Center for Biological Diversity , Et Al . v. United States Department of the Interior, Et Al .

United States Court of Appeals
FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA CIRCUIT
Argued November 21, 2024 Decided July 15, 2025
No. 23-5308
CENTER FOR B IOLOGICAL D IVERSITY , ET AL .,
A PPELLANTS
v.
U NITED STATES D EPARTMENT OF THE I NTERIOR, ET AL .,
A PPELLEES
Appeal from the United States District Court
for the District of Columbia
(No. 1:22-cv-01716)
Kyle J. Tisdel argued the cause for appellants. With him
on the briefs were Jason C. Rylander and Samantha
Ruscavage-Barz.
Daniel Halainen, Attorney, U.S. Department of Justice,
argued the cause for federal appellees. With him on the brief
were Todd Kim, Assistant Attorney General, and Michael T.
Gray, Attorney.
Sean Marotta argued the cause for intervenors-appellees.
With him on the joint brief were Travis Jordan, Senior
Assistant Attorney General, Office of the Attorney General for
the State of Wyoming, Catherine E. Stetson, Dana A. Raphael,

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Steven J. Rosenbaum, Bradley K. Ervin, Bret A. Sumner,
Malinda Morain, Eric Waeckerlin, Affie Ellis, Sarah C.
Bordelon, Hadassah M. Reimer, Kristina (Tina) R. Van
Bockern, Nikesh Jindal, Daniel S. Volchok, Andrew C. Lillie,
Mark D. Gibson, Kathleen C. Schroder, Mark Champoux,
Andrew C. Emrich, Thomas L. Sansonetti, and Bryson C.
Smith. Joseph Meyer, D. David DeWald, Attorney, Office of
the Attorney General for the State of Wyoming, Robert J.
Lundman, Attorney, U.S. Department of Justice, and Ryan A.
Smith, entered appearances.
Before: P ILLARD , WILKINS and R AO , Circuit Judges.
Opinion for the Court filed by Circuit Judge PILLARD .
PILLARD , Circuit Judge: From January 2021 to August
2022, the Bureau of Land Management approved more than
4,000 permits for oil and gas wells on public land in the
Permian Basin of southeast New Mexico and the Powder River
Basin of northeast Wyoming. Plaintiff environmental
organizations have challenged all those permit approvals,
alleging that BLM failed to adequately consider the climate and
environmental justice impact of the disputed wells. The district
court held that plaintiffs lacked standing and dismissed the
claims.
On appeal, the plaintiff organizations assert standing based
on affidavits recounting that their members live, work, and
recreate in the general vicinity of the permitted drilling sites
and consequently suffer a variety of injuries to their health,
safety, and recreational and aesthetic interests. But Plaintiffs
have failed to sufficiently link those harms to the discrete
agency actions they seek to reverse. Rather than explain how
one or more of the challenged permits would likely injure them,
as Article III requires, Plaintiffs have instead pursued an all-or-

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nothing theory that claims standing to challenge all the permits
in the aggregate—whether for wells within a couple of miles
from where they live, work, or play, or for those more than 50
miles away. They alternatively claim standing based on
calculations of the wells’ overall contribution to global climate
change, and on an asserted organizational injury resulting from
the government’s failure to publicize information about climate
change. Those theories, too, are barred by our precedent. We
therefore affirm the district court’s judgment of dismissal.
I.
A.
The Bureau of Land Management (BLM or the Bureau),
an agency within the U.S. Department of the Interior, is
authorized by the Mineral Leasing Act, 30 U.S.C. § 181 et seq.,
to issue leases granting private parties the right to extract oil,
gas, and other natural resources from public lands, id. § 181.
The Bureau opens public lands to such private use through a
three-stage process—land-use planning, leasing, and drill
permitting—outlined by the Mineral Leasing Act, the Federal
Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA), 43 U.S.C. § 1701
et seq., and various federal regulations.
Under that process, BLM first prepares a Resource
Management Plan setting a general strategy and objectives for
a particular area of public land. Id. § 1712; 43 C.F.R. § 1601.0-
5(n).1 That Plan identifies which portions of the land will be
open to private leasing for oil and gas development. 43 U.S.C.
§ 1712(a). Second, BLM leases eligible individual parcels of
land through a competitive auction. 43 C.F.R §§ 3120.5-1, 5-
1 Some of the applicable regulations were revised during the course
of this litigation. We generally cite the version of the regulations in
effect at the time of the challenged action.

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3 (2022); 30 U.S.C. § 226(b)(1)(A). Third, before a successful
lessee commences drilling, it must submit to BLM for its
approval an Application for Permit to Drill (APD or permit) a
proposed oil or gas well. 30 U.S.C. § 226(g); 43 C.F.R. §
3162.3-1 (2022). Throughout those stages, BLM must comply
with federal environmental statutes including, as relevant here,
the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), 42 U.S.C. §
4321 et seq., the Endangered Species Act (ESA), 16 U.S.C. §
1531 et seq, and the FLPMA.
NEPA requires federal agencies “to consider and report on
the environmental effect of their proposed actions.” WildEarth
Guardians v. Jewell (WildEarth 2013), 738 F.3d 298, 302
(D.C. Cir. 2013). Specifically, an agency must prepare an
environmental impact statement (EIS) for all “major Federal
actions significantly affecting the quality of the human
environment.” 42 U.S.C. § 4332(C). By regulation, all
approvals of Resource Management Plans are considered
“major Federal actions” and must be accompanied by an EIS.
43 C.F.R. § 1601.0-6. However, not every federal action
requires an EIS; an action that is “not likely to have significant
effects” can instead be examined by a less in-depth
“environmental assessment.” 40 C.F.R. § 1501.3(a)(2) (2022).
The Bureau conducted only environmental assessments of the
individual APDs challenged in this case rather than separate
EISs for each one, although these environmental assessments
incorporate analysis from earlier EISs more broadly analyzing
effects of oil and gas development in New Mexico and
Wyoming. See, e.g., Environmental Assessment: Titan
Exploration LLC Nine Mile T41R74S22SWSE Oil and Gas
Well Pad, at 2 (J.A. 751).
Section 7 of the ESA obliges federal agencies to ensure
“that any action . . . is not likely to jeopardize the continued
existence of any endangered species or threatened species or

