A U.S. federal judge has blocked the sale of offshore oil and gas drilling leases across some 80 million acres of the Gulf of Mexico, ruling that the environmental review that underpinned the sale was flawed.
In the Jan. 27 ruling (pdf), U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras in Washington said that the U.S. Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) failed to accurately assess the impact of the leases on greenhouse gas emissions, which have been linked to climate change.
