U.S. Revokes Endangered Species Listing for Permian Basin Lizard, Resolves Texas Attorney General Lawsuit [1]
“June 4 (Reuters) - The Trump administration agreed to strip endangered species protection from a lizard whose habitat overlapped the largest oil-producing region in the United States, settling a lawsuit brought by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service designated the dunes sagebrush lizard as endangered in May 2024, after concluding that oil and gas development in the Permian Basin had made the loss of its habitat ‘effectively permanent.’
But the service now believes it made a ‘serious and fundamental’ error by improperly assuming that habitat restoration could not occur, and by discounting experimental efforts that ‘showed promise,’ the U.S. Department of Justice said in a Wednesday court filing accompanying the settlement.
That error ‘led to an incomplete and potentially inaccurate assessment of the potential and ongoing conservation efforts in New Mexico and Texas,’ the Justice Department said.”