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result in the destruction or adverse modification of habitat of
such species.” 16 U.S.C. § 1536(a)(2). If an agency
determines that a proposed action “may affect listed species or
critical habitat,” 50 C.F.R. § 402.14(a) (2022), it must engage
in “consultation” with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and
National Marine Fisheries Service (the Services). Id.; Growth
Energy v. EPA., 5 F.4th 1, 26 (D.C. Cir. 2021) (per curiam).
Pursuant to that consultation, the relevant Service develops a
“biological opinion” that assesses “whether the action is likely
to jeopardize the continued existence of listed species or result
in the destruction or adverse modification of critical habitat.”
50 C.F.R. § 402.14(g)(4) (2022).
The FLPMA, for its part, declares “the policy of the United
States that . . . the public lands be managed in a manner that
will protect the quality of scientific, scenic, historical,
ecological, environmental, air and atmospheric, water
resource, and archeological values.” 43 U.S.C. § 1701(a)(8).
To that end, the Act directs BLM to “take any action necessary
to prevent unnecessary or undue degradation of the lands.” Id.
§ 1732(b).
B.
In June 2022, plaintiffs Center for Biological Diversity
(CBD or Center) and WildEarth Guardians, later joined by
plaintiffs Citizens Caring for the Future and New Mexico
Interfaith Power and Light, filed suit in the United States
District Court for the District of Columbia against the U.S.
Department of the Interior, the Secretary of the Interior, BLM,
and the Bureau’s Director (Federal Appellees). Plaintiffs
ultimately challenged every permit to drill approved between
January 21, 2021, and August 31, 2022, by any of four BLM
Field Offices—Carlsbad or Roswell in New Mexico’s Permian

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Basin, and Casper or Buffalo in Wyoming’s Powder River
Basin. Am. Compl. ¶ 102 (J.A. 125-26).
Plaintiffs alleged that BLM authorized at least 4,019
qualifying APDs over that twenty-month period, and they
appended to their complaint a full list of the permits they
challenged. Critically, this case does not challenge any
Resource Management Plan or leasing decision—although
some of the Plaintiffs in this case have filed other litigation to
challenge the Bureau’s leasing authorizations in the relevant
regions. See WildEarth Guardians v. Bernhardt, 501 F. Supp.
3d 1192 (D.N.M. 2020) (holding that plaintiffs had standing to
challenge leasing of drilling rights on land in the Carlsbad
region in 2017 and 2018 but that the leasing did not violate
NEPA). Instead, Plaintiffs claim here that the Bureau’s
issuance of the challenged permits themselves violated NEPA,
the ESA, and the FLPMA.
Plaintiffs’ Amended Complaint includes five counts. All
are brought under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), as
neither NEPA nor the FLPMA creates a private right of action,
Theodore Roosevelt Conservation P’ship v. Salazar, 616 F.3d
497, 507 (D.C. Cir. 2010), and judicial review of agency action
under the ESA is also governed by the APA, Union Neighbors
United, Inc. v. Jewell, 831 F.3d 564, 574 (D.C. Cir. 2016);
Nat’l Ass’n of Home Builders v. Norton, 415 F.3d 8, 13 (D.C.
Cir. 2005). First, Plaintiffs claim that BLM’s permit approvals
violated NEPA because the environmental assessments
accompanying the approvals all failed to take a “hard look” at
the oil and gas wells’ cumulative greenhouse gas emissions and
resulting climate impacts. Second, they claim the Bureau’s
failure to properly consider the environmental justice impacts
of the challenged permit approvals also violated NEPA.
Plaintiffs’ next two claims allege that BLM violated the ESA
by failing to properly consult with the Services about the APD

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approvals’ impacts on species threatened by climate change,
and by failing to reinitiate consultation on the relevant
Resource Management Plans, and so acted arbitrarily and in
derogation of its duty to protect listed species and critical
habitat. Finally, Plaintiffs claim that, in approving the
challenged permits, BLM failed to prevent unnecessary or
undue degradation of public lands in violation of the FLPMA.
Plaintiffs request that the court vacate and set aside all the
challenged Permit approvals and enjoin Federal Appellees
from permitting any further drilling until BLM complies with
the relevant statutes.
A group of oil and gas industry associations and
companies holding the challenged permits (Intervenors), as
well as the state of Wyoming, successfully moved to intervene
to defend BLM’s permit approvals. Intervenors then moved to
dismiss arguing, among other things, that Plaintiffs lacked
standing to challenge the permit approvals because they had
not alleged any concrete and particularized injury linked to the
APDs at issue.
In opposition to the motion to dismiss, Plaintiffs offered
three distinct theories of standing, each supported by
supplemental declarations filed by Plaintiffs’ individual
members and officers:
First, they claimed associational standing for their NEPA
and FLPMA claims because their members lived, worked, and
recreated in two “APD Areas”—a term Plaintiffs coined to
refer to areas they define by imagined boundary lines—one
encompassing all the challenged APDs in New Mexico and one
encompassing all the challenged APDs in Wyoming. Plaintiffs
averred that their members’ health and their aesthetic,
recreational, and other interests are harmed by air pollution,
light pollution, traffic, and landscape effects associated with

