Greater New Orleans Interfaith Climate Coalition has filed an amicus curiae (“friend of the court”) brief in the District of Columbia District Court. (District Courts are the federal judiciary’s trial courts.)
You can read, on page 1, the 2-paragraph description of GNOICC’s interest in this litigation over the Biden Administration’s proposed 2025-2028 Gulf of Mexico and Gulf of Alaska offshore oil & gas leasing program.
Because there is a page limit for all briefs filed with the District Court, those two paragraphs were all that we had room for, so our longtime board member Jonathan Leo chose three different activities that best typify the ways that GNOICC both empowers communities to better understand and adapt to climate change and provides material assistance to those communities.
For those who might be put off by the 32 pages of this legal brief, let us assure you that it is chock-full of very important and very readable and understandable climate change facts and events about the Gulf of Mexico and southern Louisiana — facts and events that you will recognize and see put into a larger context of how proposed further offshore oil and gas leasing is almost certain to cause additional, predictable harm to low-income communities, communities of color, and indigenous communities in Southern Louisiana.
Here is the final sentence of Section I.D. of the brief, at page 14:
Consistent with the evidence, the Department [of Interior] itself has acknowledged that the impacts associated with oil and gas development on the environment and ‘the health and security of communities—particularly communities of color, who bear a disproportionate burden of pollution—merit a fundamental rebalancing of the Federal oil and gas program’ (emphasis in original).
The final sentence of the brief reads, at p. 18:
The Department’s failure to consider the impact of its lease Program on communities of color and indigenous and low-income communities in the Gulf is both harmful and, given the legal requirements, fatal.
And the conclusion?
For the reasons above, this Court should vacate the Department of Interior’s Record of Decision and approval of the 2024-2029 National Outer Continental Shelf Oil and Gas Leasing Proposed Final Program.
Don’t be shy. Give it a read. Here’s the link again. Thanks!
