Lawmakers call for more NEPA review of massive Gulf sale

Court precedent supports more environmental analysis, three House Democrats told the D.C. Circuit.

House Democrats are joining calls from blue states and environmental groups for a federal court to uphold a more rigorous environmental review of the nation's largest offshore oil and gas lease sale.

Rep. Raúl Grijalva of Arizona, as well as California Reps. Jared Huffman and Alan Lowenthal, urged the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to require a broader National Environmental Policy Act analysis of the climate impacts of Lease Sale 257 in the Gulf of Mexico.

The November 2021 sale covering 80 million acres had been canceled by a lower bench last year, and was then reinstated by Congress through the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act.

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management is still mandated by NEPA to fully assess the project's risks, despite Congress' directive to reinstate the sale in the 2022 bill, the lawmakers said in a brief Wednesday.

The Inflation Reduction Act "merely requires issuance of leases and does not implicitly repeal the Bureau’s obligations under NEPA," the lawmakers said in a footnote of their "friend of the court" brief.

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By:  Niina H. Farah
Source: Energy Wire

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