A federal judge in Utah ruled that a defendant accused of tampering and falsely bidding upon oil and gas leases offered by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management cannot present a 'necessity defense' a/k/a 'lesser of two evils defense' at trial.

Timothy DeChristopher sought to argue that his submission of winning auction bids on BLM federal oil and gas leases that he never intended to honor was justified because, he maintained, extracting oil and gas from federal lands would exacerbate global warming and climate change.

A federal appeals court ruled that private Mississippi Gulf Coast residents and private landowners can sue an oil company and other defendants for global warming-related damages to their property.

Alleging a chain of causation between the defendants' substantial emissions and injury to their property, they maintain that the companies used their property so as to produce massive amounts of greenhouse gasses, which then injured both plaintiffs and the general public by contributing to global warming, caused the sea level rise and added to the ferocity of Hurricane Katrina.

Last week, the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals handed down a decision that promises to alter the environmental law landscape. 

In the decision, the court determined that plaintiffs could sue a power generator under federal nuisance law for releasing greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming.  In making its ruling, the 2nd circuit overturned the district court, which had declined to hear the case after it held that the claims presented non-justiciable political questions.

We have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.

The Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia has ruled that a plan to open up offshore drilling off the coast of Alaska cannot go forward until the Department of the Interior conducts further review of the program's environmental impact. 

The Department's leasing program would have expanded the lease offerings available for the continental shelf in the Beaufort, Bering, and Chukchi Seas off the coast of Alaska.  The continental shelf is the portion of submerged land and seabed that lies between the end of a state's jurisdiction and the end of the United States' jurisdiction. 

The seas in question act as habitat for a number of wildlife species, including polar bears, a number of whale species, seals, the Pacific walrus, and various seabirds.