An environmental law group sued the Biden administration Monday over its report on reforms to the federal oil and gas leasing program, accusing the White House Council of Environmental Quality of “political interference” in the Interior Department’s recommendations.
The suit is a sign of environmentalist discontent with President Joe Biden’s resumption of the program, which he pledged to end as a candidate in order to address climate change.
Friends of the Earth’s complaint, filed under the Freedom of Information Act, asks the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to compel the release of documents on the matter and lays out its suspicions that the White House may have engaged in an “inappropriate weakening” of the Interior Department’s report, which Biden ordered during his first week in office.
BIDEN OVERHAULS FEDERAL OIL AND GAS LEASING PROGRAM — HERE’S WHAT IT MEANS
“Given the lofty climate goals outlined in the Executive Order, many (including FOE’s members) expected the Secretary’s report to contain a thorough discussion of how fossil fuels extracted from federal lands and waters exacerbate the ever-growing climate crisis,” the complaint read.
FOE’s complaint said further the group suspects that the end report “may have been modified significantly in response to political pressure from the White House and CEQ, acting at the behest of oil-and-gas industry interests and oil-producing states.”
An FOIA request for documents related to the White House’s engagement with the DOI about the report was filed in January, but CEQ never acknowledged receipt, according to the complaint. The plaintiffs are asking the court to declare CEQ to be in violation of FOIA and to order the release of the requested information.
“It should not take a lawsuit for the White House to meet its legally mandated transparency obligations to disclose how and why climate change was stripped from Interior’s report on the leasing program,” Hallie Templeton, legal director for FOE, said in a statement.
The Interior Department released its report on the leasing program on Black Friday last year. It made several recommendations to the Bureau of Land Management and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which manage the federal lands and waters eligible for oil and gas leasing, including a recommendation to increase the royalty rates companies must pay on leased lands.
For some green groups and Democratic lawmakers, however, the report fell far short of the kinds of reforms they believe are needed, up to and including a complete cessation of leasing on federal lands.
“The administration needs to manage public lands and waters consistent with its climate commitments, and today’s report does not offer a plan to do that,” Rep. Raul Grijalva, chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, said at the time.
The Biden administration has already had several legal run-ins with environmental groups, which demand that it be more hawkish on reducing fossil fuel use.
FOE, for its part, has already achieved some success in legal ventures against the administration, having won a forfeiture of the lone offshore lease sale the Interior Department undertook last year.
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A federal judge ruled that the administration failed to calculate the sale’s impact on the environment adequately.
