Judge halts federal coal leasing

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He reinstated an Obama-era moratorium on most federal coal leasing — which was later repealed by the Trump BLM and...