WASHINGTON (CN) — An environmental activist group sued the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on Monday over a longstanding policy to ignore whether greenhouse gas pollution from offshore oil and gas drilling projects harm local wildlife in the Gulf of Mexico.
Former Interior Department Solicitor David Bernhardt enacted the policy in 2008 during President George W. Bush's administration. Bernhardt returned to the Interior Department as deputy secretary in 2017 under President Donald Trump.
Bernhardt, in the 2008 M-Opinion, concluded that greenhouse gases cannot be considered an “effect” of any agency action. As a result, the service has never considered the effects of greenhouse gas emissions from offshore drilling on protected wildlife in the Gulf.
The suit, filed by the Center for Biological Diversity in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, focuses on the government’s use of the Bush-era policy in a 2018 biological opinion examining the effects of federal gas and oil activities in the Gulf on threatened wildlife.
“The federal government’s blatant disregard for the climate crisis is alarming,” said David Derrick, an attorney for the center, in a statement. “As officials ignore climate change, rising seas inundate sea turtle nests, wetland habitat vanishes and severe storms batter our coastal communities.”
“It’s absurd to lease out our public waters for oil industry profit and pretend Gulf drilling doesn’t cause climate change,” Derrick said.
The Gulf is home to a large portion of federally authorized oil and gas activities, including over 2,240 active oil and gas leases across nearly 12 million acres. Each new oil and gas lease sale creates up to 1,750 new wells, 280 production structures and 1,330 miles of new pipeline.
The oil and gas actives included in the 2018 opinion make up one of the largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions in the nation, according to the nonprofit group.
Over the next six years, the Interior Department estimated that approximately 2 million barrels of oil per day — 700 million per year — will be extracted from the Gulf, emitting over 320 million tons of greenhouse gases per year.
“The biological opinion’s silence on greenhouse gas pollution is unlawful. The opinion fails to quantify greenhouse gas emissions, ignores climate change as part of the environmental baseline, and, most importantly, omits analysis of the impacts of greenhouse gas pollution on threatened and endangered species and their critical habitats,” the center says in the suit.
Offshore drilling regularly harms federally protected species in the Gulf, and the harm will continue as long as the policy remains in place, the nonprofit argues. The protected species include manatees, six sea turtle species, four beach mice species and nine bird species.
Stuart Pimm, a professor of conservation ecology at Duke University, joined the suit as a plaintiff with the center. He warned in a news release that the government’s reliance on the two-decades-old guidance flew in the face of science.
“Incontrovertible scientific evidence points to the massive changes to species on land and in the oceans from our progressively more harmful disruption of the climate caused by the very activities being approved by the Fish and Wildlife Service,” Pimm said.
The nonprofit center argued that the government wrongly concluded that, over the next 50 years, no individual whooping crane, Mississippi sandhill crane, piping plover, red knot, beach mouse, Cape Sable seaside sparrow or West Indian manatee will be harmed. Loggerhead and Kemp’s ridley sea turtles would only face “extremely low, but not zero” impacts, according to the opinion.
According to the nonprofit, the only way the agency reached those conclusions was by omitting the possibility of a catastrophic oil spill above 1 million barrels — the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster released over 3.19 million barrels into the Gulf.
The conclusion was based on assertions from other agencies, such as the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, that another catastrophic spill is unlikely to happen and cannot be linked to any proposed action. However, the nonprofit notes, such agencies and their predecessors made a similar prediction before the Deepwater Horizon disaster.
Further, the agency admitted that at least one large spill — up to 10,000 barrels — is likely to occur over the next 40 years, but concluded that such an incident would pose little harm to any endangered species or critical habitats.
The center urges the yet-to-be-assigned federal judge to vacate the 2018 opinion and order the agency to amend Environmental Species Act regulations to specify that the government must consider greenhouse gas emissions during consultation.
Follow @Ryan_Knappy
Subscribe to Closing Arguments
Sign up for new weekly newsletter Closing Arguments to get the latest about ongoing trials, major litigation and hot cases and rulings in courthouses around the U.S. and the world.
Additional Reads
-
Shell, climate activists wrap appeal of landmark Dutch case April 12, 2024 -
