Alaska Wilderness League v. Jewell

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Plaintiffs filed a motion for summary judgment and a supplemental complaint in their challenge in the federal district court for the District of Alaska to the second supplemental environmental impact statement (SEIS) for an oil and gas lease sale in the Chukchi Sea off the Alaskan coast. The plaintiffs, which are environmental groups and Alaskan communities, added a new count alleging that the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s (BOEM’s) failure to analyze the climate change effects of the consumption of oil and gas from the lease sale in the second SEIS violated NEPA. In support of their motion for summary judgment, the plaintiffs contended that advances had been made since preparation of earlier environmental analyses that would allow the agency to assess the impacts of oil and gas extraction on climate change based on “an overall atmospheric ‘carbon budget.’” The plaintiffs said that BOEM had improperly concluded that it could not perform an assessment of whether the lease sale would affect energy markets and consumer behavior, and had also improperly concluded that NEPA did not require it to consider climate impacts of burning lease sale fuels.

After the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) affirmed its approval of an oil and gas lease sale in the Chukchi Sea off the northwest coast of Alaska, the parties notified the federal district court for the District of Alaska that the plaintiffs had decided to challenge BOEM’s determination. These developments regarding the Chukchi Sea lease sale followed the Ninth Circuit’s ruling in January 2014 that BOEM’s earlier environmental review for the lease sale was deficient because it was based on an arbitrary estimate of the amount of economically recoverable oil. In response to the Ninth Circuit’s decision, BOEM issued a supplemental environmental impact statement in February 2015 and a record of decision in March. In the challenge to this round of decision-making, the parties are to complete their briefing by October 9, 2015.

In April 2014, the federal district court for the District of Alaska remanded the matter to BOEM for further analysis in keeping with the Ninth Circuit’s opinion. The court ordered BOEM to provide bimonthly updates, and barred BOEM from removing suspensions on drilling in the lease area and from approving or “deeming submitted”any exploration plans submitted by lessee. In May 2014, BOEM submitted its first status report, indicating that it had begun drafting a supplemental environmental impact statement (SEIS) and collecting and analyzing information to create a expanded exploration and development scenario to study on remand. BOEM estimated that it would issue its record of decision in March 2015. In June 2014, BOEM published a notice of intent to prepare an SEIS in the Federal Register.

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