Texas sues Biden administration over lizard’s endangered status, cites oil industry threat

Attorney General Ken Paxton of Texas filed a lawsuit against the Biden administration on Monday, claiming that the politically driven decision to designate the dunes sagebrush lizard as an endangered species could have negative effects on oil production and property owners. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service adopted a final rule on May 20 classifying the lizard endangered, according to Republican Paxton, who claimed the agency did so based on inaccurate evidence and arbitrary assumptions about the species’ future.

He added that while protecting the lizard’s existence throughout its vast geographic range, which includes the Permian Basin, the oil-producing region of the United States, it also put private landowners’ capacity to do business at risk. The action aims to nullify the final rule and was filed in a federal court in Midland, Texas. Paxton has brought numerous cases against the policies of the Biden administration.

The Democratic government, he claimed in a statement, was “weaponizing environmental law” in an effort to “backdoorly undermine Texas’s oil and gas industries, which help keep the lights on for America.” A representative for the U.S. Department of the Interior, which includes the Fish and Wildlife Service, declined to comment. The defendants included both agencies. Paxton was requested in June to contest the lizard’s endangered designation by the Railroad Commission of Texas, which oversees the state’s oil and gas sector and described the listing as “nothing more than a political game.”

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, Texas produced 27% of the country’s marketable natural gas and 43% of its crude oil in 2023. The area covered by the dunes sagebrush lizard is 1.25 million acres (1,953 square. According to the Fish and Wildlife Service, the dunes sagebrush lizard’s range is 1.25 million acres, or 1,953 square miles. The lawsuit is Texas v. U.S. Department of the Interior et al, U.S. District Court, Western District of Texas, No. 24-00233.