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each group of wells. They relied primarily on the Tenth
Circuit’s decision in Diné Citizens Against Ruining Our
Environment v. Bernhardt, 923 F.3d 831 (10th Cir. 2019) (Diné
CARE), which held that a plaintiff organization had standing to
challenge more than 300 APDs in New Mexico based on
alleged harms to users of the area affected by oil and gas
activity. Plaintiffs told the district court in this case that, under
the logic of Diné CARE, they were not required to “catalog
discrete injuries from each discrete APD across the 4,000+ at
issue” or “catalog harm and geo-nexus to 4,000+ wells.”
Conservation Groups Mem. in Support of Response to Mot. to
Dismiss 11-12 (Conservation Groups Mem.) (J.A. 496-97).
Second, as to their ESA claims, Plaintiffs asserted
associational standing because their members observed and
studied wildlife facing threats from climate change that would
be exacerbated by emissions from the wells. The identified
affected species included songbirds in Hawaii, squirrels in
Arizona, butterflies in California, and coral reefs in Fiji.
Third, CBD claimed organizational standing for its ESA
claims on the ground that BLM’s failure to engage in the
required ESA consultation deprived it of information about
federal agency actions’ impact on species and so harmed its
ability to fulfill its organizational mission.
The district court granted Intervenors’ motion to dismiss
on the ground that Plaintiffs lacked standing. Emphasizing that
Plaintiffs must demonstrate standing for each challenged APD,
the court held that Plaintiffs had only claimed a “geographic
nexus to the broad ‘APD Areas’ [that] Plaintiffs created” and
therefore failed to assert “any individual member’s geographic
nexus to any specific wells or drilling sites.” Ctr. for
Biological Diversity v. U.S. Dep’t of the Interior, No. 22-cv-
01716, 2023 WL 7182041, at *4 (D.D.C. Nov. 1, 2023). The

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district court distinguished Diné CARE as having “challenged
an agency action stemming from a single [EIS],” whereas
Plaintiffs here failed to identify any “single underlying agency
action applicable to the challenged [permit] approvals.” Id. at
*5.
The district court also held that CBD lacked organizational
standing for the ESA claims, concluding it had failed to tie “its
mission of protecting species to any particular [APD]
approval,” or explain “how its resource needs would change in
response to the approvals.” Id. at *4. The court did not
separately analyze Plaintiffs’ associational standing arguments
for their ESA claims based on their members’ interests in
species harmed by climate change.
Plaintiffs timely appealed. We have appellate jurisdiction
under 28 U.S.C. § 1291.
II.
We review de novo the district court’s judgment of
dismissal for lack of standing and, “[i]n determining standing,
we may consider materials outside of the complaint.” Food &
Water Watch, Inc. v. Vilsack, 808 F.3d 905, 913 (D.C. Cir.
2015). Because this case is before us at the pleading stage, we
accept as true the well-pleaded factual allegations in the
complaint or in declarations submitted in support of standing,
draw all reasonable inferences in plaintiffs’ favor, and
“presume that general allegations embrace those specific facts
that are necessary to support the claim.” Lujan v. Defs. of
Wildlife, 504 U.S. 555, 561 (1992) (formatting modified); see
also Air Excursions LLC v. Yellen, 66 F.4th 272, 277 (D.C. Cir.
2023).
The Constitution limits the federal judicial power to
individual cases and controversies, and a proper case or

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controversy requires at least one plaintiff to demonstrate that
she has standing to sue. Murthy v. Missouri, 144 S. Ct. 1972,
1985-86 (2024). Standing necessitates an injury that is
“concrete, particularized, and actual or imminent; fairly
traceable to the challenged action; and redressable by a
favorable ruling.” Clapper v. Amnesty Int’l USA, 568 U.S. 398,
409 (2013) (internal quotation marks omitted). That injury
may result from an agency action that failed to follow some
statutorily required procedure, such as completing NEPA
environmental review or engaging in ESA consultation prior to
undertaking a specific action. WildEarth 2013, 738 F.3d at
304-05; Growth Energy, 5 F.4th at 27.
For claims of procedural injury under NEPA and the ESA,
the imminence and redressability prongs of standing are
somewhat relaxed. See Growth Energy, 5 F.4th at 27; see also
Ctr. for L. and Educ. v. U.S. Dep’t of Educ., 396 F.3d 1152,
1157 (D.C. Cir. 2005) (“Where plaintiffs allege injury resulting
from violation of a procedural right afforded to them by statute
and designed to protect their threatened concrete interest, the
courts relax—while not wholly eliminating—the issues of
imminence and redressability, but not the issues of injury in
fact or causation.”). For causation, a plaintiff “must show two
links: one connecting the omitted procedural step to some
substantive government decision that may have been wrongly
decided because of the lack of [compliance with] that
procedural requirement and one connecting that substantive
decision to the plaintiff’s particularized injury.” Growth
Energy, 5 F.4th at 27 (internal quotation marks omitted). For
redressability of a procedural injury, a plaintiff need not show
that “compliance with the procedure would alter the final
agency decision,” but only that the agency “could reach a
different conclusion if ordered to revisit its procedural error.”
Id. at 27-28 (formatting modified). However, even a plaintiff
claiming procedural injury must show how the agency’s error

