California v. Zinke

The federal district court for the District of Montana granted the State of Wyoming’s motion to intervene in a lawsuit brought by four states to challenge the Department of the Interior’s lifting of the Obama administration’s moratorium on the federal coal leasing program. The court said Wyoming met the standard for intervention as of right because it contained a number of coal leases affected by the moratorium and because it occupied a different position than the United States due to its “unique interests as a high volume coal producing state.”

California, New Mexico, New York, and Washington sued Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, and the U.S. Department of the Interior in the federal district court for the District of Montana, seeking to stop the defendants from restarting the federal coal leasing program. The states asked the court to set aside Secretarial Order 3348, in which Secretary Zinke revoked a secretarial order issued by his predecessor Sally Jewell that ordered a programmatic environmental impact review of the coal leasing program and placed a moratorium on new coal leases pending the completion of the review. The states alleged that the defendants had failed to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act, the Mineral Leasing Act, the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, and the Administrative Procedure Act. The states asserted that they had been leaders in working to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to impede climate change and that they had a significant interest in ensuring that the federal coal leasing program did not undermine these efforts. The states also alleged that they had experienced and would continue to experience the adverse impacts of climate change. They asserted that previously conducted environmental reviews of the coal leasing program did not consider and evaluate the program’s climate change impacts. On May 31, 2017, the states’ action was consolidated with a lawsuit brought by the Northern Cheyenne Tribe and environmental groups.