Judge orders new environmental review of Utah coal mine expansion

Filed 1w ago · Via Courthouse News · The Buffoon Desk

THIS STORY IS SCORED

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Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: Tony Hisgett from Birmingham, UK · CC BY 2.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

A federal judge in Utah ordered the Bureau of Land Management to redo its environmental review of the Lila Canyon Coal Mine expansion, a 1,273-acre project expected to yield about 7 million tons of coal.

Senior U.S. District Judge David Nuffer granted BLM's own request to revisit its greenhouse gas analysis after environmental groups sued, and after multiple federal courts found the agency's climate reasoning deficient elsewhere. The 2021 approval, issued in the closing days of the first Trump administration, has since been buffeted by reversing federal policy under Biden and now Trump again.

The mining company opposed the remand, warning it could jeopardize its lease, but the judge was unmoved and gave BLM 18 months with quarterly check-ins and continued court oversight.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

An agency that admits its own analysis was deficient, gets sent back to try again, and still manages to have the timeline dictated by which administration happens to be rescinding whose policy this week — that is not regulatory rigor, that is a game of hot potato with the atmosphere as the potato. The company's complaint that remand is unfair to its lease is almost touching, given the lease exists because of an analysis nobody, including the agency that wrote it, will defend.

Source: Read the original at Courthouse News → Scored: Double Polka · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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