6:10 PM 03/20/2019 | Energy Tim Pearce | Energy Reporter
A federal judge temporarily blocked new oil lease auctions in Wyoming on Tuesday after finding the Department of the Interior “did not sufficiently consider climate change” when proposing the lease sales, The Washington Post reports.
Washington D.C. District Court Judge Rudolph Contreras ruled the government violated federal law and did not fully study the environmental impact of oil development on 300,000 acres of federal land. (RELATED: Federal Oil And Gas Lease Sales Break $1 Billion In 2018, Nearly Triple Previous Record)
Contreras did not void leases already sold, but he ordered the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to redo the environmental reviews used to approve the leases. The BLM must include in the redone reviews the effects of each new oil well on overall emissions in the U.S., including the pumped oil’s downstream effects, Contreras’s ruling said.
“Given the national, cumulative nature of climate change, considering each individual drilling project in a vacuum deprives the agency and the public of the context necessary to evaluate oil and gas drilling on federal land before irretrievably committing to that drilling,” he wrote, according to WaPo.
Former President Barack Obama appointed Contreras to the federal bench in March 2012.
Contreras’s ruling came after the activist groups WildEarth Guardians and Physicians for Social Responsibility sued the federal government over the lease sale in 2016.
“In spite of the President’s commitment to US leadership in moving towards a clean energy future … Federal Defendants continue to authorize the sale and issuance of hundreds of federal oil and gas leases on public lands across the Interior West without meaningfully acknowledging or evaluating the climate change implications of their actions,” the two groups wrote in their lawsuit, according to Ars Technica.
The BLM’s original environmental assessments included information on Wyoming’s climate and how climate change might factor into its future. The assessments granted that oil drilling in the area would increase the effects of climate change but declined to say by how much. Accurately predicting how many oil wells would eventually be dug is too difficult for any meaningful analysis, the BLM said, according to Ars.
Interesting political post script.
Judge Contreras is the same judge that recused himself from the Michael Flynn case shortly after accepting his plea.~ctm
Guest commentary by David Middleton
This is the key piece of information:
The BLM’s original environmental assessments included information on Wyoming’s climate and how climate change might factor into its future. The assessments granted that oil drilling in the area would increase the effects of climate change but declined to say by how much. Accurately predicting how many oil wells would eventually be dug is too difficult for any meaningful analysis, the BLM said…
It’s not just difficult, it’s impossible to perform any meaningful analysis on the volume of greenhouse gas emissions that may result from lease sales and awarding leases. Not all leases get drilled and not all wells are productive.
Wyoming’s Powder River Basin has recently become very active. While not yet coming close to the Williston Basin in North Dakota, oil production has been on the increase over the past few years:
WYOMING OIL
How strong is Wyoming’s oil recovery, and will it last?
Heather Richards Jan 27, 2018Wyoming oil is saving the day, something that hasn’t been said for more than two years. State revenue forecasts are improving. The oilfield service industry is climbing. And the general mood has gone from “cautiously optimistic” to just plain “optimistic.”
Proponents point to high producing wells in the Powder River Basin, a flush of new applications to drill and most of all the rising price of crude as evidence of a turnaround.
[…]
In Wyoming, a state depleted of once robust fossil fuel revenues, the recovery has spurred hope. Oil is just one of the three commodities that tanked in recent years, but its comeback has brought unexpected revenue right before a legislative budget session.
[…]
Operators started looking at Wyoming as a deal, and that competition pushed up the cost of buying leases in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin.
“We haven’t seen that in a long, long, long time,” Hinchey said of the $15,000 per acre leases sold in 2017. Companies were dropping millions simply to stake out a claim, he said.“When you buy a lease like that, you want to make it productive, because you’re spending a lot of money,” he said.
Large companies like EOG Resources, Anadarko, Chesapeake and Devon have all made investments in eastern Wyoming.
Coinciding with the current uptick in price are new strides in the drilling plans that these companies have set up in earlier years.
The Bureau of Land Management released a draft environmental impact statement Friday for a joint oil and gas project between five major players north of Douglas. The 5,000-well project is planned over a 10-year period, and according to BLM’s estimates could generate 8,000 jobs.
