A federal judge has suspended an oil sale off the coast of Alaska, saying the Interior Department failed to consider the cumulative effects on endangered beluga whales.
Judge Sharon Gleason of the U.S. District Court for the District of Alaska ordered the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management in her Tuesday ruling to do a supplemental analysis on how the 2022 lease sale of roughly 1 million acres may affect the whales. The whale’s population in Alaska’s Cook Inlet numbers fewer than 300 due to historic overfishing.
Gleason also found that BOEM violated the National Environmental Policy Act by not providing sufficient alternatives in its environmental review. The judge said she chose not to vacate the sale, Lease Sale 258, because it was mandated to be held by December 2022 by Congress in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).
The “Court finds that vacatur would be contrary to the directive of Congress,” the judge wrote.