June, 14 2022, 01:11pm EDT

For Immediate Release
Contact:
Brady Bradshaw, Center for Biological Diversity, (442) 370-0626, bbradshaw@biologicaldiversity.org
Angela Mooney D’Arcy, Sacred Places Institute for Indigenous Peoples, (310) 678-1747, a.mooneydarcy@gmail.com
Pete Stauffer, Surfrider Foundation, (503) 887-0514, pstauffer@surfrider.org
Lawmakers, Organizations Warn Biden Against Rushed Pipeline Restart Off California Coast
Repair of Ruptured Oil Pipeline to Be Fast-Tracked Without Public Input
WASHINGTON
Environmental organizations sued the Bureau of Land Management today for issuing more than 3,500 oil and gas drilling permits in New Mexico and Wyoming during the first 16 months of the Biden administration in violation of the Endangered Species Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, and the Federal Land Policy and Management Act. The lawsuit was filed in the federal District Court of Washington, D.C.
These approved oil and gas wells will result in approximately 490 million to 600 million metric tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent greenhouse gas emissions over their operational lives. That pollution will worsen the climate crisis, damage ecosystems across the United States, and harm more than 150 climate-imperiled species, including Hawaiian songbirds, polar bears and coral reefs. Such climate harm also results in the unnecessary and undue degradation of public lands.
"Fossil fuels are driving the extinction crisis, and the Bureau of Land Management is making things worse by failing to protect these imperiled species," said Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity. "The agency's cursory approval of more than 3,500 drilling permits contradicts President Biden's pledges to address the terrifying threat of climate change. Every new well takes polar bears and many other species one step closer to extinction."
The Endangered Species Act requires all federal agencies to ensure their activities do not jeopardize the existence of threatened and endangered species. Agencies must use the best available science to assess the impacts and harms -- including indirect harm from pollution -- caused by their activities. But the BLM has never acknowledged that emissions from oil and gas extraction on public lands and waters could harm climate-imperiled species.
In January 2021 President Biden signed an executive order requiring federal agencies to follow the best available science in developing policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Based on an enormous international body of research, scientists have warned that more than 1 million species will go extinct in the coming decades because of climate change and other causes.
Today's lawsuit also challenges these permit approvals for numerous violations of the National Environmental Policy Act. NEPA requires all federal agencies take a hard look at the consequences of their actions, including the cumulative impacts of fossil fuel emissions. The Federal Land Policy and Management Act obligates the BLM to take action to prevent the unnecessary and undue degradation of public lands, including from the climate-related impacts that the BLM admits are occurring from ongoing oil and gas permitting.
"The climate crisis is happening now, causing harms that are disproportionately felt by environmental justice communities, and it requires immediate action in order to maintain a livable planet," said Kyle Tisdel, climate and energy program director with Western Environmental Law Center. "The federal government's oil and gas program accounts for almost one-tenth of annual greenhouse gas emissions in the nation. While President Biden has acknowledged the urgency of this crisis, it is time for action to align with rhetoric. The Bureau of Land Management has admitted that continued oil and gas exploitation is a significant cause of the climate crisis, yet the agency continues to recklessly issue thousands of new oil and gas drilling permits, violating its duty to prevent unnecessary and undue degradation of public lands."
Virtually all decisions to approve oil and gas drilling permits are made without any meaningful opportunity for public engagement, the groups note. Instead, these rubber-stamp approvals rely on prior decisions at the oil and gas leasing and planning stages, which themselves can be woefully out of date and often fail to allow for meaningful public participation.
While the Bureau of Land Management has begun to provide estimates of emissions from drilling, it has never made any meaningful attempt to assess how these emissions are worsening the climate crisis, damaging the lands the agency manages, or hurting people and communities and worsening environmental inequities and injustices.
"The Biden administration is literally drilling away the climate," said Jeremy Nichols, climate and energy program director for WildEarth Guardians. "Today's lawsuit is about enforcing the reality that more oil and gas extraction only stands to fuel the climate crisis, contrary to the promises of President Biden."
Background
Oil and gas production from public lands annually emits more than 400 million tons of CO2e greenhouse gas pollution. This represents roughly 8% of all climate pollution from fossil fuel burning in the United States and 1% of greenhouse gas pollution globally.
Federal fossil fuels that have not been leased to the industry contain up to 450 billion tons of potential climate pollution; those already leased to the industry contain the potential for 43 billion tons of emissions in total.
