Green groups are suing the Trump administration for planning an oil lease sale in the Gulf of Mexico without first conducting an environmental review.
The lawsuit — filed on Tuesday — asks the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to vacate and stop the Dec. 10 lease sale. The challenge comes a week after the Interior Department told POLITICO’s E&E News that it was forgoing environmental reviews under the National Environmental Policy Act for all of the offshore lease sales mandated in the Republican megalaw.
“If you’re going to auction off 80 million acres of our public waters to the oil industry, the least you can do is not break the law in a plethora of ways as you do it,” George Torgun, a senior attorney at Earthjustice said in a Tuesday statement. Earthjustice brought the lawsuit on behalf of Friends of the Earth and Healthy Gulf; other plaintiffs include the Center for Biological Diversity, Natural Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club.
The GOP megalaw, which President Donald Trump signed in July, directs Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management to hold 30 oil and gas lease sales over the next 15 years in what Trump has renamed the Gulf of America. The law also mandates six lease auctions in Alaska’s Cook Inlet between now and 2032.
