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With 42 days remaining in the Trump presidency, Interior Secretary David Bernhardt is rushing to finish favors for the oil and gas industry—especially in the Arctic.
On Monday alone, the Interior Department officially scheduled an oil lease auction in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for January 6th, and moved ahead with plans to allow seismic testing that will disturb polar bears in their dens. This morning, the department published a proposed rule that would eliminate numerous Obama-era safety requirements for offshore drilling in the Arctic.
The breakneck speed of the final rulemakings and sales puts all of the actions on shaky legal ground. While the Arctic Refuge lease sale is technically scheduled for January 6th, exactly 30 days after the notice was published in the federal register, the Bureau of Land Management is requiring sealed bids to be submitted by December 31st, just 23 days after the sale notice.
House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Raúl Grijalva and several of his colleagues warned Bernhardt that the accelerated timeline will be subject to court challenges. “BLM appears to be pretending to adhere to the regulation by waiting until January 6, 2021, to open the bids, but simply saying that is the date of ‘the lease sale’ defies common sense and almost certainly violates the regulation,” they wrote.
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The bottom line is the incoming Biden administration will have pretty unrestricted authority to do whatever they want to in terms of stopping or interrupting the leasing process. The applicable statutes, the Mineral Leasing Act, gives the Interior Secretary broad power to lease or not lease. If they do it right and carefully, the odds of a court setting aside what they do are pretty slim.”