Hundreds of organizations have petitioned the Biden administration to follow through on the president's promise to end all new federal fossil fuel leasing immediately. They have also petitioned to phase out existing federal oil and gas production to near zero by 2035. Renewed IPCC warnings and several scientific analyses show that climate pollution from the world's already-producing oil, gas and coal developments would push warming past 1.5 degrees Celsius.
Oil, gas, and coal extraction uses mines, well pads, gas lines, roads and other infrastructure that destroy habitat for wildlife, including threatened and endangered species. Oil spills and other harms from offshore drilling have done immense damage to ocean wildlife and coastal communities. Fracking and mining also pollute watersheds and waterways that provide drinking water to millions of people.
At the Center for Biological Diversity, we believe that the welfare of human beings is deeply linked to nature — to the existence in our world of a vast diversity of wild animals and plants. Because diversity has intrinsic value, and because its loss impoverishes society, we work to secure a future for all species, great and small, hovering on the brink of extinction. We do so through science, law and creative media, with a focus on protecting the lands, waters and climate that species need to survive.
(520) 623-5252LATEST NEWS
US Led 'Unprecedented' Surge in Global Military Spending in 2024
"As governments increasingly prioritize military security, often at the expense of other budget areas, the economic and social trade-offs could have significant effects on societies for years to come," said one expert.
Apr 28, 2025
Military spending worldwide soared to $2.718 trillion last year, meaning it "has increased every year for a full decade, going up by 37% between 2015 and 2024," according to an annual report released Monday.
The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) has tracked conflict, disarmament, and weapons for nearly six decades. Its 2024 spending report states that "for the second year in a row, military expenditure increased in all five of the world's geographical regions, reflecting heightened geopolitical tensions across the globe."
In a Monday statement, Xiao Liang, a researcher with the SIPRI Military Expenditure and Arms Production Program, highlighted that "over 100 countries around the world raised their military spending in 2024."
"It was the highest year-on-year increase since the end of the Cold War."
"This was really unprecedented... It was the highest year-on-year increase since the end of the Cold War," Liang told Agence France-Press, while acknowledging that there may have been larger jumps during the Cold War but Soviet Union data is not available.
Liang warned that "as governments increasingly prioritize military security, often at the expense of other budget areas, the economic and social trade-offs could have significant effects on societies for years to come."
The United States—whose Republican lawmakers are currently cooking up a plan to give even more money to a Pentagon that's never passed an audit—led all countries, with $997 billion in military spending. The report points out that the U.S. not only allocated "3.2 times more than the second-largest spender," but also "accounted for 37% of global military expenditure in 2024 and 66% of spending by North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) members."
In the second spot was China, with an estimated $314 billion in spending. Nan Tian, director of the SIPRI Military Expenditure and Arms Production Program, raised the alarm about spending in Asia.
"Major military spenders in the Asia-Pacific region are investing increasing resources into advanced military capabilities," said Tian. "With several unresolved disputes and mounting tensions, these investments risk sending the region into a dangerous arms-race spiral."
In third place was Russia, with an estimated $149 billion in spending. Russia remains at war after launching a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Rounding out the top five were Germany ($88.5 billion) and India ($86.1 billion).
They were followed by the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, Ukraine, France, Japan, South Korea, Israel, Poland, Italy, and Australia. The report says that "together, the top 15 spenders in 2024 accounted for 80% of global military spending ($2,185 billion) and for 79% of the total increase in spending over the year. All 15 increased their military spending in 2024."
"The two largest year-on-year percentage increases among this group were in Israel (+65%) and Russia (+38%), highlighting the effect of major conflicts on spending trends in 2024," the publication continues. Israel has been engaged in a U.S.-backed military assault on the Gaza Strip—globally condemned as genocide—since October 2023.
"Russia once again significantly increased its military spending, widening the spending gap with Ukraine," noted SIPRI researcher Diego Lopes da Silva. "Ukraine currently allocates all of its tax revenues to its military. In such a tight fiscal space, it will be challenging for Ukraine to keep increasing its military spending."
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday announced an upcoming three-day truce to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe. In response, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called for an immediate monthlong cease-fire.
All NATO members boosted military spending last year, which SIPRI researcher Jade Guiberteau Ricard said was "driven mainly by the ongoing Russian threat and concerns about possible U.S. disengagement within the alliance."
