Biden's war on energy campaign was busy last week
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BLM head and eco-terrorist Tracy Stone-Manning has designs on you, and you won’t like it
Administrative decrees, and friendly suits between the Swamp and its green energy allies; it’s war alright, and we’re the enemy they’re after.
To begin with, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has just paused oil and gas leasing on 2.2 million acres of Colorado public land.
The agreement was filed Thursday in Colorado federal court and requires the government to conduct a new environmental analysis of the climate impacts of oil and gas leasing on public lands in southwestern Colorado. The government also agreed to consider how the leases may impact the endangered Gunnison sage- grouse and its habitat.
The Sierra Club, Center for Biological Diversity and others said in an August 2020 lawsuit that BLM had violated the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires the government to take a hard look at the environmental impacts of its leasing decisions, when it approved the current 20-year plan.
The groups said the decision to allow leasing on these public lands would aggravate the climate crisis and that it would be “impossible” to address that impact without “completely transforming the way public lands are managed for fossil fuel exploitation.”
The groups also said the government failed to adequately consider the impacts leasing would have on the survival and recovery of the threatened Gunnison sage-grouse.
Next, the U.S. Forest Service and two environmental groups agreed to stop the 50-mile (80-kilometer) Crow Creek Pipeline Project, which would have created a natural gas pipeline from Idaho to Wyoming.
Finally, a federal judge has reinstated a moratorium on coal leasing from federal lands imposed under former Obama and then scuttled under former President Donald Trump.
The ruling from U.S. District Judge Brian Morris requires government officials to conduct a new environmental review before they can resume coal sales from federal lands. Morris faulted the government’s previous review of the program, done under Trump, for failing to adequately consider the climate damage from coal’s greenhouse gas emissions and other effects.
Almost half the nation´s annual coal production – some 260 million tons last year – is mined by private companies from leases on federal land, primarily in Western states such as Wyoming, Montana and Colorado.
…The coal program brought in about $400 million to federal and state coffers through royalties and other payments in 2021, according to government data. It supports thousands of jobs and has been fiercely defended by industry representatives, Republicans in Congress and officials in coal- producing states.
All three of these actions were based on the EPA’s unilateral expansion of environmental impact statements to include a project’s effect on “global warming”, and that same regulation is now being used to invalidate hundreds of projects around the country and force their developers to begin gain. Crisis by design.
Last month’s Supreme Court ruling in West Virginia v EPA, began the process or reining in Congress’s practice of enacting fine-sounding laws while leaving it to non-elected bureaucrats to dream up the rules necessary to implement them. But it was only a start, and it will take years to fully eradicate the process. Until then, administrative regulations can change with each change of administrations, whipsawing industry and ordinary citizens alike.
