Pruitt Taking On ‘Sue-and-Settle Racket’
The Sue-and-Settle Racket
An attorney general takes on environmental groups’ war on fossil fuels.
By Stephen Moore
For four years now, radical environmental groups have teamed with the Obama administration’s Interior Department and hijacked the Endangered Species Act (ESA) to bottle up development in many areas out West. The big villain that the Left is trying to thwart, of course, is the oil-and-gas industry. The ESA is blocking drilling operations in many prime energy-rich locations.
But now this scam may come to an end. On Monday Oklahoma’s attorney general, Scott Pruitt, filed what could be a landmark lawsuit against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), arguing that the so-called “sue and settle” procedure for listing animals on the endangered list is a violation of the federal ESA statute. In the complaint, filed on behalf of the State of Oklahoma, Mr. Pruitt charges that “by entering into private settlements with special interest litigants, FWS has attempted to circumvent the legislative and regulatory process and make fundamental changes to its ESA-imposed obligations.”
The State of Oklahoma and energy companies are seeking “injunctive relief” that would overturn the designation of up to several hundred species that have been added to the threatened or endangered list through the “sue and settle” process. Under sue and settle, left-wing environmental groups, including the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) and WildLife Guardians, petition FWS to list a species as nearing extinction, and then shortly thereafter — sometimes in a matter of days — sue the federal government for inaction. Under the Obama administration, the feds have been increasingly likely to enter into a consent agreement with the environmentalists to fast-forward the decision-making process.
Pruitt’s action comes just a week ahead of a widely anticipated ESA listing of the lesser prairie chicken, a range bird the size of a small turkey. This colorful bird is found in states such as Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and New Mexico, and, according to a spokesman at Continental Resources, a major oil-and-gas driller based in Oklahoma, listing it as an endangered species “could disrupt drilling and exploration on hundreds of thousands of very promising oil and gas lands” in the Southwest.