Judge Rudolph Contreras of the United States District Court has halted oil and gas drilling across 130,000 hectares (500 square miles) in Wyoming, arguing that the United States government, when leasing large areas of public land for energy exploration, must first consider the impacts of such activities on climate change. According to the New York Times, in 2018 the US Department of the Interior handed over 12.8 million hectares of public land to oil and gas companies. In Wyoming, the number of drilling rigs doubled between 2016 and 2018.

A landmark ruling

The order is the latest in a series of judicial rulings over the past ten years – including one last month in Montana – criticising the United States for inadequately considering greenhouse gas emissions when approving oil, gas and coal extraction projects on federal land. But the ruling by district judge Rudolph Contreras went a step further than those previously handed down by his colleagues. Past Supreme Court decisions had focused on individual land sales or leasing permits.

Contreras instead held that when the United States Bureau of Land Management (BLM) sells or leases public land for energy activities, such as oil and gas exploration or extraction, officials must take into account the greenhouse gas emissions associated with those activities. The ruling also comes in the wake of Trump's aggressive policy aimed at opening up ever more public land for energy development.

The relationship between fossil fuels and CO2

According to a report published in November by the US Geological Survey, emissions from the extraction and combustion of fossil fuels from federal land generate the equivalent of 1.4 billion tonnes per year of greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. A figure that amounts to nearly a quarter of total carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in the United States. Companies paid more than $6.5 billion to produce oil, gas and coal from federal lands and waters in 2017, according to the latest data released by the government, and the money is split between the federal government and the states in which extraction takes place.

Previous cases against drilling

During the Obama presidency too, between 2015 and 2016, the Bureau of Land Management had issued several leases for fracking activities on more than 186,000 hectares of land across Colorado, Utah and Wyoming, without however assessing the related emissions, as required by the National Environmental Policy Act. The ruling by Contreras, which covers only the Wyoming leases, bars federal officials from issuing drilling permits until they have conducted a new environmental review and more carefully analysed greenhouse gas emissions.

Reactions to the ruling

Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon criticised the ruling, arguing that carbon emissions should not be reduced at the expense of workers who provide reliable and affordable energy. "Bringing our country to its knees is not the way to tackle climate change — we need solutions that are not extreme," said the Republican Gordon.

Kyle Tisdel, director of the climate and energy programme at the Western environmental law center, who also represents the plaintiffs, stated that the ruling will have "far-reaching repercussions" on how the Blm will now conduct such analyses and will need to provide documents demonstrating that it has given serious consideration to greenhouse gas emissions before it can issue new permits to drill on Wyoming land.