The Biden administration’s five-year plan for offshore oil and gas leasing got its day in court Tuesday, as a three-judge panel weighed whether the Interior Department could have done more to analyze the potential risks of future fossil fuel development.
During oral arguments, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit did not clearly show whether it was likely to require the agency to go back to the drawing board at this stage of development planning. But Judge Brad Garcia, a Biden appointee, asked a number of questions about how Interior accounted for the Rice’s whale in analyzing oil and gas leasing, indicating at least some dissatisfaction with how the agency assessed possible harms.
Garcia zeroed in on the modeling the agency does to determine how environmentally sensitive a particular region may be to fossil fuel development. In this case, Healthy Gulf and other environmental groups argued that modeling improperly excluded the Rice’s whale.
If the marine mammal had been included, the agency’s modeling might have found the Gulf more sensitive to leasing, and Interior “could have chosen to do two or one lease sales, or chosen a different region,” Garcia said.