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could affect her “concrete interests.” Id. at 27. “Unless there
is a substantial probability that the substantive agency action
that disregarded a procedural requirement created a
demonstrable risk, or caused a demonstrable increase in an
existing risk, of injury to the particularized interests of the
plaintiff, the plaintiff lacks standing.” Fla. Audubon Soc’y v.
Bentsen, 94 F.3d 658, 669 (D.C. Cir. 1996) (en banc)
(formatting altered). To have such a particularized interest, a
plaintiff “must use the area affected by the challenged activity
and not an area roughly ‘in the vicinity’ of it.” Lujan, 504 U.S.
at 566 (quoting Lujan v. Nat’l Wildlife Fed’n, 497 U.S. 871,
887-88 (1990)).
A plaintiff “must demonstrate standing for each claim [it]
seeks to press” and “for each form of relief sought,” even if the
various claims are derived from similar facts or raise similar
legal questions. DaimlerChrysler Corp. v. Cuno, 547 U.S. 332,
352 (2006) (formatting altered). In both the district court and
here, Plaintiffs have resisted this basic principle. Before the
district court, Plaintiffs denied any obligation to identify a
“harm and geo-nexus” to the specific permits they sought to
challenge. Conservation Groups Mem. 12-13 (J.A. 497-98).
And in their opening brief to our court, Plaintiffs maintained
that Diné CARE relieved them of their burden “to establish
standing for each well individually.” Conservation Groups Br.
15.
Federal Appellees acknowledge that plaintiffs may use
“common allegations or evidence to establish standing to
challenge multiple agency actions,” such as alleging
“recreational or aesthetic harms that are fairly traceable to
multiple permits.” Federal Appellees Br. 19. As Federal
Appellees observed before the district court, a plaintiff “may
define the ‘affected area’ for each APD in any number of
overlapping ways, such as by visual site [sic] lines, relevant air

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sheds, or anticipated range of resulting noise pollution.” Defs’
Resp. to Def-Intervenors’ Mot. to Dismiss 13 (J.A. 477). But
even when established with common support, their standing
depends on a showing of injury, causation, and redressability
that implicates each individual challenged APD. Federal
Appellees Br. 19; Intervenors Br. 25-30.
When pressed at argument, even Plaintiffs ultimately
recognized their duty to establish standing for every permit and
therefore to allege how all the challenged APDs contribute to
their injury in fact. Oral Arg. Tr. 5:15-6:20. We proceed to
assess Plaintiffs’ proffered theories of standing under that basic
framework to determine whether they have met their pleading-
stage burden to plausibly allege standing. See Humane Soc’y
v. Vilsack, 797 F.3d 4, 8 (D.C. Cir. 2015).
III.
Plaintiffs offer two theories of “associational” or
“representative” standing based on the injuries incurred by
their individual members. To claim associational standing,
Plaintiffs must show that (1) at least one of their members
would have standing to sue in their own right, (2) the interests
the members seek to protect are germane to their organizations’
purposes, and (3) the members need not participate
individually in the lawsuit. ITServe All., Inc. v. U.S. Dep’t of
Homeland Sec., 71 F.4th 1028, 1032 (D.C. Cir. 2023) (citing
Hunt v. Wash. State Apple Advert. Comm’n, 432 U.S. 333, 343
(1977)). Only the first prong—the Article III standing of
Plaintiffs’ individual members—is at issue here. Because
Plaintiffs have failed to demonstrate that any individual
member would plausibly have standing to challenge any or all

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the APDs under either of the two theories, we hold that they
lack associational standing.
A.
Plaintiffs first argue that they have associational standing
for their claims that the permit approvals violated NEPA and
the FLPMA because their individual members attested that
they experience a variety of harms within Plaintiffs’ self-
defined “APD Areas” that they allege are caused by oil and gas
development and will be intensified by the authorization of the
disputed wells. It is well established that environmental
plaintiffs adequately allege standing “when they aver that they
use the affected area and are persons for whom the aesthetic
and recreational values of the area will be lessened by the
challenged activity.” Friends of the Earth, Inc. v. Laidlaw
Env’t Servs. (TOC), Inc., 528 U.S. 167, 183 (2000) (internal
quotation marks omitted). We have, for example, found
standing when plaintiffs made recreational use of waters and
coastlines where the Department of the Interior granted leases
for oil and gas development, Ctr. for Sustainable Econ. v.
Jewell, 779 F.3d 588, 596 (D.C. Cir. 2015), and when plaintiffs
had aesthetic and recreational interests in lands where BLM
had offered leases for mining because pollution threatening
those interests “follow[ed] inexorably” from the challenged
agency action, WildEarth 2013, 738 F.3d at 305-06. See also
Calif. Cmtys. Against Toxics v. EPA, 928 F.3d 1041, 1049
(D.C. Cir. 2019) (finding standing because reasonable fear of
harm from hazardous waste pollution caused petitioners
reduced enjoyment of the outdoors); Sierra Club v. U.S. Dep’t
of Transp., 125 F.4th 1170, 1180-82 (D.C. Cir. 2025) (finding
standing based on safety risks and “increased disruption to []
peace and quiet” caused by increased rail traffic) (internal
quotation marks omitted); Sierra Club v. FERC, 867 F.3d

