Following claims from environmental groups that its current management plan failed to take climate impacts into account, the Bureau of Land Management has agreed, as part of a lawsuit settlement, to refrain from issuing any new oil and gas leases on 2.2 million acres of public land in Colorado.
The Bureau of Property Management has agreed, according to the Center for Biological Diversity, to expand its environmental research and publish a revised plan for 2.2 million acres of land in southwest Colorado.
“The North Fork Valley has been fighting for over a decade to prevent leasing of public lands to oil and gas development around our homes, farms, and in our watersheds,” said Natasha Léger, executive director of Citizens for a Healthy Community. “We have seen some of the most extreme warmings in the country, and our rare and irreplaceable ecosystem is under increasing climate and ecological stress. This moratorium on leasing has been hard fought and would not have been possible without the unwavering persistence of citizen and environmental groups holding government officials accountable.”
Center for Biological Diversity, August 12, 2022
According to reporters National Environmental Policy Act which mandates that the government carefully consider the environmental effects of its leasing decisions was broken by BLM when it approved the current 20-year plan, according to a lawsuit filed in August 2020 by the Sierra Club, Center for Biological Diversity, and others.
The groups claimed that allowing leasing on certain public lands would worsen the climate catastrophe and that it would be “impossible” to deal with the effects without “totally altering the way public lands are administered for fossil fuel extraction.”
A huge bird with a chunky body, a small head, and a long tail is the Gunnison sage-grouse. It is one of at least two endangered birds that have prompted legal disputes over oil and gas production in the American West in the past. Conservation organizations have won a significant legal victory in previous cases when they claimed that leasing endangered the birds, such as the halting of mining and drilling in Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho.
