Court blocks Biden's anti-energy policies

 The Hill:

The Biden administration will suspend or delay new federal oil and gas leasing following a court ruling against the process by which it calculates the social cost of climate change, the administration announced Saturday night.

On Feb. 11, Judge James Cain of the Western District of Louisiana, a Trump appointee, blocked the administration’s method of calculating the social costs associated with greenhouse gases, the primary driver of climate change. The Biden administration had returned to Obama-era calculation methods, with plans to develop its own in the future.

In his ruling, Cain blocked federal agencies from considering findings from the White House Interagency Working Group, which had been tasked with devising new metrics based on the Obama-era calculations. It also bars the administration from considering the global impacts of greenhouse gas emissions, one of the major distinctions that made the Obama estimates far higher than the Trump administration’s.
...

Cain issued the ruling in response to a lawsuit from 10 GOP-led states, agreeing that “the balance of the injuries” from considering those costs “weighs substantially in favor" of those states, saying it “directly causes harm” to their economies.

“The … estimates artificially increase the cost estimates of lease sales, which in effect, reduces the number of parcels being leased, resulting in the States receiving less in bonus bids, ground rents, and production royalties,” Cain wrote.

The court should also order the Biden administration to go forward with the leasing.  The Biden policy makes no sense at all.  It blocks drilling in the US while he tries to make up for the shortfall in production by increasing buying of oil from foreign sources.  It is just nuts.