Earth Island Institute v. Nash

Earth Island Institute, Sequoia Forestkeeper, Greenpeace, and climate scientist James Hansen filed a lawsuit in the federal district court for the Northern District of California challenging federal and state authorizations for a logging project and biomass power plant on public forestland burned during the Rim Fire in 2013. The complaint alleged that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the California Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) improperly used disaster relief funds for logging activities and that HUD, HCD, and U.S. Forest Service violated the National Environmental Policy Act. The plaintiffs contended that environmental impact statements (EISs) from 2014 and 2016 should have been supplemented with new information about the forest’s natural regeneration and that the biomass plant should have been considered in the same EISs as the logging project. The complaint’s allegations included that the EISs failed to analyze the environmental impacts of logging for biomass energy production, including increased greenhouse gas emissions, and that the climate and greenhouse gas effects of logging would be different than what was studied in the EISs due to differences in logging “post-fire large, dead trees” for lumber and removing and burning “trees of all sizes, both live and dead, and including the young, naturally-regenerating forest, for biomass energy production.” The plaintiffs later filed a motion for a temporary restraining order or preliminary injunction. The federal defendants filed to dismiss the case for improper venue or to transfer the case to the Eastern District of California.