact was arbitrary and capricious. In rejecting BLM’s use of the perfect substitution assumption, the Tenth Circuit distinguished the case from the Supreme Court’s decision in Baltimore Gas & Electric Co. v. NRDC, 462 U.S. 87 (1983), in which the Court deferred to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) in a matter regarding nuclear waste storage, in part because the matter was within NRC’s expertise and at the “frontiers of science.” The Tenth Circuit said BLM was not owed deference in this case because climate science was not a “scientific frontier”; the Tenth Circuit also noted that BLM had acknowledged that climate change was “a scientifically verified reality.” In a concurring opinion, Judge Baldock indicated that the court’s “assertion that climate science is settled science is, in my view, both unnecessary to this appeal and questionable as a factual matter.”

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