Challenging Federal Approvals for New Oil and Gas Drilling on California Public Lands
The Bureau of Land Management has never analyzed the cumulative harms of its oil and gas well approvals on nearby communities and the environment in California’s San Joaquin Valley.
Dirty air in the San Joaquin Valley has caused devastating health harms in Valley communities, where residents suffer the most asthma-related emergency room visits, heart attacks, and low birth-weight infants in the state of California. These impacts are particularly acute the closer people live and work to drilling activity. The pollution emitted by oil and gas drilling is linked to all manner of adverse health outcomes.
In 2025, health and conservation groups sued the BLM, challenging its approvals of new oil and gas drilling permits on public lands in California’s San Joaquin Valley. The lawsuit is not the first time a court has been asked to step in to stop the BLM from authorizing an expansion of oil and gas drilling on public lands in California without accounting for air and water pollution, health, and climate impacts.
Earlier litigation filed by Earthjustice successfully challenged the BLM’s failure to analyze the cumulative harms of oil and gas extraction in Central California. Pursuant to legal agreements filed in summer 2022, the BLM agreed to complete a proper environmental review for the region, which it had still yet to complete three years later.
Despite this lack of a proper review, the BLM continued to approve new drilling in the region. As a result, in June 2023, many of the same groups sued the BLM for drilling permits it approved throughout 2023 and 2024 in the San Joaquin Valley. That lawsuit, Center for Biological Diversity, et al. v. U.S. Bureau of Land Management, et al., was ongoing before the U.S. District Court at the time of the 2025 lawsuit filing.
