April 6, 2022: Earlier this week, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of Sierra Club and its allies in holding that the Trump Administration’s Department of the Interior unlawfully approved a massive expansion of the Bull Mountain underground coal mine in Montana in violation of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).
The Court held that Interior “hid the ball” about the climate impacts of the mine expansion, which, if developed, would allow the mine to access 176 million tons of federal coal and make Bull Mountain the largest underground coal mine in the U.S. based on annual production. Mining, shipping, and burning coal from the expansion would result in 240 million tons of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions; on an annual basis, the GHG emissions from burning Bull Mountain coal would be greater than the largest single point source of GHG emissions in the US.
Despite quantifying the nearly quarter billion – with a b! – tons of GHG emissions, the Trump Administration dismissed the climate impacts of the expansion as insignificant. Not surprisingly, given the current climate crisis, the Ninth Circuit found this unsupported conclusion to be “deeply troubling” and noted that “if a project of this scale can be found to have no significant impact, virtually every domestic source of GHGs may be deemed to have no significant impact as long as it is measured against total global emissions.” To put it differently, if the court had accepted the Trump administration’s argument, federal agencies would have been enable to ignore the climate impacts of nearly every project they authorize, implement, or fund.
The case will now be remanded back to the federal district court in Montana to determine the appropriate remedy. Ultimately, it will be up to the Biden Administration to determine whether to allow the expansion – and its quarter billion tons of climate pollution – to move forward.
Sierra Club brought the suit with Montana Environmental Information Center, WildEarth Guardians, 350 Montana, Western Environmental Law Center, and Earthjustice. Environmental Law Program senior attorney Nathaniel Shoaff represented the Sierra Club in the case.