PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — A state appeals court in Oregon decided late Wednesday that the rules for a program designed to limit and drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel companies are invalid. The program, started in 2022, is one of the strongest climate programs in the nation.

State environmental officials said the court’s decision hinges on an administrative error and doesn’t touch on whether the state has the authority to implement the program. The Climate Protection Program targets a 90 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from transportation fuels and natural gas by 2050.

Wednesday’s decision by the Oregon Court of Appeals comes in a case brought by fossil fuel companies that alleged the state Environmental Quality Commission erred in its rulemaking for the program. The commission acts as the Department of Environmental Quality’s policy and rulemaking board.

The court in its decision said it concluded the rules for the program were invalid.

The department said the decision was limited to an administrative error and not effective immediately, Oregon Public Broadcasting reported.

“The court did not make a decision about whether the Environmental Quality Commission has authority to adopt the Climate Protection Program,” Lauren Wirtis, a department spokesperson, said in a statement.

The department is confident it has the authority to adopt and enforce the program and is evaluating next steps with the state Department of Justice, Wirtis said.

NW Natural, one of the litigants, said it was pleased with the court’s decision and that it is committed to moving toward a low-carbon energy future.

A group of environmental, climate and social justice groups agreed with the state position that the decision focused on a procedural technicality and did not undermine the Department of Environmental Quality’s authority to set greenhouse gas emissions limits on the oil and gas industry.

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By SCOTT SONNER
Associated Press

RENO, Nev. (AP) — Conservationists are seeking an emergency court order to block construction of a Nevada lithium mine after a U.S. judge directed a federal agency to revisit part of its approval of the plans but allowed construction to go forward in the meantime.

Four environmental groups want U.S. District Judge Miranda Du in Reno to temporarily halt any work at a subsidiary of Lithium Americas’ mine near the Oregon border until they can appeal her ruling earlier this month to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

They filed on Tuesday a formal notice of their intent to appeal to the San Francisco-based circuit court and an emergency motion for injunction in Reno pending the appeal. An Oregon tribe that filed a new, separate lawsuit to block the mine last week joined the notice of appeal.

“This mine should not be allowed to destroy public land unless and until the Ninth Circuit has determined whether it was legally approved,” said Talasi Brooks, a lawyer for the Western Watersheds Project.

Du gave the U.S. Bureau of Land Management until the end of Wednesday to respond to the motion or reach an agreement with the conservation groups to postpone any construction until she rules on their request for an emergency injunction.

“Based on the urgency implied by environmental plaintiffs’ representation that Lithium Nevada intends to start construction on February 27 … the court sets an expedited briefing schedule,” she wrote in a brief order late Tuesday.

The company said last week that construction at the Thacker Pass Lithium Mine was “imminent” after Du ruled Feb. 6 the bureau had acted legally — with one possible exception — when it approved plans for the mine in January 2021.

A spokesperson for Lithium Americas said Tuesday they were confident the appellate court would uphold the project’s approval.

“Since we began this project more than a decade ago, we have been committed to doing things right,” Tim Crowley, the company spokesperson, said in an email to The Associated Press. “The recent U.S. District Court ruling definitively supported BLM’s consultation process, and we are confident the ruling will be upheld.”

Du’s earlier ruling was the latest in a series of high-stakes legal battles pitting environmentalists against so-called “green energy” projects the Biden administration is pushing over the objections of conservation groups, tribes and others.

The White House says the mine planned by Lithium Nevada Corp., a subsidiary of Lithium Americas, is critical to ramped-up efforts to produce raw materials for electric vehicle batteries.

Opponents say it would harm wildlife habitats, degrade groundwater and pollute the air.

“It symbolizes BLM’s wrecking ball approach to ‘green’ energy on public lands,” Katie Fite of WildLands Defense said Tuesday.

Du ordered the bureau Feb. 6 to go back and determine whether the company had established valid mining rights on 1,300 acres (526 hectares) of neighboring land, where it plans to bury millions of tons of waste rock that would be removed from the open pit mine deeper than the length of a football field.

But she stopped short of granting the opponents’ request at that time to block any work at the site until the validity of the claim was established under the Mining Law of 1872 on the adjacent lands about 200 miles northeast of Reno.

