Western Organization of Resource Councils v. Jewell

Two organizations brought a lawsuit against the Secretary of the Interior and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) challenging the failure to update the environmental review of the federal coal management program to consider the climate change impact of greenhouse gas emissions resulting from the program. The organizations—Western Organization of Resource Councils and Friends of the Earth—alleged that BLM had not comprehensively analyzed the environmental impacts of the program since 1979, and that the 1979 analysis “only briefly discussed the then-nascent science of the effects of greenhouse gas emissions and the federal coal management program’s emissions.” The organizations asked the federal district court for the District of Columbia to declare defendants in violation of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA); to order an analysis of the impacts of coal leasing under the federal coal management program on climate change and analyze alternative policies to reduce such impacts, and to enjoin defendants from considering applications for or issuing new coal leases or modifications of existing leases until defendants comply with NEPA.