Arctic Ocean oil drilling opponents win appeal
Source: LA Times
The U.S. government violated the law when it opened millions of acres of the Arctic Ocean to offshore oil drilling, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday, possibly delaying plans by companies such as Royal Dutch Shell to drill off the northwest coast of Alaska in the near future.
The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled that the Interior Department did not properly evaluate the impact of oil development in the Chukchi Sea when it sold more than $2.6 billion in development leases in the environmentally sensitive area in 2008.
A coalition of environmental advocacy groups and Alaska Native organizations sued the federal government, arguing that the U.S. had offered an estimated 30 million acres of oil leases for sale without sufficient scientific information or analysis of potential effects on the region.
The groups also said that when the federal government analyzed the sale, it underestimated how much development could occur if companies discovered oil, a failure that "runs the risk of understating the impacts and the risks of catastrophic spills," said Michael LeVine, Pacific senior counsel for Oceana, which is part of the coalition of plaintiffs.
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