Top conservation groups sued the Biden administration on Thursday for allegedly violating the Endangered Species Act in considering a planned liquified natural gas project in Alaska and failing to consider the harm to polar bear and whale populations in the area.
The lawsuit was filed in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals by the Center for Biological Diversity and the Sierra Club, which requested the court invalidate the administration’s approval of the Alaska LNG Project, originally granted last year.
The lawsuit alleges that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service failed to properly evaluate the potential for harm to the local polar bear population, as well as populations of Cook Inlet beluga whales and North Pacific right whales, in its consideration of the the Alaska LNG Project and decision to approve the project’s Environmental Impact Statement.
Once completed, the $38.7 billion Alaska LNG Project will consist of several compressor stations and an 807-mile pipeline bisecting much of Alaska, allowing for the shipment of gas from Alaska’s North Slope region to Asia.
It would also allow the Alaska Gasoline Development Corporation to ship roughly 30 million metric tons of gas abroad per year.
Burning that amount of gas could result in more than 50 million tons of CO2-equivalent emissions annually, the groups said, roughly the same emissions generation as 13 coal-fired power plants.
The Sierra Club and Center for Biological Diversity noted Thursday that the pipeline to connect drilling operations on the North Slope to the export terminal would increase the amount of large vessel traffic in the Cook Inlet region by as much as 75%, according to estimates from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC.
“The rubber-stamp approval of the Alaska LNG project was reckless in many ways,” Sierra Club Alaska Chapter Director Andrea Feinger said in a statement. “The project will be devastating to vulnerable wildlife already struggling to face the catastrophic impacts of climate change.”
The areas affected are home to both the Cook Inlet beluga whales, a critically endangered species whose population has declined by 75% since 1970, petitioners said.
The project could threaten further harm to the North Pacific right whale population, whose population is down to some 30 individuals, the groups said, and is at “extreme risk of imminent extinction.”
Polar bear populations could be harmed by climate change, the groups said, which is warming the Arctic four times faster than the rest of the planet. “If warming continues at current rates, two-thirds of the world’s polar bears could be extinct by 2050 because of the loss of their Arctic sea-ice habitat,” they noted.
The news comes after both the Center for Biological Diversity and the Sierra Club filed a lawsuit last August asking the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals to direct the Department of Energy to reconsider its LNG export approval decision for the Alaska LNG Project, asserting that the approval was “not in the public interest.”
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President Joe Biden has struggled to appease both climate groups and centrist Democrats with his stance on LNG projects, which pit climate concerns against energy security.
Most recently, the administration provoked intense backlash by ordering a temporary pause on new LNG export terminals in order to evaluate the potential climate and environmental impacts of these exports.