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He reinstated an Obama-era moratorium on most federal coal leasing — which was later repealed by the Trump BLM and not reinstated when the Biden administration moved to replace the Trump-era policy — until the agency completes “sufficient” analysis.

Sally Jewell, the outgoing secretary of the Interior under then-President Barack Obama, on Jan. 15, 2016, issued a moratorium on new coal leasing until the BLM took a comprehensive look at the program’s effects.

Tribal and environmental groups sued the Department of the Interior in 2017, after then-Secretary Ryan Zinke concluded that “the public interest is not served by halting the Federal coal program for an extended time,” and lifted the moratorium.

Morris ruled in 2019 that the move violated federal environmental law and directed the BLM to assess the consequences of new leasing. It did, but the same groups, unsatisfied with the results, sued the agency again in 2020.

The order is a win for a number of environmental groups, the Northern Cheyenne Tribe and the states of California, Washington, New York and New Mexico.

“Federal coal isn’t compatible with preserving a livable climate,” Taylor McKinnon, a senior public lands campaigner at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a written statement. “The Biden administration must now undertake a full environmental review to bring the federal coal program to an orderly end.”

After cheering the “significant victory,” Jenny Harbine, managing attorney for Earthjustice’s Northern Rockies office, called for the Biden administration to “go further by urgently phasing out the existing coal leases that are destroying our planet.”

The Biden Interior Department defended its decision not to reinstate the moratorium while formulating a new coal policy.

Wyoming and Montana, together the source of more than 40% of the country’s coal, intervened in the case in support of continued leasing.

“Enacting a moratorium at a moment when coal is badly needed to ensure a secure and reliable energy supply is wrongheaded on many fronts,” Gov. Mark Gordon said in a written statement. “This decision is bad for Wyoming.”

Travis Deti, executive director of the Wyoming Mining Association, called the ruling “political and divorced from reality.”

While mines in the Powder River Basin hold enough leases to get them through the next decade, he said, some hope to operate for longer than that.

“It puts a question mark on long-term plans,” Deti said. “Not only for coal operators, but for utilities as well.”

More than a decade has passed since Wyoming’s last federal coal lease sale, but a couple of sales are pending.

According to the groups challenging coal leasing, the remaining window to stop the effects of climate change from becoming catastrophic is already too narrow for the U.S. to burn all of the coal that has already been leased.

The National Mining Association, another intervenor backing the BLM, said it plans to appeal the ruling.

Its CEO, Rich Nolan, said in an emailed statement that “Americans need the energy affordability and energy security buttressed by coal production on federal lands and so do our allies struggling to transition away from Russian energy.”