“There’s no evidence that Lithium Nevada will be able to establish valid mining claims to lands it plans to bury in waste rock and tailings, but the damage will be done regardless,” Brooks said in a statement Tuesday announcing the filing of the emergency request for an injunction.

Du said in her Feb. 6 ruling it was a rare instance where it was proper to stop short of vacating an agency’s approval of an overall project to allow the bureau to re-examine the adequacy of one element of the plan — the disposal of the waste rock.

She made clear her ruling incorporates part of a recent ruling by the 9th Circuit in a fight over the 1872 law in an Arizona case that could prove more onerous to mining companies that want to dispose of their waste on neighboring federal lands.

In that case, the San Francisco-based appellate court upheld an Arizona ruling that the Forest Service lacked authority to approve Rosemont Copper’s plans to dispose of waste rock on land adjacent to the mine it wanted to dig on a national forest southeast of Tucson. The service and the Bureau of Land Management long have interpreted the mining law to convey the same mineral rights to such lands.

General Motors Co. announced Jan. 31 it had conditionally agreed to invest $650 million in Lithium Americas in a deal that will give the company exclusive access to the first phase of the Thacker Pass mine. The equity investment in two phases was contingent on the project clearing legal challenges in court in Reno.

Lithium Americas said last week that Du’s Feb. 6 ruling satisfied the completion of the first phase and that as a result, GM had purchased 15 million common shares of Lithium Americas at $21.24 per share on Feb. 16 for a total of $320 million.

Lithium Americas estimates that the mine can support production of up to 1 million electric vehicles annually. The company expects production to begin in the second half of 2026.

In the Feb. 6 ruling, Du also denied for the third time relief sought by Native American tribes who argued it could destroy a sacred site where their ancestors were massacred in 1865. Last week, three tribes filed a separate lawsuit claiming that the bureau has misrepresented its claims that it’s met its legal obligation to consult with tribes about potential impacts to historical and cultural values near the mine site.

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By SCOTT SONNER
Associated Press

RENO, Nev. (AP) — Conservationists suing a federal agency over approval of a mine at the largest known U.S. deposit of lithium will go before a judge Wednesday in search of an emergency court order to block excavations they say would disturb sacred tribal burial grounds near the Nevada-Oregon line.

Overshadowed by conflict at a lithium mine planned north of Las Vegas where the government intends to declare a rare wildflower threatened or endangered, Lithium Nevada Corp.’s proposed Thacker Pass mine is emerging as a potentially bigger battleground in the debate over environmental trade-offs tied to President Joe Biden’s push for renewable energy.

Lithium is a key component in electric vehicle batteries.

U.S. District Judge Miranda Du in Reno will hear arguments from lawyers for the mine, the Bureau of Land Management and four conservation groups.

Critics say the federal agency violated environmental laws in a December rush to approve the mine in the final days of the Trump administration.

The project recently won an unexpected endorsement from a respected, longtime environmental watchdog of mining operations in Nevada who concluded “the impacts from this mine are relatively benign.”

“The environmental value of this lithium producing mine, however, is enormous,” said Glenn Miller, a retired professor at the University of Nevada, Reno.

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By MATTHEW BROWN
and ELLEN KNICKMEYER
Associated Press

BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) — Down to its final weeks, the Trump administration is working to push through dozens of environmental rollbacks that could weaken century-old protections for migratory birds, expand Arctic drilling and hamstring future regulation of public health threats.

The pending changes, which benefit oil and gas and other industries, deepen the challenges for President-elect Joe Biden, who made restoring and advancing protections for the environment, climate and public health a core piece of his campaign.

“We’re going to see a real scorched-earth effort here at the tail end of the administration,” said Brian Rutledge, a vice president at the National Audubon Society.

The proposed changes cap four years of unprecedented environmental deregulation by President Donald Trump, whose administration has worked to fundamentally change how federal agencies apply and enforce the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act and other protections.

Most of the changes are expected to sail through the approval process, which includes the White House releasing the final version and publication in the Federal Register.

Some decisions, if they go into effect, will be easy for Biden to simply reverse. He already has pledged to return the United States to the Paris climate accord as a first step in his own $2 trillion climate plan. But he faces years of work in court and within agencies to repair major Trump cuts to the nation’s framework of environmental protections.

