Homes along the Arctic Ocean in Utqiagvik, Alaska.John Moore/Getty
This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Green advocacy groups filed two lawsuits against the Trump administration on Wednesday, marking the first environmental legal challenges against the president’s second administration.
Both focus on the Trump administration’s moves to open up more of US waters to oil and gas drilling, which the plaintiffs say are illegal.
“The Arctic Ocean has been protected from US drilling for nearly a decade, and those protections have been affirmed by the federal courts.”
“Offshore oil drilling is destructive from start to finish,” said Kristen Monsell, the oceans legal director at the conservation organization Center for Biological Diversity. “Opening up more public waters to the oil industry for short-term gain and political points is a reprehensible and irresponsible way to manage our precious ocean ecosystems.”
In the first lawsuit, local and national organizations including the Center for Biological Diversity, Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, the Louisiana-based Healthy Gulf, and the Northern Alaska Environmental Center took aim at the president’s revocation of Joe Biden-era protections for 265 million acres of federal waters from future fossil fuel leasing. Trump signed an order withdrawing the protections just hours into his second term.
Another related challenge, filed by many of the same groups, calls for a court to reinstate a 2021 decision affirming protections from nearly 130 million acres in the Arctic and Atlantic oceans.
“The Arctic Ocean has been protected from US drilling for nearly a decade, and those protections have been affirmed by the federal courts,” said Sierra Weaver, a senior attorney at the organization Defenders of Wildlife, which is a plaintiff in the case. “Though these coastlines have been protected, the administration is showing no restraint in seeking to hand off some of our most fragile and pristine landscapes for the oil industry’s profit.”
The lawsuits will probably be the first of hundreds of environmental lawsuits filed by green groups against the Trump administration. During his first weeks in office, Trump has already rolled back a swath of Biden-era environmental protections while freezing green spending programs—part of his pledge to boost the fossil fuel industry.
Trump says the US must boost fossil fuels—which are responsible for the vast majority of global warming—to meet demand and ensure that the United States remains a global energy leader. The US is currently producing more oil and gas than any other country in history.
The Guardian has contacted the White House for comment about the litigation.
