- This topic has 1 reply, 2 voices, and was last updated 4 years, 2 months ago by
.
-
Topic
-
US judge halts hundreds of drilling projects in groundbreaking climate change ruling
…it was ruled the Trump administration violated environmental laws by failing to consider greenhouse gas emissions. The federal judge has ordered the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which manages US public lands and issues leases to the energy industry, to redo its analysis.
The decision stems from an environmental lawsuit. WildEarth Guardians, Physicians for Social Responsibility, and the Western Environmental Law Center sued the BLM in 2016 for failing to calculate and limit the amount of greenhouse gas emissions from future oil and gas projects.
The agency “did not adequately quantify the climate change impacts of oil and gas leasing”, said Rudolph Contreras, a US district judge in Washington DC, in a ruling late on Tuesday. He added that the agency “must consider the cumulative impact of GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions” generated by past, present and future BLM leases across the country.
The decision is the first significant check on the climate impact of the Trump administration’s “energy-first” agenda that has opened up vast swaths of public land for mining and drilling. Environmental advocates are praising the move, with Jeremy Nichols, WildEarth Guardians’ Climate and Energy Program director, calling it a “triumph for our climate”.
“This ruling says that the entire oil & gas drilling program is off the rails, and moving forward illegally,” said Nichols.
The Western Energy Alliance, one of the defendants in the case, [stated via] Kathleen Sgamma, its president, to the Washington Post: “This judge has ignored decades of legal precedent in this ruling. The judge is basically asking BLM to take a wild guess on how many wells will be developed on leases, prematurely.”
Nichols predicts there will be implications for public lands across the west. His group is now poised to bring litigation to block drilling on hundreds of thousands of acres in other states.
“With the science mounting that we need to aggressively rein in greenhouse gases, this ruling is monumental,” said Kyle Tisdel, attorney and energy and communities program director for the Western Environmental Law Center. “Every acre of our public land sold to the oil and gas industry is another blow to the climate, making this ruling a powerful reality check on the Trump administration and a potent tool for reining in climate pollution.”
++++++++++++++++++++++++
This has got to be overturned via the appellate court process. Judge Contreras was recused as the judge in the Michael Flynn case – 6 days after the hearing started. He was also one of the FISA court judges that more than likely rubber-stamped the FISA warrants used to spy on the Trump campaign. And it looks like the globalists got to this scrud on the basis of ‘fake climate change’ psuedo-science.
Wondered why the price of gas just jumped 4 cents a gallon yesterday….
Livin' in the Gulag...
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.