This is a standard tool in the Swamp's toolkit
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no oil for us, thank you, we’re Americans
The Biden administration entered a legal settlement Tuesday evening with environmental groups, agreeing to block drilling on more than 58,000 acres of public land.
The federal government will refrain from issuing any drilling permits across 113 leases spanning 58,617 acres in Montana, North Dakota and South Dakota under the settlement between the Department of the Interior (DOI) and the coalition of organizations led by the WildEarth Guardians and Sierra Club.
"Today’s agreement opens the door for the Biden administration to undo the Trump administration’s recklessness and disregard for the climate and public interest," Jeremy Nichols, climate and energy program director of the WildEarth Guardians, said in a statement Wednesday.
"Oil and gas leasing is completely at odds with climate action, we applaud the administration for agreeing to do the right thing," Nichols said.
The way this works is that, if Congress lacks the votes to enact a specific law, it passes the buck on to the EPA for that agency’s zealots to draft up a regulation that will achieve the same end. But if the regulation won’t pass judicial scrutiny, if its restrictions exceed even the wide powers it’s enjoyed under all but the Trump administrations, the EPA reaches out to private groups (whose own staffers often serve previously with the agency and remain friends) to file a suit against the offending practice. The EPA, or whatever other agency is being sued, quickly reaches a settlement that is submitted to the court for incorporation into a final judgment. That produces exactly the same result that a statute or regulation would have, but now it’s in the form of a court order, unappealable and final.
This goes on all the time.