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1357, 1365-66 (D.C. Cir. 2017) (finding standing based on
noise pollution).
To support their standing, Plaintiffs primarily rely on
declarations submitted by Kayley Shoup and Rebecca Sobel as
to New Mexico and Jeremy Nichols and Erik Molvar as to
Wyoming, each of whom is a member of at least one plaintiff
organization. The declarations discuss in detail the injuries
sustained by Plaintiffs’ members within the APD Areas as a
result of oil and gas development, including exposure to smog,
haze, and pollutants harmful to human health and public
welfare (traceable to an array of emissions, including
particulate matter, ozone, benzene ethylene, toluene, and
xylene), the degradation of the appearance of public lands by
oil and gas infrastructure, noise pollution and dangerous roads
caused by increased heavy truck traffic, earthquakes linked to
hydraulic fracking, and the disturbance of local wildlife. They
explain how those effects can be felt in specific locations where
Plaintiffs’ members have lived, worked, or recreated. And they
assert their members’ intent to return to those places in the
future.
There is no dispute that Plaintiffs’ declarations present, as
Federal Appellees concede, “the kinds of submissions that
often support standing to challenge a particular project.”
Federal Appellees Br. 28. Together, they readily demonstrate
that Plaintiffs’ members are among those who use the areas
described in the affidavits and whose health, safety, aesthetic,
or recreational interests are likely to be harmed by oil and gas
activity that affects those locations. See Laidlaw, 528 U.S. at
183. The problem for Plaintiffs is that they have not alleged
whether or how the newly permitted wells will cause those
harms at the locations they identify as where they live, work,
or travel. Plaintiffs cannot rely on allegations of the kinds of
concrete harms generally associated with oil and gas extraction

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to challenge permits for oil and gas extraction across thousands
of square miles of New Mexico and Wyoming without linking
their experience of those harms to the challenged permits—by,
for example, identifying the nature and range of the wells’
impact(s).
As we have emphasized, Plaintiffs’ claims require that
they trace their injury to the drilling permits they seek to
challenge. To attempt to do so, Plaintiffs describe their
members’ nexus only to an “APD Area” in each state, which
Plaintiffs define as the region created by “drawing a line around
where the challenged wells will be drilled” in each state on
maps created by Plaintiffs for this litigation. See Shoup Decl.
¶ 13 (J.A. 530); Clauser Decl. Exs. 1-A, 1-B, 1-C, 1-D (J.A.
519-26). Generally speaking, given the dispersion of the New
Mexico wells at issue, as depicted in Figure 1, the APD Area
apparently spans more than 80 miles from north to south, and
a similar distance from east to west to include all the permitted
well sites. The area encompassing all the wells in Wyoming,
depicted in Figure 2, is even larger.

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16
Fig. 1: Clauser Decl. Ex. 1-B (J.A. 522), depicting the
challenged APDs in New Mexico.

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17
Fig. 2: Clauser Decl. Ex. 1-D (J.A. 526), depicting the
challenged APDs in Wyoming.

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The relevant declarations do identify specific locations
where Plaintiffs’ members have experienced harms linked to
oil and gas development, such as Carlsbad Caverns National
Park in New Mexico and portions of Thunder Basin National
Grassland in Wyoming. But they fail to demonstrate causal
links between harms at those locations and the APD approvals
that Plaintiffs seek to reverse. For example, Shoup resides in
Carlsbad—within the New Mexico APD Area—and her
declaration alleges that oil and gas wells cause haze that affects
her recreational activities in and around the city. Shoup Decl.
¶¶ 12, 15, 18 (J.A. 530-31, 534). However, she does not allege
which challenged permits will likely cause or contribute to
those harms. Plaintiffs simply contend that all of them will,
without sufficiently explaining the reach of the wells’ effects—
individually or together—to make that contention plausible or
amenable to meaningful review.
It seems likely that the challenged wells located closest to
Shoup’s home or to the identified roads and places she
frequents will contribute to haze affecting her, but the record
offers no means for us to confirm as much—particularly as to
Plaintiffs’ claims extending to permits to drill wells at distances
of 10, 20, or 50 miles from Carlsbad. Plaintiffs’ declarations
do not, for example, describe the geographic reach of any
individual well’s likely contribution to the various types of
harmful effects—haze, noxious emissions, visual blight on the
landscape, noise and light pollution, increased heavy vehicle
traffic, and seismic activity—that they ascribe to oil and gas
development. And they do not specify which of Plaintiffs’
members routinely recreate within the reach of those
particularized effects. To the contrary, Plaintiffs fail to assert
the geographic extent of any of the injuries allegedly caused by
any of the challenged APDs. They thus give us no basis to
credit their claims that wells at varying distances from where
they live, work, and recreate cause their identified harms.

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The point is not that we question whether the asserted
harmful effects extend beyond the specific well sites, but that
Plaintiffs have provided no information at all as to how far they
typically extend. For example, plausible allegations that
drilling at a permitted site typically emits stench or noxious
chemicals for an 80-mile radius would presumably suffice to
establish that drilling inflicts those harms on persons anywhere
within Plaintiffs’ New Mexico APD area; a smaller radius
would require allegations that Plaintiffs experience effects at
various specified locations within sufficient proximity to
subsets of the wells. But Plaintiffs allege only generally that a
“rotten-egg smell of hydrogen sulfide” is common across the
APD Area, without providing information that would allow us
to assess whether and where the newly permitted wells they
challenge will plausibly contribute to that effect. Id. ¶ 22 (J.A.
535).
To take another example, Plaintiffs might trace new wells
to visible blight by alleging that the size of the typical drilling
apparatus and the sightlines around identified groups of
permitted drill sites make them visible to at least one of the
Plaintiffs from the roads or other locations where they travel,
live, or visit. Instead, Plaintiffs’ visibility claims are more
general: The Nichols Declaration, for instance, avers that the
wells’ effect on the landscape “would be visible from many
public lands vantage points in the region where [he] ha[s]
recreated and plan[s] to recreate,” Nichols Decl. ¶ 27 (J.A.
562), but makes no effort to identify which permitted wells’
effects would be visible from which locations.
Without such information as to the ambit of any of the
asserted effects of the permitted wells, we cannot determine
whether it is plausible that any individual APD likely interferes
with Nichols’ or any other member-affiant’s recreational
interests in any particular place. That question turns on the

