California v. Norton
| Decision Date | 02 December 2002 |
| Docket Number | No. 01-16690.,No. 01-16637.,01-16637.,01-16690. |
| Citation | 311 F.3d 1162 |
| Parties | State of CALIFORNIA; California Coastal Commission; Gray Davis, Governor; Bill Lockyer, Attorney General, Plaintiffs-Appellees, and Natural Resources Defense Council; League for Coastal Protection; Get Oil Out!; Citizens Planning Association of Santa Barbara; California Public Interest Research Group; Sierra Club; Friends of the Sea Otter; California Coastkeeper; Santa Barbara Channelkeeper; Santa Monica Baykeeper, Inc., Intervenors-Appellees, and Santa Barbara County; San Luis Obispo County, Intervenors-Appellees, v. Gale NORTON, Secretary of the Department of Interior; United States Department of the Interior Minerals Management Service; Regional Supervisor of the Minerals Management Service, Defendants-Appellants, and Aera Energy LLC; Conoco, Inc.; Nuevo Energy Company; Poseidon Petroleum, LLC; Samedan Oil Corp., Intervenors-Appellants. State of California; California Coastal Commission; Gray Davis, Governor; Bill Lockyer, Attorney General, Plaintiffs-Appellees, and Natural Resources Defense Council; League for Coastal Protection; Get Oil Out!; Citizens Planning Association of Santa Barbara; California Public Interest Research Group; Sierra Club; Friends of the Sea Otter; California Coastkeeper; Santa Barbara Channelkeeper; Santa Monica Baykeeper, Inc., Intervenors-Appellees, and Santa Barbara County; San Luis Obispo County, Intervenors-Appellees, v. Gale Norton, Secretary of the Department of Interior; United States Department of the Interior Minerals Management Service; Regional Supervisor of the Minerals Management Service, Defendants-Appellants, and Aera Energy LLC; Conoco, INC.; Nuevo Energy Company; Poseidon Petroleum, LLC; Samedan Oil Corp., Intervenors-Appellants. |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Ninth Circuit |
Thomas L. Sansonetti, Assistant Attorney General, Environment & Natl. Resources Div., David W. Shapiro, United States Attorney, James Coda, Assistant U.S. Attorney, Edward S. Geldermann, William B. Lazarus, David C. Shilton, U.S. Dept. of Justice, Washington D.C., Fred E. Ferguson, Peter J. Schaumberg, Geoffrey R. Heath, Office of the Solicitor, Department of the Interior, for the appellants.
E. Edward Bruce, Steven J. Rosenbaum, Gregory M. Williams, Covington & Burling, Washington D.C., for the intervenors-appellants.
Bill Lockyer, Attorney General of the State of California, Richard M. Frank, Chief Assistant Attorney General, J. Matthew Rodriquez, Senior Assistant Attorney General, Jamee Jordan Patterson, Supervising Deputy Attorney General, San Diego California, for the plaintiffs-appellees.
Stephen Shane Stark, County Counsel, Santa Barbara County, Alan Seltzer, Chief Deputy County Counsel, Santa Barbara County, William M. Dillon, Senior Deputy County Counsel, Santa Barbara County, Santa Barbara, California, James B. Lindholm, Jr., County Counsel San Luis Obispo County, Timothy McNulty, Deputy County Counsel, San Luis Obispo County, San Luis Obispo, California, for the County intervenors-appellees.
Linda Krop, Environmental Defense Center, Santa Barbara, California, Andrew Caputo, Natural Resources Defense Council, San Francisco, California, for the Environmental Group intervenors-appellees.
Appeal from the United States District Court for the Northern District of California; Claudia Wilken, District Judge, Presiding. D.C. No. CV-99-04964-CV.
Before SCHROEDER, Chief Judge, D.W. NELSON and REINHARDT, Circuit Judges.
Appellants ("United States")1 granted "suspensions" of thirty-six oil leases off-shore of central California pursuant to 43 U.S.C. § 1334(a)(1). The purpose of the lease suspensions was to extend the lives of the leases and to allow the lessees to "facilitate proper development of the lease[s]." 43 U.S.C. § 1334(a)(1). Without the suspensions, the leases would have expired and the lessees would have lost all production rights because the lessees had not begun production in paying quantities and the term of the leases had elapsed. Id.
Appellee ("California") asserted authority to review the lease suspensions for consistency with California's Coastal Management Program pursuant to the Coastal Zone Management Act, 16 U.S.C. §§ 1451-1465. California also objected to the lease suspensions on grounds that the United States failed to perform an environmental review of the lease suspensions pursuant to the National Environmental Policy Act ("NEPA"), 42 U.S.C. §§ 4321-4370f. The United States refused to submit the lease suspensions to California for review, claiming that lease suspensions are not subject to review by California under the terms of the Coastal Zone Management Act. The United States also asserted that the lease suspensions were categorically excluded from environmental review pursuant to NEPA.