One change that Trump wants to push through would restrict criminal prosecution for industries responsible for the deaths of the nation’s migratory birds. Hawks and other birds that migrate through the central U.S. to nesting grounds on the Great Plains navigate deadly threats — from electrocution on power lines, to wind turbines that knock them from the air and oil field waste pits where landing birds perish in toxic water.

Right now, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 is a vital tool for protecting more than 1,000 species of birds including hawks and other birds of prey. Federal prosecutors use the act to recover damages, including $100 million from BP for its 2010 oil rig spill into the Gulf of Mexico, which killed more than 100,000 seabirds.

But the Trump administration wants to make sure companies face no criminal liability for such preventable, unintentional deaths.

Federal officials advanced the bird treaty changes to the White House, one of the final steps before adoption, two days after news organizations declared Biden the winner of the presidential race.

For industry, “that’s an important one,” said Rachel Jones, vice president of the National Association of Manufacturers. Jones lobbied for the changes in the Migratory Bird Treaty Act at a meeting last year between private-sector representatives and staff from the White House and Interior Department. “It really matters in relation to the infrastructure we need for a modern society.”

The administration’s latest action to cement its policies ahead of Biden taking office came last week, as the Department of Interior published an analysis justifying plans to ease rules on mining, drilling and grazing across millions of acres in seven Western states. A judge had blocked the plans last year, saying such activities left unchecked were likely to harm a struggling bird species, the greater sage grouse.

Earlier moves by the Trump administration, which are now facing court challenges, remove protections for millions of miles of waterways and wetlands, narrow protections for wildlife species facing extinction and open more of the hundreds of millions of acres of public land to oil and gas drilling.

Asked about the push now, as Trump and many of his supporters continue to deny his election loss, Environmental Protection Agency spokesman James Hewitt said, “EPA continues to advance this administration’s commitment to meaningful environmental progress while moving forward with our regulatory reform agenda.”

Pushing to get new rules on the books before the end of a president’s term is not unusual — former Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush both did it, said Cary Coglianese, an expert on administrative law and rule-making at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School.

Obama agency heads, after a 2016 Trump victory that surprised many, pushed through rules that sought to protect funding for Planned Parenthood and toughen pollution rules on the oil and gas industries, among others.

But environmentalists and some former federal officials said the actions being taken in Trump’s final days reflect a pro-industry agenda taken to the extreme, in disregard for imperiled wildlife, climate change and damage to human health from air pollution.

“What we’re seeing at the end is what we’ve seen all along, which is a fealty to private interests over public interests,” said David Hayes, former deputy secretary of the Interior Department under Obama and now adjunct professor at the New York University School of Law. “They seem intent on finalizing these as a kind of ideological point.”

Many of the final rollbacks still pending under the Trump administration have significant implications for oil and gas companies. That includes the administration’s steps this week toward a sale of energy leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

The announcement of upcoming sale drew rebukes from environmentalists and Democrats in Congress.

Brett Hartl with the Center for Biological Diversity said backers of drilling are playing the long game and know that another Republican administration favorable to drilling will come along eventually.

“Any time you’ve officially got an area under lease … it makes it harder to keep the land protected in the long run,” Hartl said.

Another proposal that arrived at the White House would set emissions standards for small but dangerous particles of pollution emitted by refineries and other industrial sources. Other changes would allow more drilling and mining on thousands of square miles of public lands around New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon National Historical Park and deep in the Alaska wilderness.

The Trump administration from its first days pursued American “energy dominance,” in which imported oil would no longer be needed and U.S. companies would produce a surplus of fuels that could be sold to other countries.

Finalizing the pending changes is critical to maintaining the nation’s “energy leadership,” said American Petroleum Institute senior vice president Frank Macchiarola. For the oil and gas industry, he said, the opening of the Arctic refuge to drilling was long overdue and would provide jobs and needed revenue for the state of Alaska.

Trump critics are looking to two pending Senate contests in Georgia for insight into how easily any of his administration’s last-minute changes can be undone.

If Democrats win both, they’ll control the Senate and the House and will be in position to invoke the Congressional Review Act, which allows Congress to strike down newly approved regulations.

Otherwise, outside parties could sue or the Biden administration would have to undertake the often lengthy process of reversing changes that are fully enacted before Trump leaves office.

“Regulations are not like diamonds,” said Coglianese, the Penn law professor. “They don’t last forever.”

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