Major players like EOG and mid-sized operators like Wold Oil are figuring out the puzzle of Wyoming’s rock. They are drilling horizontally, keeping within a band of oil saturated sediment for up to 2 miles.
“Clearly Wyoming is benefiting a lot from this,” said Godby, the economist, of the oil recovery. “How strong is this? That’s hard to say.”
Clearly the agents of the Obama maladministration can’t allow this happen… Why do I refer to Judge Contreras as an agent of the Obama maladministration?
Contreras was close friends with Peter Sztrok, the disgraced former FBI agent who engineered a perjury trap for former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. Contreras is believed to be the FISA Court judge who signed off on the first fraudulent FISA warrant for Carter Page. Contreras accepted Flynn’s guilty plea, even though Sztrok’s initial report said Flynn didn’t lie. Contreras was removed from the Flynn case and replaced by Emmet Sullivan, who immediately issued a Brady Order to Mueller’s inquisitors demanding they turn over any and all exculpatory evidence they had in their possession.
And now this…
U.S. Ordered to Halt Oil and Gas Drilling in Swath of Wyoming
Andrew Harris
The U.S. must stop drilling for oil and gas on more than 300,000 acres in Wyoming because the Bureau of Land Management failed to account for the cumulative effect of the activity on global climate change, a federal judge in Washington ruled.
[…]
“Given the national, cumulative nature of climate change, considering each individual drilling project in a vacuum deprives the agency and the public of the context necessary to evaluate oil and gas drilling on federal land before irretrievably committing to that drilling,” U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras said in a 60-page decision.
[…]
Contreras faulted the federal government for merely summarizing the potential impacts without elaborating on the degree to which its decisions may contribute to climate change. He stopped short of voiding the Wyoming leases at issue, ordering the bureau to re-examine nine of its environmental assessments and “no significant impact” findings, and barring the BLM from authorizing new drilling in that state until it satisfies its environmental-law obligations.
[…]
The groups suing, Wildearth Guardians and Physicians for Social Responsibility, challenged the federal government’s approval of 473 oil and gas leases covering 463,553 acres across the three states.
The judge hasn’t yet issued his rulings on the challenged Colorado and Utah leases.
[…]
The judge is probably waiting to see how quickly his ruling gets overturned before moving on to Colorado and Utah. This is a standard tactic of Enviromarxist terrorists environmental activists. They sue the regulatory agency to invalidate lawfully issued drilling permits or otherwise render lawfully awarded mineral leases un-drillable. This is what they did to Shell in the Chukchi Sea… just dumber. They aren’t challenging drilling permits. They are challenging the awarding of leases. In a drilling permit application, it’s at least mathematically possible to estimate future greenhouse gas emissions from individual wells. It’s absolutely impossible to do this at the time the leases are issued for the purpose of calculating the cumulative future emissions for a leasing area.
If this doesn’t get slapped down very quickly, this form of Enviromarxist terroristic environmental activist lawfare will spread…
Overnight Energy: Judge halts drilling on Wyoming public lands over climate change | Dems demand details on Interior’s offshore drilling plans | Trump mocks wind power
BY MIRANDA GREEN – 03/20/19
JUDGE TEMPORARILY HALTS DRILLING IN WYOMING OVER CLIMATE CHANGE: A federal judge late Tuesday temporarily blocked oil and gas drilling on thousands of acres of public land in Wyoming, ruling that the Trump administration failed to “sufficiently consider climate change.”
The decision by Judge Rudolph Contreras of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia found that the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) failed to adequately assess the environmental impacts of drilling on the roughly 300,000 acres by not studying how each proposed drilling project could contribute to overall U.S. carbon emissions.
[…]
“Climate change, and humanity’s ability to combat it, are increasingly prominent topics of public discourse. This case concerns the attention the government must give climate change when taking action that may increase its effects,” he wrote in his opinion. “BLM failed to take a ‘hard look’ at [greenhouse gas] emissions from the Wyoming Lease Sales.”
[…]
DEMS DEMAND OFFSHORE DRILLING INFO BEFORE CONFIRMATION HEARING: A group of Senate Democrats are calling on the Interior Department to release more details about its anticipated offshore drilling plan prior to next week’s confirmation hearing for acting Secretary David Bernhardt.