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scope of an asserted effect, which may be influenced by
associated variables like air currents or the specific topography
or sightlines across New Mexico and Wyoming. We need not
speculate as to what facts would suffice to establish that a given
type of effect of the permitted activity likely injures Plaintiffs.
It is dispositive that all of Plaintiffs’ supporting materials are
silent on the critical question of which APDs are alleged to
cause which harms in which of the locations Plaintiffs frequent,
leaving us unable meaningfully to review their claims that all
the challenged agency actions will likely cause them harm.
Plaintiffs cannot overcome this fatal defect by treating the
permits as if they were a single action affecting a unitary APD
Area, without information that the effect of any one well on
any plaintiff anywhere in that vast area suffices to support their
challenge to the entire batch. As each APD is a distinct agency
action, plaintiffs must establish standing as to each. See
Murthy, 144 S. Ct. at 1988 (“plaintiffs must demonstrate
standing for each claim they press . . . and for each form of
relief that they seek”) (internal quotation marks omitted);
Friends of Animals v. Bernhardt, 961 F.3d 1197, 1204-05
(D.C. Cir. 2020) (plaintiffs must prove standing for each
“discrete regulatory action” based on the “discrete effects” of
that action). The fact that Plaintiffs have elected to combine
their claims against more than 4,000 APDs into one case does
not convert the separate permitting actions into a single federal
agency action.
Moreover, the use of an “APD Area” as a shortcut for
standing, untethered to any information about the range of the
challenged wells’ effects, lacks a limiting principle. At oral
argument, Plaintiffs’ counsel accepted that their declarations
would not suffice to demonstrate standing to challenge a
hypothetical additional well 50 miles north of Roswell, New
Mexico, Oral Arg. Tr. 19:1-16, even though Plaintiffs could

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easily have drawn an “APD Area” to contain such a well and
recited the same list of harms caused by oil and gas
development affecting their activities within that APD Area.
That well-advised concession demonstrates the weakness of
Plaintiffs’ theory of standing. If that hypothetical well is too
far-flung for Plaintiffs to challenge based on the record in this
case, why is the same not true for the widely dispersed wells
they do seek to challenge? Because Plaintiffs neglect to
identify the geographic ambit of the harms caused by an agency
decision to approve an APD, Plaintiffs ultimately offer no way
to distinguish their standing to challenge the APDs at issue here
from their standing relative to any other permit in New Mexico,
Wyoming, or elsewhere.
Our holding should not be understood as obliging
Plaintiffs to submit a voluminous complaint featuring separate,
duplicative allegations for each of the 4,000 challenged wells.
As Federal Appellees have acknowledged, Plaintiffs may
“define the ‘affected area’ for each APD in any number of
overlapping ways.” Defs’ Resp. to Def-Intervenors’ Mot. to
Dismiss 13 (J.A. 477). And they may, where appropriate, “rely
on common allegations or evidence to establish standing to
challenge multiple agency actions,” such that the allegations
supporting standing to challenge different permits “may
overlap to a significant degree, or even entirely.” Federal
Appellees Br. 19. For example, Plaintiffs might allege that a
well causes a cognizable type of harm—such as smog, ozone,
or stench—within a specified radius. Allegations that one of
their members recreated at a single location within the
overlapping radii of more than one well could suffice to
demonstrate “concrete and particularized injury . . . due to
geographic proximity to the action[s] challenged that gives rise
to Article III standing” to challenge multiple permits. City of
Olmsted Falls v. FAA, 292 F.3d 261, 267 (D.C. Cir. 2002).

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The point is that Plaintiffs must somehow establish an
injury in fact traceable to every challenged well. On this record
as Plaintiffs describe it, different parts of the APD Area may or
may not be distinctly affected by some or all of the challenged
approvals. They cannot simply assert that their members’
presence in a large APD Area automatically grants standing to
challenge every APD listed in the complaint. Plaintiffs object
that it is incongruous to require them to identify injury from
each permit when BLM’s own permitting process ignores any
such “site-specific” differences across wells. Reply Br. 11. As
discussed above, each of the permits challenged in this case is
accompanied by a brief “environmental assessment,” rather
than a full EIS. Instead of conducting a full analysis of the
anticipated environmental harms of each APD based on those
wells’ individual characteristics and exact locations, the
Bureau’s own environmental assessments largely “tier” back
and incorporate by reference a relatively detailed but shared
analysis of the effects of oil and gas production that
accompanied earlier agency actions, such as a Resource
Management Plan. See, e.g., Environmental Assessment: Titan
Exploration LLC Nine Mile T41R74S22SWSE Oil and Gas
Well Pad, at 2 (J.A. 751). Indeed, BLM’s pace of operations—
approving over 4,000 challenged permits over a twenty-month
period—essentially foreclosed the Bureau from creating a
tailored environmental analysis for each well.
If Plaintiffs are correct that BLM has failed to properly
account for the cumulative impacts of the wells—and we take
no position on the merits of Plaintiffs’ arguments at this stage
of the proceedings—that might mean that each of the
challenged permits violates NEPA for the same reason, such as
a failure to consider the “incremental effects of the action when
added to the effects of other past, present, and reasonably
foreseeable actions.” 40 C.F.R. § 1508.1(g)(3) (2022). Even
if the challenged permits all suffer from the same legal defect,