"It is worth saying that boosting spending alone will not necessarily translate into significantly greater military capability or independence from the USA," the expert added. "Those are far more complex tasks."
Another SIPRI researcher, Lorenzo Scarazzato, highlighted that "for the first time since reunification Germany became the biggest military spender in Western Europe, which was due to the €100 billion special defense fund announced in 2022."
"The latest policies adopted in Germany and many other European countries suggest that Europe has entered a period of high and increasing military spending that is likely to continue for the foreseeable future," Scarazzato said.
As for the Middle East, SIPRI researcher Zubaida Kari said that "despite widespread expectations that many Middle Eastern countries would increase their military spending in 2024, major rises were limited to Israel and Lebanon."
In addition to slaughtering at least tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza over the past nearly 19 months, Israel has killed thousands of people in Lebanon while allegedly targeting the political and paramilitary group Hezbollah. Kari said that elsewhere in the region, "countries either did not significantly increase spending in response to the war in Gaza or were prevented from doing so by economic constraints."
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Not Just for the Battlefield: Rights Group Warns of Dystopian World Where Killer Robots Reign
"To avoid a future of automated killing, governments should seize every opportunity to work toward the goal of adopting a global treaty on autonomous weapons systems," according to the author of the report.
Apr 28, 2025
In a report published Monday, a leading human rights group calls for international political action to prohibit and regulate so-called "killer robots"—autonomous weapons systems that select targets based on inputs from sensors rather than from humans—and examines them in the context of six core principles in international human rights law.
In some cases, the report argues, an autonomous weapons system may simply be incompatible with a given human rights principle or obligation.
The report, co-published by Human Rights Watch and Harvard Law School's International Human Rights Clinic, comes just ahead of the first United Nations General Assembly meeting on autonomous weapons systems next month. Back in 2017, dozens of artificial intelligence and robotics experts published a letter urging the U.N. to ban the development and use of killer robots. As drone warfare has grown, those calls have continued.
"To avoid a future of automated killing, governments should seize every opportunity to work toward the goal of adopting a global treaty on autonomous weapons systems," said the author behind the report, Bonnie Docherty, a senior arms adviser at Human Rights Watch and a lecturer on law at Harvard Law School's International Human Rights Clinic, in a statement on Monday.
According to the report, which includes recommendations on a potential international treaty, the call for negotiations to adopt "a legally binding instrument to prohibit and regulate autonomous weapons systems" is supported by at least 129 countries.
Drones relying on an autonomous targeting system have been used by Ukraine to hit Russian targets during the war between the two countries, The New York Timesreported last year.
In 2023, the Pentagon announced a program, known as the Replicator initiative, which involves a push to build thousands of autonomous drones. The program is part of the U.S. Defense Department's plan to counter China. In November, the watchdog group Public Citizen alleged that Pentagon officials have not been clear about whether the drones in the Replicator project would be used to kill.
A senior Navy admiral recently toldBloomberg that the program is "alive and well" under the Department of Defense's new leadership following U.S. President Donald Trump's return to the White House.
Docherty warned that the impact of killer robots will stretch beyond the traditional battlefield. "The use of autonomous weapons systems will not be limited to war, but will extend to law enforcement operations, border control, and other circumstances, raising serious concerns under international human rights law," she said in the statement
When it comes to the right to peaceful assembly under human rights law, which is important in the context of law enforcement exercising use force, "autonomous weapons systems would be incompatible with this right," according to the report.
Killer robots pose a threat to peaceful assembly because they "would lack human judgment and could not be pre-programmed or trained to address every situation," meaning they "would find it challenging to draw the line between peaceful and violent protesters."
Also, "the use or threat of use of autonomous weapons systems, especially in the hands of abusive governments, could strike fear among protesters and thus cause a chilling effect on free expression and peaceful assembly," per the report.
Killer robots would also contravene the principle of human dignity, according to the report, which establishes that all humans have inherent worth that is "universal and inviolable."
"The dignity critique is not focused on the systems generating the wrong outcomes," the report states. "Even if autonomous weapons systems could feasibly make no errors in outcomes—something that is extremely unlikely—the human dignity concerns remain, necessitating prohibitions and regulations of such systems."
"Autonomous weapon systems cannot be programmed to give value to human life, do not possess emotions like compassion that can generate restraint to violence, and would rely on processes that dehumanize individuals by making life-and-death decisions based on software and data points," Docherty added.
