Texas Sues Biden Administration Over Little Lizard

Sep 24

Sep 24 Texas Sues Biden Administration Over Little Lizard

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is suing the Biden administration, the Department of the Interior, and the US Fish and Wildlife Service – all because of a lizard barely two inches long.

In May, the USFWS designated the dunes sagebrush lizard as endangered, a move that Paxton says harms property owners and, especially, oil and gas production. In a statement, he accused the administration of “weaponizing environmental law” in a “backdoor attempt to undermine Texas's oil and gas industries which help keep the lights on for America.”

If Biden is trying to undermine the industry, he’s doing a terrible job of it: Texas, like the rest of the country, produced record amounts of oil in 2023. In fact the 14 million barrels of oil extracted daily last year is the most by any country, ever. Texas accounted for 43% of the nation's crude oil production (and 27% of its natural gas) in 2023.

Much of that Texan oil is sucked out of the Permian Basin in the southwestern part of the state, a tiny portion of which coincides with the sagebrush lizard’s ever-shrinking habitat. The species (Sceloporus arenicolus), makes its home in the shinnery oak sand dune systems of four Texas counties (along with a small slice of southeast New Mexico).

After more than 40 years of consideration, the USFWS finally listed the lizard as endangered, citing future energy development, sand mining, and climate change as the main threats to its survival. The agency estimated that more than a third of the lizard's approximately 520,161 acres of shinnery oak habitat had been made uninhabitable, largely by the damage inflicted by oil and gas extraction.

“What a tremendous relief for this little lizard’s survival,” Michael Robinson, senior conservation advocate at the Center for Biological Diversity, said at the time of the designation in May. “After four decades of the government sitting on its hands, these lizards are finally protected from oil spills and giant machines scooping up sand.”

That relief might be short lived, as the battle is now enjoined in the courts. If Paxton can frame the issue as “lizard vs oil,” we can predict it will end badly for the reptile.