The ruling restores Obama’s orders putting large parts of the Arctic off-limits to offshore drilling and throws Trump’s oil and gas lease sale plans into question.

SABRINA SHANKMAN REPORTS FOR INSIDE CLIMATE NEWS

MAR 30, 2019

The government’s pell-mell race to open up new areas for oil and gas drilling on public lands and waters is running into legal obstacles mounted by conservationists and climate advocates.

Through litigation and procedural maneuvers, opponents of fossil fuel expansion are hoping to overturn key elements of the no-holds-barred oil and gas boom that President Donald Trump and his cabinet have pressed for from the moment they took office.

In the latest case, a federal judge in Alaska sided with environmental groups in a lawsuit over offshore drilling late Friday. The Arctic offshore areas in question—parts of the Outer Continental Shelf in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas—had been protected from fossil fuel drilling by an executive order issued by President Barack Obama. Trump had overturned that order in 2017, and the administration was hurtling toward a lease sale there that it hoped to hold later this year.

The judge determined that Trump didn’t have the authority to revoke Obama’s decisions to withdraw those areas from leasing, or an area of canyons Obama withdrew from leasing in the Atlantic Ocean. That would require action by Congress, the judge wrote.

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