A federal appeals court on Thursday appeared to be divided on whether to allow conservation groups to pursue their lawsuit challenging the Biden administration’s approval of more than 4,000 oil and gas drilling permits in the western United States.
During oral arguments, three judges of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit considered whether the Center for Biological Diversity and other challengers have legal standing in their suit against the Interior Department’s approval of applications for permits to drill (APDs) in New Mexico’s Permian Basin and Wyoming’s Powder River Basin. A lower court had tossed out their challenge for failing to show that the groups had been harmed by the approvals.
At least one member of the panel, Judge Neomi Rao, appeared to share the district court’s skepticism that the case could move forward when conservation groups had not linked environmental harms listed by their members to each of the challenged APDs.
The theory of standing in this case is “we can take all these actions together to think of an aggregate theory of harm,” said Rao, a Trump appointee. “How is that consistent with our case law?”