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however, the Constitution requires Plaintiffs to demonstrate an
injury linked to each distinct federal action.
Plaintiffs urge us to follow the Tenth Circuit in Diné
CARE, which considered and rejected similar objections to an
analogous factual showing in support of standing to challenge
hundreds of drilling permits. In Diné CARE, environmental
organizations (including one of the plaintiffs in this case)
brought a wholesale challenge to the grant of approximately
350 APDs in the Mancos Shale in the Greater Chaco region of
northeast New Mexico. Diné CARE, 923 F.3d at 835, 838 n.2.
The Diné CARE plaintiffs’ standing affidavits described their
members’ activities in various locations in the Greater Chaco
region and their exposure to traffic, foul odors, light pollution,
and other harms resulting from oil and gas activity. Id. at 842.
The Tenth Circuit sustained plaintiffs’ standing, rejecting
the government’s argument that plaintiffs had failed to
“establish standing for each challenged APD approval” with
affidavits that only “refer[red] generally to the ‘greater Chaco
region’ or the ‘Mancos Shale formation’” instead of individual
well sites. Id. (formatting altered). It emphasized that no court
had “ever required an environmental plaintiff to show that it
has traversed each bit of land that will be affected by a
challenged agency action.” Id. (quoting S. Utah Wilderness
All. v. Palma, 707 F.3d 1143, 1155 (10th Cir. 2013)). The
Tenth Circuit concluded that plaintiffs’ use of maps to show
the geographic proximity of the well sites to locations where
their members lived and recreated, combined with the nature of
plaintiffs’ challenge to the “indirect and cumulative impacts of
the APDs” extending “beyond the boundaries of the well sites
and into the greater Chaco landscape,” sufficed to demonstrate
the required injury in fact. Id. at 842-43.

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We acknowledge that the allegations and affidavits in
support of standing in Diné CARE bear a strong resemblance
to those in this case—unsurprisingly so, given the overlap in
parties, attorneys, and declarants in the two cases. The district
court here distinguished Diné CARE as challenging one agency
action encompassing all the permits. 2023 WL 7182041, at *5.
That does not appear to be quite right: The Tenth Circuit
understood that the plaintiffs’ claims were “in the form of
challenges to numerous individual APDs,” rather than to a
common agency action underlying all the wells (such as a
Resource Management Plan or leasing decision). Diné CARE,
923 F.3d at 843. In our view, Diné CARE is not distinguishable
in the way the district court thought.
Nonetheless, we agree that our decision is not clearly in
conflict with Diné CARE. The Tenth Circuit itself provides a
more modest and defensible reading of Diné CARE than
Plaintiffs urge here, suggesting that its plaintiffs’ standing
rested not just on their identification of activities in a large
region some part of which was affected by the challenged
APDs, but on the fact that those plaintiffs “regularly visited
near the well sites and thus established a ‘geographic nexus to
the site’” of the permits they sought to challenge. Rocky
Mountain Peace & Just. Ctr. v. U.S. Fish & Wildlife Serv., 40
F.4th 1133, 1153 (10th Cir. 2022) (formatting altered) (quoting
Diné CARE, 923 F.3d at 841). The scope of the challenge here
is much broader, involving more than ten times as many APDs
spread over what appear to be substantially larger areas in two
different states. Compare Clauser Decl. Exs. 1-A, 1-B, 1-C, 1-
D (J.A. 519-26), with Dorsey Decl. Ex. A, Diné CARE, 923
F.3d 831 (Diné CARE J.A. 423) (mapping the challenged APD
locations in Diné CARE).
The Tenth Circuit’s decision is in any case not binding on
this court, and to the extent that Diné CARE confers standing

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to challenge multiple agency actions without a demonstrated
injury caused by each action, as Plaintiffs contend, we must
reject it as inconsistent with precedent binding on this court.
For the reasons discussed above, Plaintiffs cannot establish
standing without demonstrating the requisite causal link
between the challenged drilling permits and the concrete harms
they identify.
The district court described the defect in Plaintiffs’
arguments as a failure to “allege a cognizable injury in fact.”
2023 WL 7182041, at *5. But, as we have emphasized, the
injuries described in Plaintiffs’ declarations could suffice to
show standing to challenge the permits they identify if they
were to specify the causal mechanism connecting their harms
to the individual agency actions. We therefore affirm the
judgment of the district court dismissing all of Plaintiffs’
NEPA and FLPMA claims on the alternative ground that
Plaintiffs have failed to show the requisite causal link between
a “substantive government decision that may have been
wrongly decided” and “the plaintiff’s particularized injury”
needed to support their standing. Growth Energy, 5 F.4th at 27
(internal quotation marks omitted).
We will not at this stage comb through Plaintiffs’
declarations and supporting materials to attempt to ascertain
whether their asserted injuries can be plausibly traced to at least
some of the permits at issue, even if not all of them. Plaintiffs,
who “bear the burden to establish standing by setting forth
specific facts,” Murthy, 144 S. Ct. at 1991 n.7 (formatting
altered), have persisted throughout this case with an “all-or-
nothing” theory of standing. They do not explain how they
might still have standing even if their more expansive theory
fails—by, for example, concretely identifying how specified
groups of wells harm identified plaintiffs. We decline to
“hunt[] for truffles buried in . . . the record” to draw the

