A group of more than 250 green organizations on Tuesday filed a legal petition under the Administrative Procedures Act requesting that the Obama administration halt all new fossil fuel leasing on federal lands. Such a moratorium already exists for coal leasing. The new petition, in contrast, calls for “Interior Secretary Sally Jewell to place an immediate moratorium on new leases for federally managed, publicly owned oil, gas, tar sands and oil shale.”
The petition calls for a moratorium to stay in place “until and unless it can be demonstrated that resumption of fossil fuel mining on public lands is consistent with meeting the U.S. goal of holding global warming ‘well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels’ and pursuing efforts to ‘limit the temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels,’ as agreed to by the United States and 194 other countries in the 2015 Paris Agreement,” according to a Center for Biological Diversity press release.
The Interior Department announced in mid-January it would issue no new coal leases on federal lands while completing a programmatic environmental impact statement of the U.S. coal leasing program. The review is intended to determine if the program is properly structured to provide a fair return to taxpayers, reflects its impacts on the environment, and will continue to help meet the nation’s energy needs. The agency last conducted a PEIS review for the federal coal program in 1983-1984. That review process also included a pause on coal leasing, as did the previous four. Currently, approximately 41 percent of the nation’s annual coal production comes from federal land.
