Suit challenges U.S. plans for selling offshore leases

Environmentalists set to file a lawsuit today challenging the Obama administration’s plans to sell offshore drilling leases over the next five years are using a novel argument: that the government overlooked the value of waiting to harvest oil and gas from coastal waters. The Houston Chronicle reports the economic-driven approach is a new one for offshore drilling critics, who have separately accused the government of moving too swiftly to approve new oil and natural gas exploration after the Deepwater Horizon disaster and ignoring the environmental effects of the work. Lawyers with New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity are filing the lawsuit in the United States Circuit Court for the District of Columbia on behalf of the Santa Fe, N.M.-based Center for Sustainable Economy. The lawsuit will ask the court to kick out the current program and require the Interior Department to revise it. The legal challenge takes direct aim at the Interior Department’s plan to hold more than a dozen offshore drilling lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico and waters around Alaska before June 30, 2017. “It’s clear to us that the new offshore leasing program was hastily prepared to score political points,” says John Talberth, president and senior economist at the Center for Sustainable Economy. Talberth notes that federal laws require a full cost-benefit analysis as well as environmental reviews. The full story can be found here.