California filed suit in federal district court seeking to enjoin the lease suspensions until it was afforded the opportunity to review them. California also sought to force the United States to prepare an Environmental Impact Statement ("EIS") before approving the lease suspensions. Ten environmental groups intervened as plaintiffs with California: Natural Resources Defense Council; League For Coastal Protection; Get Oil Out!; Citizens Planning Association of Santa Barbara; California Public Interest Research Group; Sierra Club; Friends of the Sea Otter; California CoastKeeper; Santa Barbara Channel-keeper; and Santa Monica Bay Keeper, Inc. ("Environmental Groups"). The counties of Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo ("Counties") also intervened as plaintiffs with California. The lessees intervened as defendants with the United States: Aera Energy, LLC; Conoco, Inc.; Nuevo Energy Company; Poseidon Petroleum, LLC; and Samedan Oil Corp. ("Oil Companies").
The district court held that the approval of the lease suspensions by the United States was subject to consistency review by California pursuant to 16 U.S.C. § 1456(c)(1)(A). California ex rel. Cal. Coastal Comm'n v. Norton, 150 F.Supp.2d 1046, 1057 (N.D.Cal.2001). The district court also held that the United States did not adequately document its reliance on the claimed categorical exclusion pursuant to NEPA and ordered the United States to provide an explanation for the applicability of the categorical exclusion to these lease suspensions. Id. The United States and the Oil Companies timely appealed.
We have jurisdiction pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 1291, and we affirm.
This case implicates California's ability to review and influence decisions of the federal government regarding oil drilling in federal waters off of California's coast. Our decision today necessarily involves a rather long and complex textual journey through an interwoven scheme of federal and State statutes and regulations. Before we embark, we briefly recollect the failures that these environmental protections are designed to prevent by providing for substantial State involvement in federal decisions concerning offshore oil drilling.
Five miles off the shore of the small beach town of Summerland, California, at 10:45 a.m. on Tuesday, January 28, 1969, crews on Union Oil Company offshore Platform Alpha were pulling the drilling tube out of well A-21 in order to assess their progress. Mud began to ooze up from the depths through the well shaft, signaling that something had gone wrong below. Within minutes, tons of mud spewed out of the top of the well propelled by a blast of natural gas. Frantic platform workers quickly capped the well, but it was too late to stop the rushing rent of oil rising from 3,000 feet below the ocean floor. The unlined walls of the well shaft gave way and oil poured into the surrounding geological formation under the sea floor. As the pressure continued to build, the oil burst upward through the roof of the Venture Anticline, ripped five long gashes in the ocean floor, and rose 188 feet through the blue-green waters of the Santa Barbara channel. The flow continued at thousands of gallons per hour for more than a week, spreading a tar-black patch seaward over eight hundred square miles of ocean. A.E. Keir Nash et al., Oil Pollution and the Public Interest: A Study of the Santa Barbara Oil Spill 1-3 (1972); Keith C. Clark & Jeffrey J. Hemphill, The Santa Barbara Oil Spill: A Retrospective (paper given at the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers 64th Annual Meeting, Sept. 14, 2001) at http:// www.geog.ucsb.edu/-jeff/sb_69oilspill; Battle Off Coast Slick Is Spreading—Planes Called In, S.F. Chron., Feb. 1, 1969 at 1; Oil Leak Presents Particularly Sticky Problem, S.F. Chron., Feb. 2, 1969 at 5. Futile Fight Against The Oil Slick, S.F. Chron., Feb. 7, 1969 at 1; Nick Welsh, The Big Spill, The Santa Barbara Independent, Jan. 26, 1989.
Then on the evening of Tuesday, February 4, the wind shifted and blew hard onshore, driving the oil into Santa Barbara harbor and fouling thirty miles of beaches up and down the coast. Futile Fight Against the Oil Slick. For weeks on end "[a] dense acrid stench clung to the shoreline as a force of 1000 men — many of them prisoners — pitchforked tons of straw onto the stained sand and murky tide to soak up the mess." Great Oil Slick Cleanup — The `Impossible' Task, S.F. Chron., Feb. 10, 1969 at 2. The cleanup efforts proved largely ineffective against the mass of oil, and thousands of sea birds were killed along with seals and other marine mammals. See Oil Slick Killing Off Wild Life, S.F. Chron., Feb. 2, 1969 at 1; Oil Thickens on Beach—`Months of Work Ahead', S.F. Chron., Feb. 6, 1969 at 1. By February 24, another well on Platform Alpha had blown out, and the oil-gushing fractures had spread over acres of ocean floor. County of Santa Barbara Planning and Development Energy Division, Blowout at Union Oil's Platform A at http://www.countyofsb.org/energy/information/1969blowout.asp.
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