Alaska Industrial Development & Export Authority v. U.S. Department of the Interior

The federal district court in the District of Columbia granted federal defendants’ motion to transfer to the District of Alaska, where a case in which the same plaintiff had unsuccessfully challenged the Biden administration's 2021 moratorium on Arctic National Wildlife Refuge leasing program activities. The court agreed with the defendants that the District of Alaska was “the superior forum” because it would make “little sense” to adjudicate the matter in the District of Columbia, to which the plaintiff had no connection, and when the lawsuit’s subject matter was in another state where a court already had ruled on a similar dispute involving the same parties.

Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority (AIDEA) filed a lawsuit in federal district court in the District of Columbia challenging the U.S. Department of the Interior’s (DOI’s) September 2023 termination of seven oil and gas leases on the Coastal Plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The leases were issued in January 2021; DOI suspended the leases in June 2021. After a court <a href="https://climatecasechart.com/case/alaska-industrial-development-export-authority-v-biden/">rejected</a> a challenge to the suspension, DOI issued a letter canceling the leases, citing, among other things, DOI’s failure in its environmental review for the 2021 leases to provide quantitative estimates of downstream greenhouse gas emissions from foreign consumption or to explain why it could not provide such estimates and DOI’s failure to consider alternatives that involved fewer than 2,000 acres of surface development. AIDEA asserted that the lease cancellations violated the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 and the Administrative Procedure Act, that DOI failed to provide AIDEA with due process, and that the cancellation violated DOI regulations.