Montana Environmental Information Center v. United States Bureau of Land Management

In a lawsuit brought by environmental groups to challenge authorizations for federal oil and gas lease sales in Montana, the federal district court for the District of Montana approved a stipulated agreement between federal defendants and environmental groups and dismissed the action. In the stipulated agreement, the federal defendants agreed to notify the plaintiffs and hold public comment periods when applications for permits to drill (APDs) were submitted on the leases. The federal defendants also agreed to consider requiring measures to account for and reduce natural gas emissions as conditions of approval of the APDs. The stipulated agreement also noted that the United States Bureau of Land Management was proposing to update its regulations to reduce the waste of natural gas from flaring, venting, and leaks from oil and gas production operations on public and Indian lands. It left open the possibility that the plaintiffs could seek attorney fees under the Equal Access to Justice Act. Four trade groups that had intervened in the lawsuit said they would not object to dismissal of the action, but that they believed the federal defendants would have prevailed on the National Environmental Policy Act claims and that the plaintiffs were not entitled to attorney fees.

Four trade groups—the American Petroleum Institute, Montana Petroleum Association, Montana Chamber of Commerce, and Western Energy Alliance—notified the federal district court for the District of Montana that they opposed an anticipated settlement between environmental groups and the United States Bureau of Land Management and other federal defendants concerning the sale of oil and gas leases in Montana and the Dakotas. The court had permitted the trade groups to intervene in the action on behalf of the defendants. The trade groups said that they had not been allowed to participate in the settlement discussions and that as parties to the action, whose members had bid successfully in the challenged lease sales, they believed that the settlement would substantially infringe on their lease rights. The trade groups also said that the settlement would not be in the public interest because it would restrict BLM’s discretion. On May 26, 2016, the court ordered the federal defendants and environmental groups to file a final settlement by June 17, 2016, and said that the defendant-intervenors would have until June 24 to file a brief opposing any terms of the settlement.

The court granted defendants’ motion for summary judgment and dismissed the lawsuit on standing grounds, finding that plaintiffs had failed to establish injury-in-fact.  Noting that plaintiffs’ recreational and aesthetic interests were “uniformly local”  and the effects of greenhouse gas emissions “diffuse and unpredictable,” the court found that plaintiffs had presented “no scientific evidence or recorded scientific observations to support their assertions that BLM’s leasing decisions will present a threat of climate change impacts on lands near the lease sites.”  The court further held that plaintiffs had made no effort to show that methane emissions from the lease sites would make a “meaningful contribution” to global warming and had thus failed to show that potential climate change impacts to the local environment were “fairly traceable” to greenhouse gas emissions associated with the challenged leases.

A coalition of environmental groups sued the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) for allegedly failing to consider the climate change impacts of oil and gas leasing on public lands in Montana and the Dakotas. The groups alleged that the Interior Department failed to control the release of methane from oil and gas development on nearly 60,000 acres of leases sold in 2008 and December 2010 in violation of NEPA. The environmental groups settled an earlier action under which BLM agreed to suspend the 2008 leases and conduct a supplement EIS of their climate change impacts. In August 2010, BLM said that emissions from developing these leases could not be tied to specific climate change impacts and decided to move forward with issuing the 2008 leases and a new round of 2010 leases.