Trump’s Order to Open Arctic Waters to Oil Drilling Was Unlawful, Federal Judge Finds

WASHINGTON — In a major legal blow to President Trump’s push to expand offshore oil and gas development, a federal judge ruled that an executive order by Mr. Trump that lifted an Obama-era ban on oil and gas drilling in the Arctic Ocean and parts of the North Atlantic coast was unlawful.

Barrow, Alaska, off the Chukchi Sea in the Arctic Ocean.
A federal judge ruled that an order by President Trump
lifting an Obama-era ban on Arctic Ocean drilling was unlawful.

The decision, by Judge Sharon L. Gleason of the United States District Court for the District of Alaska, concluded late Friday that President Barack Obama’s 2015 and 2016 withdrawal from drilling of about 120 million acres of Arctic Ocean and about 3.8 million acres in the Atlantic “will remain in full force and effect unless and until revoked by Congress.” She wrote that an April 2017 executive order by Mr. Trump revoking the drilling ban “is unlawful, as it exceeded the president’s authority.”

The decision, which is expected to be appealed in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, immediately reinstates the drilling ban on most of the Arctic Ocean off the coast of Alaska, a pristine region home to endangered species including polar bears and bowhead whales where oil companies have long sought to drill. Along the Atlantic coast, it blocks drilling around a series of coral canyons that run from Norfolk, Va., to the Canadian border which are home to unique deepwater corals and rare fish species.

Read the story from The New York Times by Coral Davenport - “Trump’s Order to Open Arctic Waters to Oil Drilling Was Unlawful, Federal Judge Finds."

Lobbying by MPs forced government to back off on land-clearing enforcement

Attempts by the federal government to stop potentially unlawful clearing in Queensland were reversed after political intervention, with a highly unusual apology letter sent to every landholder suspected of planning unlawful clearing at the direct request of the minister, documents obtained by the Guardian under FOI laws reveal.

 The abrupt line between pristine protected rainforest and land
cleared by early settlers for dairy pasture in north Queensland.

In December 2015 and January 2016, the federal department of environment took the exceptional step of asking 51 landholders with approval from the Queensland government to clear their land, to explain why the clearing wasn’t unlawful under federal environmental law.

But within two months, the department issued the unusual apology letter to every recipient of the initial letter, Guardian Australia can reveal.

Read Michael Slezak’s story from The Guardian - “Lobbying by MPs forced government to back off on land-clearing enforcement.”

Logging of Victorian old-growth forest ‘cannot proceed’, lawyers say

A Victorian government-owned business is poised to clear-fell hundreds of hectares of spectacular old-growth forest, in a move lawyers say is unlawful and which they intend to halt through the supreme court if necessary.

 VicForests is poised to clear-fell hundreds
 of hectares of spectacular old-growth forest.

The area about to be logged by VicForests contains countless trees that are centuries old. It is made up of two forest types that are required by law to have 60% marked by the government as “special protections zones” that can’t be logged – a step that has not been taken.

Environmental Justice Australia (EJA) has written to the Victorian Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning, arguing that, in order to protect 60% of those forest types, the areas that are about to be logged must be included in the special protection zones.

Read Michael Slezak’s story on The Guardian - “Logging of Victorian old-growth forest ‘cannot proceed’, lawyers say.”