Judge orders US officials to weigh coal mines' climate costs

BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) — A judge says U.S officials downplayed climate change impacts and other environmental costs from the expansion of a massive coal mine near the Montana-Wyoming border, in a case that could show how far the Biden administration is willing to go to unwind his predecessors' decisions.

The lawsuit over Montana's Spring Creek mine hinges in part on an issue central to President Joe Biden's climate change agenda: Making decisions based on the full costs of fossil fuel extraction, including impacts on a warming planet that are being felt across society.

U.S. District Judge Susan Watters said that under former President Donald Trump, the Interior Department played up the economic benefits of the 2-square-mile (5 square kilometer) expansion of Spring Creek, which opened up development of 85 million tons of coal.

But Watters said in her ruling Wednesday that officials failed to fully consider how burning the coal would contribute to climate change, known as the “social cost of carbon," a concept that places a dollar value on every ton of greenhouse gasses emitted.

Trump in 2017 issued an order for agencies not to use social cost of carbon estimates that had been developed at the end of the Obama administration. Watters said the executive order did not excuse the government from considering those costs if they represent the best science.

“Federal agencies cannot ignore more accurate scientific information when it is available,” Watters wrote. A federal magistrate judge issued similar recommendations in 2019, but the case had been put on hold after former owner Cloud Peak Energy went bankrupt.

The mine was bought by the Navajo Nation-owned Navajo Transitional Energy Company in 2019.

Mining in the Spring Creek expansion has been ongoing since it was...