Trump's Arctic Oil, Gas Lease Sale Violated Environmental Rules, Lawsuits Claim

Earthjustice and other groups say the National Petroleum Reserve lease sale failed to consider how burning the fossil fuels might impact climate change.

An expanding legal campaign to force federal agencies to take climate change into account when making big energy decisions has a new frontier: Alaska's National Petroleum Reserve.

Environmentalists on Friday challenged a record-breaking oil and gas lease sale there by the Trump administration, which offered up 10 million acres for drilling in December.

In a pair of lawsuits, environmental groups argued that the lease sale broke a key law by ignoring climate and other environmental impacts.

In one of the suits, the environmental law organization Earthjustice and the plaintiffs it represents argued that the Trump administration had violated the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) by failing to consider how the greenhouse gas emissions from burning the fossil fuels from the Arctic tracts might impact climate change.

"NEPA requires agencies to take a hard look at the effects of their actions," said Rebecca Noblin, a staff attorney with Earthjustice. "There have been a lot of courts lately that have said that if this is a fossil fuel project, that includes the effects of burning fossil fuels. The agency just hasn't done that here."

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