Oakland, CA — An Alameda County Superior Court judge ruled that a 2013 law put a stop to a lawsuit designed to force the state of California to examine the environmental effects of the highly controversial oil and gas drilling process called fracking.Environmental advocates, represented by Earthjustice, were in court seeking to force the agency responsible for regulating the oil and gas industry to abide by the state's foremost law that protects public health and the environment. The conservation groups argued that the California Department of Conservation, Division of Oil, Gas, and Geothermal Resources had failed to consider or evaluate the risks of fracking, as required by the California Environmental Quality Act.
In issuing its ruling, the court agreed with oil industry arguments that after the passage of Senate Bill 4 and issuance of the agency's newly adopted emergency regulations, the environmental lawsuit must be dismissed. The Division admits it has not previously permitted or monitored fracking's impacts and has never formally evaluated the potential environmental and health effects of the practice, even as it continues to approve new permits for oil and gas wells.
“California's new fracking law creates a host of problems,” said Will Rostov, the Earthjustice attorney representing the conservation groups. “Under the new rules for the next twelve months, the state must approve any and all fracking projects without considering all the environmental harms that fracking causes.”
The agency has been rubberstamping oil and gas drilling activity without doing environmental review at all, or by issuing “negative declarations” that such activity will have “no significant effect” on the environment, without any study or mention of the potential impacts from fracking. The emergency regulations go a step further and require the agency to blindly approve fracking.
“This ruling demonstrates that the emergency regulations under S.B. 4 are an attempt to greenlight fracking throughout California with no protection for the environment or public health,” said Hollin Kretzmann, a staff attorney with one plaintiff, the Center for Biological Diversity. “Governor Brown needs to halt fracking immediately before it causes irrevocable damage to our state.”
Fracking is a controversial procedure used by drillers in California to extract deposits of oil and gas from depleted wells or from geologic formations where conventional drilling is ineffective. Hundreds of thousands to millions of gallons of water are mixed with toxic chemicals and injected down each well at high pressure, fracturing the underground rock formation to force the oil or gas to flow to the surface.
Earthjustice
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