Late last week, the District Court in D.C. delivered a stunning and unexpected victory to climate advocates: It voided offshore oil and gas leases, recently sold by the federal government to energy companies, across 2,700 square miles of the Gulf of Mexico because the U.S. Department of Interior had not accurately calculated what effect the fossil fuels extracted from those wells would have on global greenhouse gas emissions.
An analysis by the Department of Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) said that it was not possible to quantify whether drilling less oil would result in a reduction of emissions. But District Judge Rudolph Contreras was having none of it. He pointed to research by Peter Erickson, the U.S. climate policy program director of the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), an international research and policy nonprofit, that shows how such math could be done. Erickson’s report, the judge wrote, “did exactly what BOEM claims was not possible, translating the agency’s own estimate of the reduction in barrels of oil at each price point into greenhouse gas emissions.”
