A group of environmental organizations filed a complaint against the Bureau of Ocean Management (BOEM) on Monday, claiming the sales of leases the bureau made in the Gulf of Mexico were illegal.
The plaintiffs claimed in the lawsuit that BOEM’s plans to lease more than 70 million acres of Gulf waters for the extraction of fossil fuels are based on a very defective environmental assessment.
Healthcare, Green Energy Spending
The lease auctions were previously postponed by the Biden administration due to conflicting court decisions, but as a result of a clause Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) put into the Inflation Reduction Act mandating the sales, they are now scheduled to take place on March 28.
Democrats’ green energy and healthcare spending measure, the Inflation Reduction Act, which was passed last August, included directives for the Interior to conduct three lease sales that were postponed in May 2022, two of which are situated in the Gulf of Mexico.
On February 24, the Interior published a final notice of sale for the lease sale, opening up 73.3 million acres of federal land for leasing.
As the government moved through with leasing, citing requirements in the new law, environmental groups opposed to more oil and gas leasing urged the administration to forgo auctioning off federal territory both onshore and offshore.
The law’s lease provisions were obtained by Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, who supports further oil and gas extraction on public lands and waters. The law was enacted without Republican support.
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Greenhouse Gas Emissions
The lawsuit asserts that the BOEM environmental impact statement improperly evaluated the hazards from greenhouse gas emissions and failed to adequately account for risks from things like ship strikes and oil spills.
The plaintiffs assert that the EIS failed to take a smaller-scale alternative into account and instead only considered leasing nearly all possible areas in the Gulf waters, in violation of the National Environmental Protection Act.
National organizations including the Sierra Club, the Center for Biological Diversity, EarthJustice, and the Natural Resources Defense Council are among the plaintiffs in the action, along with regional advocacy organizations like Healthy Gulf and Bayou City Waterkeeper.
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