In his ruling (pdf), Contreras ordered the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to redo its analysis of hundreds of drilling projects in Wyoming to account for their potential climate impacts.
“Given the national, cumulative nature of climate change, considering each individual drilling project in a vacuum deprives the agency and the public of the context necessary to evaluate oil and gas drilling on federal land before irretrievably committing to that drilling,” Contreras wrote.
During his first two years in the White House, President Donald Trump auctioned off millions of acres of federal land to oil and gas developers.
According to a New York Times analysis last October, “more than 12.8 million acres of federally controlled oil and gas parcels were offered for lease” in 2018.
Kyle Tisdel, director of the Western Environmental Law Center’s Energy and Communities Program, said in a statement that the judge’s ruling on Tuesday is a “powerful reality check on the Trump administration and a potent tool for reining in climate pollution.”
“With the science mounting that we need to aggressively rein in greenhouse gases, this ruling is monumental,” Tisdel said. “Every acre of our public land sold to the oil and gas industry is another blow to the climate.”