Judge Terry Doughty of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana on Tuesday issued a nationwide preliminary injunction against U.S. President Joe Biden’s ban on oil and gas leases on federal lands.
Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr joined 12 other state attorneys general in filing suit to block the Biden Administration’s violation of the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (OCSLA) and the Mineral Leasing Act (MLA). Coalition members are citing Tuesday’s action as a major victory.
This, according to a press release that Carr and members of his staff published this week.
“We cannot allow this reckless abuse of presidential power,” Carr said in the press release.
“We are pleased the court granted preliminary relief, and we will continue working with our coalition to ensure the president’s executive order does not harm middle-class jobs, cripple our economy, negatively affect everyday Americans or sequester investment funding for vital environmental defense and restoration projects.”
In January, Biden issued Executive Order 14008 and declared a moratorium on future oil and gas leasing and drilling permits on federal lands. The executive order halted all oil and gas leasing operations, days after the U.S. Department of the Interior halted development and exploration of existing leases.
In addition to Georgia, the following states joined in the lawsuit filed in the United States District Court for the Western District of Louisiana: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah, and West Virginia.
Carr announced in April he had joined nine other state attorneys general in suing the Biden Administration, all to save several people’s financial livelihoods.
Carr said Biden and members of his administration want to carry out an act of executive overreach that will kill thousands of jobs throughout the United States and threatens to impose more burdens and harms on the American people. In a recent executive order, Biden established a group of federal appointees to set a value based on global environmental damages from climate change. These values include the social cost of carbon, the social cost of methane, and the social cost of nitrous oxide. The president further required federal agencies to immediately apply these numbers in regulatory actions and other types of decision-making.
“This executive order is nothing but a license for gross federal overreach that will have potentially life-altering consequences for hard-working Georgians,” Carr said at the time.
“The president is using arbitrary numbers to justify regulating anything and everything, and we will not allow this egregious overstep of Executive Branch authority.”
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Chris Butler is an investigative journalist at The Tennessee Star. Follow Chris on Facebook. Email tips to [email protected].
