Dakota Resource Council v. U.S. Department of the Interior

The federal district court for the District of Columbia upheld the U.S. Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM’s) 2022 approval of six oil and gas lease sales for parcels in western states, finding that conservation groups failed to show that BLM violated the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) or the Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA) when it analyzed the lease sales’ potential effects on greenhouse gas emissions and climate change and approved the sales. The court found that “[o]perating at the frontiers of science, BLM reasonably exhausted available tools to analyze the lease sales environmental consequences.” First, the court found that BLM took a hard look at the lease sales’ cumulative effects by estimating the quantity of greenhouse gas emissions from each individual lease sale; comparing each lease sale’s annual emissions to total annual state and national fossil fuel emissions, state and national emissions from all sectors, and global emissions; comparing life-of-lease emissions to state and national oil and gas emissions; and using the social cost of greenhouse gases to calculate expected environmental harm. BLM’s environmental assessments also incorporated a separate “Specialist Report” that evaluated cumulative emissions from federal fossil fuel authorizations and measured emissions from fossil fuel development on federal lands “against the yardstick of U.S. policy objectives and international agreements” such as the global carbon budget for meeting the Paris Agreement’s target of net-zero emissions by 2050. The court was not persuaded by the conservation groups’ arguments, including assertions that BLM was required to project the impact of emissions on local and global ecosystems or that BLM designed its comparison of the lease sales’ emissions to total federal fossil fuel emissions to make the lease sales’ emissions appear de minimis. Second, the court found that BLM adequately justified its decision to consider each lease sale separately by explaining that consolidated review was not feasible due to “the fluid and localized nature of the oil and gas lease decision-making process.” The court noted that BLM “did not hide the fact that the lease sales were part of an overall federal program with cumulative environmental impacts,” given its preparation of the Specialist Report and the consideration of cumulative emissions in each environmental assessment. The court noted, however, that “given the potentially catastrophic consequences of the climate crisis and the rapidly developing legal and scientific terrain, it may prove prudent for [BLM] to take the next step by preparing a programmatic [environmental impact statement (EIS)] for the entire federal fossil-fuel program,” as the conservation groups urged. Third, the court found that BLM did not err by issuing a finding of no significant impact (FONSI) under NEPA instead of preparing an EIS. The court said the D.C. Circuit had previously accepted the rationale given by BLM—that available scientific tools did not permit a determination of whether a particular amount of greenhouse gas emissions would have a significant impact. The court also said it was not clear what purpose would be served by requiring preparation of an EIS in a case where “an agency has exhausted all available tools and finds there is no way to determine significance.” Fourth, the court found that the record did not support the plaintiffs’ contention that lease sales would cause “unnecessary and undue degradation” under the FLPMA. The court also ruled that the conservation groups did not have to standing to challenge the Oklahoma lease sale because they did not identify any member who used the area in or near the lease parcel in that state. The court rejected a contention that the conservation groups failed to exhaust administrative remedies but indicated that the defendants potentially had a viable argument that the groups “jumped the gun” by filing the lawsuit the day before BLM approved five of the six lease sales. The court declined to “enter this thorny thicket of finality issues” because it had rejected the groups’ claims on the merits. In a <a href="https://climatecasechart.com/case/wilderness-society-v-haaland/">separate case</a> challenging only BLM’s approval of the Wyoming oil and gas lease sale, the court ruled in part for conservation groups that challenged the NEPA review for the sale.

A case brought by 10 conservation groups filed in federal district court in the District of Columbia challenged approval of 173 oil and gas lease sales across eight states. The complaint asserted climate change-based violations of National Environmental Policy Act and the Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA). The complaint asserted that an environmental impact statement should have been prepared. It alleged a failure to provide “meaningful analysis” of greenhouse gas emissions in the seven environmental assessments prepared for the lease sales and asserted that the conclusions in the findings of no significant impact were “unsupported and inconsistent with the agency’s acknowledgment of the climate crisis.” The complaint also asserted that the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) failed to consider cumulative impacts of the lease sales by “fail[ing] to evaluate the severity of their collective impacts in the context of the climate crisis and GHG emissions from the Leasing Program.” The complaint also asserted that BLM violated FLPMA by “fail[ing] to define or to take any action necessary to prevent the further unnecessary or undue degradation of public lands from acknowledged climate impacts and despite its acknowledged contribution to those impacts.”