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A federal appeals court has handed the Biden administration a temporary victory this week regarding the White House’s efforts to scale back fossil fuel production even as gas and energy prices remain high.
The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans overturned a lower federal court’s ruling that would have ended the Biden administration’s drilling and leasing moratoriums on federal lands, Newsmax reported Thursday.
“The court’s decision vacated the Louisiana district court’s decision to block the Interior Department’s leasing pause after Louisiana and a dozen other states filed a lawsuit against the administration,” Newsmax noted, adding that the states argued they would suffer economic harm from the pause drilling.
The three-judge panel of the appeals court found that the District Court for the Western District of Louisiana’s ruling does not actually outline what the federal government is and is not permitted to do regarding the moratorium.
“We cannot reach the merits of the Government’s challenge when we cannot ascertain from the record what conduct — an unwritten agency policy, a written policy outside of the Executive Order, or the Executive Order itself — is enjoined,” the panel wrote.
“Our review of (Administrative Procedure Act) claims must begin by determining if there was final agency action. Where, as here, it is unclear what final agency action the district court predicated its order upon, we are unable to reach the merits of the appeal,” the judges noted further.
Newsmax adds:
In April, the Biden administration announced it would resume leasing sales for oil and gas drilling on federal land, while also sharply reducing the acreage available for leases, and charging higher royalties on the oil and gas produced.
At the time, the Biden administration felt external pressure to address high gas prices in the U.S.
In January 2021, his first week in office, Biden suspended all drilling on new oil and gas leases. He stated that the suspension should be implemented “pending completion of a study and reconsideration of oil and gas permitting and leasing practices,” according to the presidential order.
Following Biden’s executive orders, which included halting construction of the Keystone XL pipeline approved by his predecessor, former President Donald Trump, gasoline and diesel prices began creeping upward, rising to more than $5 per gallon on average before slipping back to around $3.91 per gallon this week. Diesel fuel, meanwhile, is around $4.90 a gallon on average.
When Trump left office in January 2021, the average price per gallon was around $2.37, according to the Energy Department’s Energy Information Agency.
Meanwhile, earlier this week, a federal judge in Montana renewed an Obama-era halt to coal mining on public lands that he enacted in 2016.
District of Montana Judge Brian Morris, who was also appointed by Obama, ordered the Bureau of Land Management to reinstate the coal mining moratorium that Trump reversed in 2017 “until it has conducted a more thorough environmental analysis,” The Hill reported.
The outlet noted further:
Leasing of federal lands for coal mining accounted for about 40 percent of U.S. coal production in 2015.
Morris had previously sided in 2019 with a coalition of tribal and environmental groups, ordering a new environmental analysis under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Calling the new analysis inadequate, the groups sued again in 2020.
Then-Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke implemented Trump’s reversal. President Biden reversed Zinke’s reversal but did not reimpose a moratorium on mining.
“BLM’s NEPA analysis should have considered the effect of restarting coal leasing from a forward-looking perspective, including connected actions,” Morris wrote. “The ‘status quo’ that existed before the Zinke Order was a moratorium on coal leasing. Because the baseline alternative must consider the status quo, BLM was required to begin its analysis from that point.”
“The Tribe has fought and sacrificed to protect our homelands for generations, and our lands and waters mean everything to us. We are thrilled that the court is requiring what we have always asked for: serious consideration of the impacts of the federal coal leasing program on the Tribe and our way of life,” Serena Wetherelt, president of the Northern Cheyenne Tribe, a plaintiff in the case, said, according to The Hill.
“We hope that President Biden and [Interior] Secretary [Deb] Haaland fulfill their trust obligation to take a hard look at the overall energy program on federal lands and really consider how to make it best serve the Tribe, taxpayers, and the climate,” she added.
