California AG Filed Protest of BLM’s Proposed Kern County Oil and Gas Lease Sale

NOVEMBER 9, 2020

California Attorney General Xavier Becerra filed a protest of the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) proposed oil and gas lease sale in Kern County, CA, scheduled to be held on December 10, 2020. The protest noted that the proposed lease sale relies on BLM’s flawed programmatic National Environmental Policy Act analysis of the bureau’s resource management plan for the region, both of which are the subject of ongoing litigation, and “rely on a flawed assumption about the amount of hydraulic fracturing in the planning area, fail to consider available data and recent studies regarding the impacts of hydraulic fracturing, and fail to consider inconsistencies with California’s state law and policies.” The protest also warned that BLM’s draft environmental assessment for the proposed lease sale “fails to adequately consider the impacts of the proposed leasing to nearby environmental justice communities, fails to sufficiently consider and mitigate groundwater impacts, fails to include appropriate measures to protect species from harm, and insufficiently addresses potential impacts to the climate.”