A Trump administration proposal to allow more exploration for oil and gas violates environmental laws, the groups said.
Environmental groups sued the Trump administration on Tuesday over a plan to sell oil and gas leases in the Gulf of Mexico. The groups say the sale violates a core environmental law and threatens coastal communities and endangered whales.
The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, said the government failed to conduct reviews required by the National Environmental Policy Act, a bedrock law that has been in place for more than 50 years. The law, known as NEPA, requires the government to evaluate projects’ environmental and health risks and to study alternatives.
The federal office that organizes the leases, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which is within the Department of Interior, says it won’t follow the NEPA guidelines and has instead performed its own assessment. The lease sales were mandated by the sweeping domestic policy law signed by President Trump in July, and the bureau determined that NEPA didn’t apply to lease sales put in place by this legislation, according to Alyse Sharpe, an Interior Department spokeswoman.
The lawsuit said the bureau’s alternative assessment failed to account for the environmental risks or to properly evaluate reasonable alternatives.
The suit argues that millions of people who live on the Gulf Coast depend on the waters for fishing, tourism and recreation, and that they would face harm from the oil and gas operations. It cited the 2010 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf, which led to the worst offshore oil spill in American history, and said that activities like oil exploration and refining affect both ecosystems and coastal communities.