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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.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Mykl on Wednesday March 04 2020, @09:03PM (3 children)
My take is the latter. The swamp on the Potomac can be drained, but it will take time. Trump claimed to want to drain the swamp, but in reality just added more water and alligators to it. Government transparency has been plummeting almost as fast as corruption has been rising.
The US Corruption Index [wikipedia.org] rating, having peaked (higher numbers are better) in 2015 at 76, has since dropped to 69. Frankly, I'm surprised it hasn't dropped even further.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 04 2020, @09:11PM
Kind of depressing that I had to question that level of sarcasm.
(Score: 2) by legont on Wednesday March 04 2020, @10:33PM
The swamp has a hysteresis built in. See, when water level goes down, number of crocodiles per cubic meter increases. Not to worry though as phase shift is coming.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by dry on Thursday March 05 2020, @05:38AM
It's the perception of corruption, not the actual corruption. There's a lot of people who believe Trump is fixing the corruption and he and his administration isn't corrupt. I've seen people actually cheering Trump, I believe it is called TDS, Trump derangement syndrome or such where people actually worship a politician