A federal court in Great Falls, Mont., has found unlawful a Bureau of Land Management plan allowing coal mining and oil and gas drilling on over 15 million acres of public land and mining rights in Montana and Wyoming.
Judge Brian Morris for the District of Montana found that the BLM failed to consider alternatives to BLM’s unfettered coal, oil and gas leasing that would reduce impacts to air, land, water, wildlife and the global climate.
The case was brought by the Western Environmental Law Center on behalf of a coalition of conservation groups in Montana and Wyoming.
Resource management plans for BLM offices in Wyoming and Montana approved in September 2015 would have allow for an expected 10.2 billion tons of coal to be mined and an expected 18,000 new oil and gas wells to be drilled, including over 6,000 federal wells.
“BLM cannot acknowledge that climate change concerns defined, in part, the scope of the RMP revision while simultaneously foreclosing consideration of alternatives that would reduce the amount of available coal,” Morris wrote.
The judge ordered BLM to prepare a supplemental environmental impact statement to review climate change impacts and consider options for the amount of coal the government will make available for sale and subsequent mining. Morris also ordered the BLM to do a better accounting of carbon and methane pollution impacts from coal, oil and gas, both in the planning area when the resources are developed and “downstream” when the minerals are ultimately burned in power plants.
