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aristarchus writes:

According to reporting at Common Dreams:

Environmental advocates cheered a federal judge's ruling Thursday that voided oil and gas leases on roughly one million acres of public lands and rejected a Trump administration policy that accelerated extraction of the fossil fuels.

"The judge confirmed that it's illegal to silence the public to expand fossil-fuel extraction," said Taylor McKinnon, a senior campaigner at the Center for Biological Diversity.

The lawsuit centered on a 2018 memoradum, "No. 2018-034," issued by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), an agency of the Interior Department. Interior Secretary David Bernhardt is a former oil and gas lobbyist.

Also key was that the areas in question are habitat for the greater sage grouse, whose numbers are in decline.

[...]Chief U.S. Magistrate Judge Ronald E. Bush said BLM was "arbitrary and capricious" in issuing the new policy, and said the agency clearly sought to mute public input.

The "BLM jettisoned prior processes, practices, and norms in favor of changes that emphasized economic maximization—to the detriment, if not outright exclusion, of pre-decisional opportunities for the public to contribute to the decision-making process affecting the management of public lands," he wrote.

"The agency's administrative record," Bush continued, "reveals no analysis that would explain or justify the transition" from the Obama-era policy to the new one "and the resulting curtailment of the public's involvement in oil and gas leasing decisions on public land."

The administration's shift appears to be "a mechanism for unharnessing prior constraints upon oil and gas leasing by specifically reducing or eliminating public involvement in the oil and gas leasing process because such public involvement hindered the oil and gas production industry," he added.

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