The group of 17 senators on Wednesday sent a letter to Bernhardt asking him to provide them a copy of the latest five-year plan currently being drafted by Interior, known as the 2019-2024 National Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) Oil and Gas Leasing Draft Proposed Program.
[…]
“The American public and their elected representatives in Congress deserve to understand your vision for the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) before we consider your nomination to serve as Secretary of the Interior,” the senators wrote.
The letter was signed by, among others, Sens. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.). It specifically asked Interior to provide them with prior insight into which coastal areas will be included in the draft plan.
[…]
The plan to expand offshore drilling comes as the Trump administration has beefed up its energy independence push, including strides to make available more public land for oil and gas exploration.
The administration still faces a number of hurdles when it comes to tapping into offshore oil and gas reservoirs, including figuring out where exactly they are. Doing so would likely include seismic testing, which environmentalist and animal advocates have long warned could cause harm to sea animals.
[…]
Contreras’ ruling is nothing more than an unlawful continuation of Obama maladministration regulatory malfeasance. Should the Trump administration attempt to open some of the 94% of the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) currently off limits to exploration & production (E&P) activities, the same sort of lawfare will be waged against it.
This claim is simply idiotic…
The administration still faces a number of hurdles when it comes to tapping into offshore oil and gas reservoirs, including figuring out where exactly they are. Doing so would likely include seismic testing, which environmentalist and animal advocates have long warned could cause harm to sea animals
Firstly, there is no such thing as “seismic testing.” Secondly, marine seismic surveys have been conducted over just about every square meter of the outer continental shelves of the world over the past 50+ years, with no evidence that it has harmed marine life… At least not due to the use of marine airguns.
If these eco-nuts could successfully invalidate mineral leases in Wyoming, Utah and Colorado, they could probably do the same in the Gulf of Mexico, which only trails behind Texas in oil production. And that would take a big bite out of American Energy Dominance…
Hat tip to SMC and CTM for bringing this to my attention.
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Another example of too many COGS (Constantly Offended Green Socialists) and not enough sensible people engaged in the processes of government. It is a problem now across the whole world, except in totalitarian administrations. In those places (all socialist/communist) of course the views of the COGS are ignored because they are not free to comment.
One other small point raised by a contributor at WUWT recently. The opposite of socialism is not capitalism, it is “freedom”.
That is one of the most profound observations, I have read in recent times.
Thank you WUWT for its openness, and for allowing all opinions/views to be submitted.
I would like to draw attention to https://youtu.be/bT1iFhGKOI8.
That’s what they try to do. It is not an accident they have common interest with both Russia and China.
Climate change alarmists consist mostly of two broad groups.
1) People who do it to forward socialist agenda. Destroying a good economy is plus for these people.
2) Useful idiots
Most calamities of AGW, could, in case they realize themselves, easily adapted to. Wyoming is by no means capable of even slowing AGW down. The emissions growth from China and India during the next 10 years will make the US look funny.
This type of Judicial overreach is despicable.
Federal judges don’t have the power or authority to hold an economy at randsom just because they have a personal delusional belief in the disconfirmed CAGW hypothesis.
In accordance to the rules, an environmental impact study was conducted and submitted to the BLM on these new oil leases.
This is just judicial nuisance and harassment by a Leftist judge that should be formally censured for his illegal actions as an example to other Leftist hack judges who want to play these silly political games.
It’s frustrating how often this same canard gets repeated ad nauseam and goes unchallenged: That there is such a thing as “clean energy”, and also that it is not fossil fuels. I have never even seen an attempt at defining “clean energy”, much less a rigorous quantitative explanation and defence of the term. I find it difficult to believe that there is a legal definition.
I’m just wondering if District Court Judge Rudolph Contreras bothered to define specifically what he meant when he used the term “climate change”?
Is it:
— the world getting hotter in summers, or colder in winters, or vice versa?
— movement of the polar vortex?
— the world suffering from flooding, or from droughts?
— the world suffering from too much CO2, or too little CO2 for optimum crop growth to feed humanity?
— the world suffering from too much cloud cover, or too little cloud cover?
— the world suffering from too many insects (pests), or too few insects (species extinction)?
— the world suffering from too many El Ninos, or too many La Ninas?
— the world suffering from too much wind (claimed increase in storms of all types) or too little wind (for windmill power farms to be reliable)?
