气候变化领域集成服务门户

The Interior Department's efforts to expand development of federal oil, gas and coal have suffered some recent courtroom setbacks. skeeze/Pixabay (pumpjack); Pamela King/E E News (Interior Department); West Cumbria Mining (coal)

Bit by bit, federal judges across the country have begun to chip away at the foundation of the Trump administration's energy agenda.

A crop of recent district court rulings rebuffed President Trump's efforts to amp up energy development on public lands and waters: the end of a coal leasing ban, the repeal of a key royalties regulation, the reversal of an offshore moratorium and the leasing of large Western tracts for oil and gas development.

All the decisions knock down or delay elements of the Trump administration's "energy dominance" agenda — a directive largely shouldered by the Interior Department, which manages federal and tribal lands.

"The administration clearly wants to hitch its wagon to the fossil fuels industry, but so many of our environmental laws and decades' worth of precedent make it clear that agencies have to analyze and account for environmental effects," said Jayni Hein, natural resources director at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University.

"Even if the administration as a whole wants to shift away from climate analysis, it really can't."

In each of the recent rulings, many of which came down on Friday nights, judges found that the Trump administration had fallen short of its requirements under the National Environmental Policy Act or Administrative Procedure Act.

One case, in which an Alaska court reinstated Obama-era oil and gas leasing bans in the Arctic and Atlantic oceans, offered an unusual direct rebuke of an exercise of executive power.

In addition to possible appeals over the recent round of leasing, offshore, regulatory and coal decisions, the Interior Department still faces upcoming legal action on the following energy issues:

Revised BLM Methane and Waste Prevention Rule: Get ready for a long round of legal wrangling over the Trump administration's revision to Obama-era controls on methane emissions from existing oil and gas operations on public and tribal lands (Energywire, Sept. 19, 2018). Although the rewrite effectively rescinds the 2016 regulation, the approach may escape some of the legal pitfalls of an outright repeal, which BLM tried with the valuation and fracking rules.