BILLINGS, Mont. — A coalition of U.S. states, environmentalists and an American Indian tribe are seeking to revive a moratorium on coal sales from federal lands that was imposed under former President Barack Obama then dropped by the Trump administration.
A Wednesday video conference hearing in the dispute is scheduled in U.S. District Court in Montana. The case centers on whether the Trump administration looked closely enough at climate change and other impacts from burning coal since deciding to end the moratorium in 2017.
Coal production has been dropping for years because of competition from cheaper fuels and pollution costs, despite strong backing for the industry from President Donald Trump. The decline has accelerated during the coronavirus pandemic, but critics of the coal program note that lease sales have continued and say the administration’s moves could open tens of thousands of acres of public lands to new mining.
Interior Department officials declared in February that coal sales from public lands result in a negligible increase in greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change. Their conclusion was based on potential emissions from four coal leases in Utah and Oklahoma that were sold after the moratorium was lifted.
Those leases make up a small piece of a federal leasing program that accounts for about 40 percent of U.S. coal production, primarily from large strip mines in Western states.
A lease sale last month brought in $3.4 million for almost 10 million tons of coal on federal lands adjacent to GCC Energy’s King II mine in southwestern Colorado.
Opponents of the leasing program include the Democratic attorneys general of California, New York, New Mexico and Washington state, the Northern Cheyenne Tribe and several environmental groups.
“Now is the perfect time to put a halt on digging up coal from out public lands and subjecting the public to the air water and climate pollution that activity causes,” said Jenny Harbine, the attorney for Wildearth Guardians, the Sierra Club and other environmental groups.
The mining industry and two coal states, Wyoming and Montana, are lined up on the side of the administration.
They said in court filings that the administration was within its rights to lift the moratorium, and that it satisfied any concerns over the move through the court-ordered environmental analysis that was completed in February.
The lawsuit was being used as “a backdoor vehicle to judicially end federal coal leasing,” after other branches of government declined to take up the cause, attorneys for the coal states and mining industry wrote in court filings.
Coal sales from public lands were largely halted in 2016 under Obama over worries about climate change and whether companies were paying a fair price for the fuel. The moratorium was rescinded by then-Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke soon after Trump took office, fulfilling a Republican campaign pledge.
The case is before U.S. District Judge Brian Morris in Great Falls.
Morris has handed down a succession of defeats to Trump’s efforts to boost the domestic energy industry, including recent rulings against nearly 300 oil and gas leases in Montana and the Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada to Nebraska.
