Judge halts federal coal leasing
August 18, 2022
CASPER — The federal government must reevaluate the environmental impacts of coal mining on federal lands before it can issue new leases, a judge ruled Friday.
Just over a week after he ordered the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to revise its coal leasing allowances in the Powder River Basin for a second time, U.S. District Judge Brian Morris of Montana found that a Trump-era environmental review of coal leasing “was arbitrarily curtailed and failed to consider relevant factors.”
He reinstated an Obama-era moratorium on most federal coal leasing — which was later repealed by the...
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