Court Smacks Down Interior’s Sage Grouse Plans

摘要

A federal district court in Montana late last week dealt another blow for the Trump administration’s effort to ease endangered species concerns over the sage grouse in areas of widespread western oil and gas development. In a May 22 ruling, the court vacated roughly 440 oil and gas leases in sage grouse habitat spanning about 336,000 acres in Wyoming and Montana that is covered under the US Interior Department’s 2017 rewrite of an Obama-era plan to manage the embattled bird’s habitat in a way that avoided further endangered species restrictions.