The Interior Department said Thursday that it will no longer require the Bureau of Land Management to put together an environmental impact statement for more than 3,200 oil and gas leases in Western states.
The leases cover 3.5 million acres in Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah and Wyoming. They had been the subject of years of legal tussles between environmental organizations and the Biden administration.
Green groups sued over the first Trump administration’s environmental policies for federal oil and gas leases, arguing they did not include the cost of greenhouse gas emissions and the cumulative impact of offering hundreds of leases.
The Biden administration opted to settle most of those cases. Then, four days before President Donald Trump took office this year, BLM said it would create an environmental impact statement that would cover 3,200-plus oil and gas leases. It wrote in the Federal Register that the statement would “provide a comprehensive analysis of the potential environmental impacts from these leases, which have been remanded to BLM for further review, including the impacts of greenhouse gas emissions (to include the social cost of carbon) and other common impacts.”
