Latest news with #KristenMonsell
E&E News
22-07-2025
- Politics
- E&E News
Legal fight grows over offshore drilling's impact on endangered species
Environmentalists are doubling down on their challenge to the Fish and Wildlife Service's assessments of threatened and endangered species in the industrialized Gulf of Mexico, parts of which the Trump administration has relabeled the Gulf of America. Citing the dangers posed by offshore oil and gas drilling, the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity on Monday augmented an earlier lawsuit that challenged a 2018 FWS assessment. The revised lawsuit contends that a 2025 update by the agency likewise failed to meet Endangered Species Act standards. 'Federal officials have forgotten the lessons of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, because they've missed obvious threats to some of the Gulf's most vulnerable critters,' Kristen Monsell, the environmental group's oceans legal director, said in a statement. Advertisement Monsell added that the service's 2025 updated assessment 'falls far short of what the law and science demand,' and she called on the FWS to 'redo these assessments with a much larger dose of reality and much less deference to oil and gas interests.'
The Guardian
19-02-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Climate advocacy groups file two lawsuits against Trump administration
Green advocacy groups filed two lawsuits against the Trump administration on Wednesday, marking the first environmental legal challenges against the president's second administration. Both focus on the Trump administration's moves to open up more of US waters to oil and gas drilling, which the plaintiffs say are illegal. 'Offshore oil drilling is destructive from start to finish,' said Kristen Monsell, the oceans legal director at the conservation organization Center for Biological Diversity. 'Opening up more public waters to the oil industry for short-term gain and political points is a reprehensible and irresponsible way to manage our precious ocean ecosystems.' In the first lawsuit, local and national organizations including the Center for Biological Diversity, Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, the Louisiana-based Healthy Gulf, and the Northern Alaska Environmental Center took aim at the president's revocation of Joe Biden-era protections for 265m acres of federal waters from future fossil fuel leasing. Trump signed an order withdrawing the protections just hours into his second term. Another related challenge, filed by many of the same groups, calls for a court to reinstate a 2021 decision affirming protections from nearly 130m acres in the Arctic and Atlantic oceans. 'The Arctic Ocean has been protected from US drilling for nearly a decade, and those protections have been affirmed by the federal courts,' said Sierra Weaver, a senior attorney at the organization Defenders of Wildlife, which is a plaintiff in the case. 'Though these coastlines have been protected, the administration is showing no restraint in seeking to hand off some of our most fragile and pristine landscapes for the oil industry's profit.' The lawsuits will probably be the first of hundreds of environmental lawsuits filed by green groups against the Trump administration. During his first weeks in office, Trump has already rolled back a swath of Biden-era environmental protections while freezing green spending programs – part of his pledge to boost the fossil fuel industry. Trump says the US must boost fossil fuels – which are responsible for the vast majority of global warming – to meet demand and ensure that the United States remains a global energy leader. The US is currently producing more oil and gas than any other country in history. The Guardian has contacted the White House for comment about the litigation.