In total, the report considers the right to life; the right to peaceful assembly; the principle of human dignity; the principle of nondiscrimination; the right to privacy; and the right to remedy.
The report also lists cases where it's more ambiguous whether autonomous weapons systems would violate a certain right.
The right to privacy, for example, protects individuals from "arbitrary or unlawful" interferences in their personal life. According to the report, "The development and use of autonomous weapons systems could violate the right because, if they or any of their component systems are based on AI technology, their development, testing, training, and use would likely require mass surveillance."
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'Absolute Insanity': Right-Wing Activist Asks If Trump Will Suspend Habeas Corpus to Expel More Migrants
"Anyone advocating for suspending the writ of habeas corpus because they don't like due process is spitting on the legacy of those who fought and died for this country and our Constitution," said one policy expert.
Apr 28, 2025
With the Trump administration making space in the press briefing room for right-wing podcasters and other conservative "new media" content creators, viewers of briefings since President Donald Trump took office have seen his press secretary field questions about the Ukrainian president's clothing during an Oval Office meeting, compliments about Trump's "fitness plan," and attacks on reporters who have long reported from the White House.
On Monday, the first question of the briefing was derided by one Democratic politician as "absolute insanity," as right-wing commentator and influencer Rogan O'Handley—also known by the handle "DC Draino"—was given the floor to ask whether Trump will suspend the writ of habeas corpus in order to circumvent several judges' rulings and "start shipping out" undocumented immigrants without due process.
"Can you please let us know if and when the Trump administration is planning to suspend the writ of habeas corpus to circumvent these radical judges?" asked O'Handley after accusing federal judges of "thwarting [Trump's] agenda with an unprecedented number of national injunctions."
O'Handley shared some familiar right-wing talking points—saying federal judges have provided "more due process to violent MS-13 and Tren de Aragua illegal aliens than they did for U.S. citizens who peacefully protested on January 6"—as he suggested the administration should abandon the legal principle under which people who are detained are permitted to challenge their imprisonment in court.
"You have got to be kidding me," wrote Sara McGee, a Democrat running for the Texas House of Representatives.
His question came amid escalating attacks by Republicans and the administration on judges who have ruled against the White House. A Republican congressman said last month that Chief Judge James Boasberg of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. should be impeached for issuing an order against Trump's invocation of the Alien Enemies Act to expel hundreds of undocumented immigrants to El Salvador. Last week, the FBI arrested Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan for allegedly helping a migrant evade arrest by escorting him out of her courtroom.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow with the American Immigration Council, noted that O'Handley and press secretary Karoline Leavitt also repeatedly cited at least one statistic that was "completely made up"—that the Biden administration allowed 15 million undocumented immigrants into the United States—as they suggested Trump should take legal steps to force all of them out of the country without the input of the judicial system.
The undocumented population in the U.S. in 2023 was 11.7 million, according to the Center for Migration Studies, down from the peak of 12 million, which was reached in 2008.
"They've been pushing this on the right for about a week now," said Reichlin-Melnick of the push to suspend habeas corpus for undocumented immigrants. "Anyone advocating for suspending the writ of habeas corpus because they don't like due process is spitting on the legacy of those who fought and died for this country and our Constitution."
Leavitt responded to O'Handley's question by saying while she has "not heard such discussions take place... the president and the entire administration are certainly open to all legal and constitutional remedies" to continue expelling people from the United States.
Several cases of undocumented immigrants who have been sent to El Salvador's notorious Terrorism Confinement Center have made national headlines in recent weeks, including that of Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia; Merwil Gutiérrez, a 19-year-old who federal agents acknowledged was not who they were looking for during a raid; and Andry Hernandez Romero, a makeup artist who was accused of being a gang member solely because he had tattoos.
O'Handley's suggestion that the bedrock legal principle be suspended for undocumented immigrants—hundreds of whom have already been forced out of the country without due process—came ahead of Trump's scheduled signing of two new immigration-related executive orders.
One would direct the departments of Justice and Homeland Security to publish a list of sanctuary cities and states—those where local law enforcement are directed not to cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement as it seeks to arrest undocumented immigrants.
The other, Leavitt said, would "unleash America's law enforcement to pursue criminals." The New York Postreported that the order would be related to providing local police agencies with military equipment and legal support for officers accused of wrongdoing.
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