— the world suffering from too few sunspots or too many sunspots?
— the world suffering from declining Arctic ice cover or increasing Antarctic ice cover?
“If you can’t define something you have no formal rational way of knowing that it exists. Neither can you really tell anyone else what it is. There is, in fact, no formal difference between inability to define and stupidity.” — Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
It appears to be anything and everything that isn’t 72F and slightly breezy during daylight hours. And they propose to solve it by harvesting energy during those same daylight hours between 10AM and 2pm local
before 10 and after 2 solar optimum diminishes
Are we in the twilight zone?
Robert, most definitely! The question: is it the twilight before the rising of the sun (the light of logic, scientific objectivity and “test all things, hold fast to that which is true” thinking) after a decade or more of its near-absence in the field of climate science and “green energy”, or is instead the twilight before the setting of sun (an extended period of abject mental darkness and superstitious beliefs by the majority of mankind related to climate science and “green energy”, similar to the previous Dark Ages in Europe)?
Well, that’s why he was put on the bench – as an enforcer.
That’s what Obama did for his tenure – stacked the deck with activists.
I predicted when Gordon was elected Governor of Wyoming, the minerals industry would be destroyed within four years and many, many more bird choppers would destroy the landscape. He already vetoed a bill to let the legislature hire a lawyer to sue to put in coal ports on the west coast (that’s how I understood the bill). If you’re hoping for an appeal and the Governor has to be involved, cross it off your “wishing and hoping” list.
Wyoming gave tax breaks, etc, to get the supercomputer in Cheyenne (complete with hundreds of virtue signaling bird choppers) to prove oil and gas and coal are horrible. Sorry, folks, Wyoming leaders are not interested in fossil fuels. They FULLY back global warming, bird choppers and teach climate change in schools. I cannot feel sorry for any of this. This is what Wyoming wants at the “leader” level, and we keep electing the Greens.
‘we keep electing the Greens.’
But it’s ‘for the environment’, right? So what harm can it do?
That’s one of the frustrating things about places where people go who like wilderness – they don’t seem to understand the issue has been hijacked.
Well said.
This is what happens when the voice of reason sits idle or permits itself to be silenced.
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” -Edmund Burke
And that’s exactly why Trump needs to do what the Republicans have been too incompetent to do: Get off his laurels and finally appoint a commission to review the so-called science of climate change. Its first order of business should be to review the alleged evidence that fossil fuel emission of carbon dioxide is the cause of increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Several scientists have now shown conclusively that it’s not.
https://edberry.com/blog/climate-physics/agw-hypothesis/contradictions-to-ipccs-climate-change-theory/
https://edberry.com/blog/climate-physics/agw-hypothesis/what-is-really-behind-the-increase-in-atmospheric-co2/
Once that’s established, the house of cards collapses.
The incite, delay, and ignore playbook is still operating.
– incite and delay on coal port access on federal waterway systems
– delay pipeline approvals
– delay any and all attempts to drill on federal shale lands
– ignore official technical test reports on hydrocarbon leakage from frack wells in PA and WY
– ignore any and all climate cycles that don’t fit the narrative of the Climate Crusades
Juliana vs US plaintiffs motion to Ninth District Court of Appeal for preliminary injunction (filed Feb. 7, 2019):
“Plaintiffs ask the Court to bar the government “from authorizing through leases, permits, or other federal approvals: (1) mining or extraction of coal on Federal Public Lands; (2) offshore oil and gas exploration, development, or extraction on the Outer Continental Shelf; and (3) development of new fossil fuel infrastructure, in the absence of a national plan that ensures the above-denoted authorizations are consistent with preventing further danger to these young Plaintiffs.”
Methinks the activists are targeting the federal leasing authority, and that Judge Contreras got the memo.
That has been their modus operandi… Abrogate the rule of law, in favor of the rule of eco-fascist morons.
It’s simple really judge. Any oil or gas production from this region will replace a similar amount from another part of the globe where there are less environmental regulations. Therefore any production in Wyoming will have zero impact on the world’s climate. Unless of course, judge, you are speaking on behalf of the UN/IPCC world “government”.
The impact is going to be 7…
So it’s ok…
No… According to the Agents of OBAMA… It’s only OK if give tribute to Saint Al Gore before awarding the leases.