An important thing happened in Montana last week.  This is the first known case of its kind in the United States.  A federal judge has approved a settlement requiring the government to suspend oil and gas leases on almost 38,000 acres in Montana because future “climate change impacts were not studied prior to leasing.”  This is one reason the Kerry-Lieberman-Graham bill should not pass (as is):  their new bill would take away the rights of states and the EPA to take action on climate change, like this, if they choose to do so.  Power should never be taken away from the states or the EPA to do what needs to be done to stop global warming.

“An attorney involved in the case says it marks the first time the Bureau of Land Management has agreed to go back and consider if a lease sale could exacerbate climate change.”

That is what I consider some progress — not the drilling for more oil and gas, but looking at the effects extracting fossil fuels will have on the world’s climate.  It’s also noteworthy that the leases suspended included the polluting process of natural gas drilling.

BILLINGS, Mont. – A federal judge has approved a first-of-its-kind settlement requiring the government to suspend 38,000 acres of oil and gas leases in Montana so it can gauge how oil field activities contribute to climate change.

At issue are the greenhouse gases emitted by drilling machinery and industry practices such as venting natural gas directly into the atmosphere.

Under the deal approved Thursday by U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy in Missoula, the Bureau of Land Management will suspend the 61 leases in Montana within 90 days. They will have to go through a new round of environmental reviews before the suspensions can be lifted.

“We view this as a very big deal, if a modest first step, in the BLM addressing climate change in oil and gas development,” said plaintiffs’ attorney Erik Schlenker-Goodrich. “It’s quite a dirty process, but there are ways to clean it up.”  “

Except there is no way to clean up the pollution and CO2 emissions from burning oil and gas.   Real progress would include the consideration of the pollution when the fuels are burned in whether or not to suspend the leases.

“Plaintiffs in the case were the Montana Environmental Information Center, the Oil and Gas Accountability Project and Wild Earth Guardians.

A parallel lawsuit challenging 70,000 acres of federal lands leased in New Mexico remains pending.

Industry representatives contend emissions from oil and gas fields are necessary to develop a valuable domestic resource. And they argue that natural gas still comes in ahead of dirtier fuels like coal in terms of climate change contributions.

Oil and gas operations contribute about 23 percent of annual U.S. methane emissions and 2 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

A BLM spokesman, Greg Albright, said reviewing lease sales for climate [...]