June 14, 2018: Today Sierra Club and its partners San Juan Citizens Alliance, Dine CARE, Wildearth Guardians, and Amigos Bravos got a great win in a case challenging the sale of thirteen oil and gas leases in the Santa Fe National Forest (New Mexico). The court set aside the leases and told the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) that it had to go back and conduct a new environmental analysis to address several areas where it had failed to provide analysis adequate to satisfy the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The groups were represented by attorneys from the Western Environmental Law Center.
First, the court found that BLM violated NEPA by refusing to assess the impacts of greenhouse gases emitted from the downstream combustion of the fossil fuels that would be produced and sold under the leases. The court found that this error alone was enough to warrant sending the decision back to BLM. The court cited Sierra Club's landmark win in the Sabal Trail pipeline case as support for its ruling. Second, the court found that BLM violated NEPA by summarily asserting that the leasing would not have different climate change impacts compared to a decision not to lease. The court explained that BLM's had failed to consider the cumulative impacts of the emissions from these leases in addition to the emissions from other actions in arriving at that unsupported conclusion. Third, the court found that BLM had violated NEPA by refusing to even attempt to quantify the volume of water that likely would be used to frack wells developed on the leased parcels, even though sufficient information was available to estimate the water use.