Judge halts hundreds of oil and gas drilling projects

  One of Donald Trump’s promises during the campaign was to lessen America’s dependence on foreign oil and his plan to do this was to open up more land to oil and gas drilling. While others have promised to reduce America’s dependence on foreign oil Donald Trump is the first President to do something about it on a serious level.

Under Trump, the pace of leasing public lands for oil and gas development has surged. A recent study found the administration has made more than 13m onshore acres available for leasing, far more than any similar period under Obama. The vast majority are located in the western states of Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming. The administration also plans to make large portions of the Atlantic available for oil and gas development, and the interior department has been criticized for favoring the energy industry.

  Presidents like Barack Obama used the mantra of reducing America’s “addiction to oil” as a means to implement a radical climate agenda based on controlling the American people instead of increasing the output at the source.

  Needless to say the climate-alarmists were not happy that Donald Trump had been achieving this goal and so naturally they filed a lawsuit to stop him and according to this article they have been successful.

In the first significant check on the Trump administration’s “energy-first” agenda, a US judge has temporarily halted hundreds of drilling projects for failing to take climate change into account.

Drilling had been stalled on more than 300,000 acres of public land in Wyoming after it was ruled the Trump administration violated environmental laws by failing to consider greenhouse gas emissions. The federal judge has ordered the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which manages US public lands and issues leases to the energy industry, to redo its analysis.

The decision stems from an environmental lawsuit. WildEarth Guardians, Physicians for Social Responsibility, and the Western Environmental Law Center sued the BLM in 2016 for failing to calculate and limit the amount of greenhouse gas emissions from future oil and gas projects.

The agency “did not adequately quantify the climate change impacts of oil and gas leasing”, said Rudolph Contreras, a US district judge in Washington DC, in a ruling late on Tuesday. He added that the agency “must consider the cumulative impact of GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions” generated by past, present and future BLM leases across the country.

  Emboldened by this victory the Western Environmental Law Center plans on suing to stop drilling on thousands of acres in several different states so this is just the beginning. 

  This ruling is not a surprise, it is only surprising it took this long to find a judge to issue a stay against this policy.

  It is only a matter of time now before all the Democratic candidates for President use this ruling to push their support for the Green New Deal and their plan to bring America back to the 1860’s.

malo periculosam libertatem quam quietum servitium