A federal judge has rejected the Biden administration’s plan for resuming sale of leases to mine coal on federal land in the vast Powder River Basin (PRB) in Wyoming and Montana, the largest coal reserve in the nation and among those in the rest of the world.
The PRB’s subbituminous coal accounts for 85% of all coal production on federal lands and 40% of all coal mined in the U.S., according to Interior Department figures. The coal is close to the surface, allowing it to be strip mined at lower cost than higher heat value eastern and midwestern underground coal.
Federal coal leasing in the PRB has a controversial history, dating back to the Regan administration in the mid-1980s, when a too-cozy relationship between the federal government and the coal industry. That resulted in a political firestorm and the ousting of several political appointees in the Department of Interior, including wildly controversial Interior Secretary James Watt.
The AP reported last week that U.S. District Court Judge Brian Morris of the Montana district, in Great Falls, rejected for the second time a plan proposed by Interior’s Bureau of Land Management on environmental conditions for coal leases. The agency is in charge of all federal lands, often the majority owner of land in western states. Morris, 59, a Democrat, was a 2013 Obama appointment to the Montana federal court and became chief judge in 2020.
Morris has been a consistent thorn in BLM’s side. He ruled most recently, “BLM again failed to consider any alternative that decreases the amount of extractable coal practically available for leasing.” BLM also “failed to consider any alternatives that would limit the expansion of existing mines … despite explicit direction from this Court.” Morris also ordered BLM to include a “no leasing” option in its environmental analysis, for the first time during the convoluted litigation.
The plan Morris rejected was essentially written during the Trump administration, although Biden’s BLM basically stayed with it, making some adjustments after Morris rejected it in 2018. After the first ruling, BLM began revising its plans, which it completed in 2020. That is the plan the current BLM defended before Morris this year.
In an irony of history, the Trump administration plan was the product of a BLM headed by William Perry Pendley. He was purged by the Reagan administration in the fallout from the 1984 PRB coal leasing scandal, where he was among mid-level political appointees who leaked confidential information about BLM’s conditions for the lease sale to the coal industry.
The 1982-1984 leasing scandal led then-secretary Watt to create a five-member outside commission, headed by University of Illinois economist and long-time Washington policy advisor David Linowes (2017-2007), joined by Penn State mineral economist Richard Gordon (1934-2014), former IRS commissioner Donald Alexander (1921-2009), ground-breaking stock broker and prominent Republican contributor Julia Walsh (1923-2003), and Andrew Brimmer (1926-2012), a Democrat and the first African American to serve on the Federal Reserve Board.
Questioned by a reporter about of lack of diversity on the Linowes commission, Watt, prone to revealing verbal gaffs, responded flippantly, “What do you mean? I have a black (Brimmer), a woman (Walsh), two Jews (Linowes and Gordon), and a cripple (Gordon, who had a withered arm). After a couple of weeks of uproar, Watt was fired in 1983, replaced in 1985 first by longtime California political broker and close Reagan advisor William Clark and then by Energy Secretary Donald Hodel in 1985.
Trump’s under-the-table appointment of Pendley to lead BLM was wildly controversial and he never received Senate confirmation, serving as BLM acting director from 2019 to 2021, after serving briefly as BLM deputy director in 2019, where he orchestrated his elevation to head the agency. Among his management initiatives was to slash the BLM headquarters staff in Washington, establish a new HQ in Grand Junction, Colo., and slash the staff by removing those who would not move to the new location.
As acting BLM head, Pendley stayed on when the Biden administration took office in January 2020, under a series of orders he wrote himself. In September 2020, Judge Morris removed him from office, citing “unlawful attempts to avoid the constitutional requirements of the Appointments Clause and the statutory requirements of the [Federal Vacancies Reform Act].”
In a written statement, Connie Wilbert, head of the Sierra Club Wyoming, said, “It’s well past time for BLM to be honest with the American people about the climate impacts that bring devastating wildfires, heat waves, and flooding, as well as the tremendous toll on human health caused by burning fossil fuels from public lands.”
–Kennedy Maize
Twitter (@kennedymaize)