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A federal judge invalidated the largest offshore oil and gas lease sale in the nation’s history yesterday, ruling an environmental assessment completed for the sale under the Trump administration was deeply flawed and inadequate.
The decision invalidates 1.7 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico that were leased to oil and gas producers. The Biden administration offered up more than 80 million acres in the lease sale, which occurred in November 2021. At the time, the administration said its hands were tied by a federal court ruling that the administration's pause on new oil and gas leasing was illegal. But many environmental and conservation groups, including the Center for Western Priorities, argued that nothing was forcing the administration to lease so many acres.
The Biden administration did not appear to be disappointed by the loss. In a statement late Thursday night, Interior Department Communications Director Melissa Schwartz noted that the sale was "based on the the previous administration's environmental analysis," and the agency looked ahead to the need for "significant and long overdue programmatic reforms."
The Interior department will have to complete a new environmental assessment for the lease sale in order to move forward. But Earthjustice attorney Brettny Hardy, whose group is a plaintiff in the case, said “We’re confident that once they do the emissions modeling right, given the climate crisis that we’re in, they will reach the decision that leasing doesn’t make sense right now."
Anti-trans activists derail Thacker Pass protest
Protests against the Thacker Pass lithium mine began in the spring of last year, after nearby tribes learned the Bureau of Land Management had hastily approved the mine in January. A number of tribes oppose the mine, which they say will be built on a site where Paiute people were twice massacred. The opposition movement to the mine has generated national media coverage in outlets including Grist and the New York Times. But the movement was recently derailed by two radical environmentalists who hold transphobic views.
In a story published yesterday, E&E News reporter Jael Holzman documents how Max Wilbert and Will Falk, co-founders of a radical environmental group called Deep Green Resistance, misled tribal members in the fight against Thacker Pass by hiding their connection to Deep Green Resistance as well as their hateful views. Wilbert and Falk set up a group called Protect Thacker Pass that raised money for the protest movement, and Falk served as an attorney for People of Red Mountain, an Indigenous group challenging the mine in court. People of Red Mountain fired Falk when it learned he was connected to Deep Green Resistance.
“It’s not right,” said Daranda Hinkey, secretary of the group. “Before all of this fell out, before we all really knew anything… we sat in ceremony with them. We prayed for these people.” Non-Native environmental groups have also sought to distance themselves from Wilbert and Falk after learning about their transphobic views, proving there's no room in the mainstream environmental movement for discrimination. “The fact that we’re trying to tie ourselves into knots around this speaks to the real cost of having them involved,” Kelly Fuller, energy and mining campaign director for Western Watersheds Project, told E&E News.
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It's a gift—a real blessing to our tribes... Our relatives and our ancestors are happy and can be at peace, because this is where our ancestors were forced off their land and had to run away from either being killed or taken away. I believe that their spirits and our spirits are connected together today in a happy time.”