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concrete links between individual injuries and individual wells
that Plaintiffs have neglected to unearth in their own
submissions. See Jones v. Kirchner, 835 F.3d 74, 83 (D.C. Cir.
2016) (internal quotation marks omitted). Plaintiffs are free to
clarify those connections in future litigation—or, alternatively,
establish standing to levy a wholesale challenge against a
broader agency action, such as a decision to authorize multiple
parcels for leasing that underlies development of a large
number of individual wells. See Ctr. for Sustainable Econ.,
779 F.3d at 592-93; WildEarth 2013, 738 F.3d at 302.
B.
Plaintiffs also claim associational standing for their
Endangered Species Act challenges. Their members attest that
the permits’ contributions to climate change will intensify
threats to listed habitats and species that they travel to observe
and study. The Bureau says Plaintiffs’ showing falls short
because no affiant asserts a risk of ESA-cognizable harms in
the Permian or Powder River Basins; they rely instead on the
contribution of the permitted oil and gas development to global
climate change that, in turn, will likely affect the listed habitats
and species they view and study elsewhere.
The district court did not separately discuss plaintiffs’
associational standing to sue under the ESA. Plaintiffs ask us
to remand for the district court to consider the issue in the first
instance. But the dispute is a legal one subject to our de novo
consideration. It has been fully briefed here, the relevant
pleadings and declarations are in the record before us, and we
may affirm the district court’s judgment “on any ground
supported by the record.” Meza v. Renaud, 9 F.4th 930, 933
(D.C. Cir. 2021). We accordingly decide the question of
Plaintiffs’ associational standing for their ESA claims and hold
that they have failed to plausibly allege standing.

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Like the NEPA and FLPMA claims discussed above,
Plaintiffs’ ESA claims are procedural, resting on averments
that Plaintiffs’ members are injured by the Bureau’s failure to
engage in the required ESA consultation with the Services. An
environmental organization may establish associational
standing to bring a procedural ESA claim by showing that a
failure to consult “demonstrably increased some specific risk
of environmental harms that imperil the members’
particularized interests in a species or habitat with which the
members share a geographic nexus.” Growth Energy, 5 F.4th
at 27 (internal quotation marks omitted).
In their declarations, Plaintiffs’ members identify adverse
effects of climate change on various covered species and
habitats that they visit, observe, and study. For example, Robin
Silver frequently visits Mount Graham in Arizona to
photograph the Mount Graham Red Squirrel, whose remaining
habitat is threatened by drought and wildfires exacerbated by
climate change. Silver Decl. ¶¶ 9-14 (J.A. 651-54). Brett Hartl
regularly visits the Hawaiian Islands to observe rare birds
threatened by the climate-change induced spread of mosquitos
that transmit avian malaria. Hartl Decl. ¶¶ 19-23 (J.A. 585-86).
And Steven Amstrup researches the movements, distribution,
and population dynamics of polar bears who face potential
extinction due to climate change’s degradation of their Arctic
habitats. Amstrup Decl. ¶¶ 11, 23-34, 57-62 (J.A. 659, 662-66,
672-74). Those and other declarations likely suffice to allege
the particularized interest in individual species and habitats
required for standing.
Plaintiffs assert that each of the challenged wells will add
to greenhouse gas emissions that, by contributing to climate
change, likely will intensify threats to the climate-imperiled
species and habitats their pleadings and declarations identify.
Our court’s precedent suggests, however, that environmental

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plaintiffs cannot demonstrate the required concrete and
particularized harm to their interests only by asserting that a
challenged government action will contribute to a particular
harmful effect of global climate change. See Growth Energy,
5 F.4th at 27. Petitioners in Center for Biological Diversity v.
U.S. Dep’t of the Interior (CBD v. DOI), 563 F.3d 466 (D.C.
Cir. 2009), for example, claimed that approval of new oil and
gas drilling on the outer continental shelf of Alaska would emit
greenhouse gases known to contribute to climate change likely
to harm local “species and ecosystems.” Id. at 475-76. We
concluded that petitioners “lack[ed] standing on their
substantive climate change theory” because “climate change is
a harm that is shared by humanity at large,” and a desire to
“prevent an increase in global temperature” is “too generalized
to establish standing” even when plaintiffs have a
particularized interest in vulnerable species and ecosystems.
Id. at 475-76, 478.
Plaintiffs counter that in CBD v. DOI we rejected only the
claim of “substantive” injury caused by an agency action while
allowing the petitioners to proceed on their theory of
procedural injury. But we similarly held that the plaintiffs in
WildEarth 2013 had standing because they demonstrated “a
separate injury in fact not caused by climate change—the harm
to their members’ recreational and aesthetic interests from
local pollution”—to ground their challenge to the agency’s
deficient consideration of the diffuse and unpredictable effects
of greenhouse gas emissions. 738 F.3d at 307.
Even assuming an injury resulting from climate change
may support standing, plaintiffs must connect the challenged
action to that injury. Given that climate change results from
the combined effects of greenhouse gas emissions around the
globe, plaintiffs resting on injury from climate change must
also allege that their personal injury is traceable to the

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challenged action and likely redressable by a favorable judicial
decision. Here, Plaintiffs’ declarations speak generally of the
harm to climate-imperiled species and habitats without
addressing how those harms flow from the greenhouse gas
emissions associated with the wells they challenge. See, e.g.,
Nagano Decl. ¶ 23 (J.A. 645) (acknowledging that the
challenged APDs represent “a fraction of the total greenhouse
emissions” from BLM lands and asserting in general terms that
the emissions will result “in significant harm to threatened and
endangered species”); Silver Decl. ¶¶ 12-16 (J.A. 653-55)
(discussing climate change’s impact on the Mount Graham Red
Squirrel’s habitat and generally alleging that the challenged
permits will result in “substantial global emissions,” without
addressing those emissions’ link to the harms averred). Even
if Plaintiffs have identified qualifying injuries, they have not
plausibly alleged that, if EPA were ordered to revisit the
specific procedural errors they seek to challenge, it is
“substantially probable” that their injuries would be
ameliorated. Growth Energy, 5 F.4th at 29. Plaintiffs must
offer more to establish a justiciable case or controversy.
IV.
Plaintiff CBD also claims standing to pursue the ESA
claims in its own right as an organization, separate from
associational standing on behalf of its members. Like an
individual, an organization can establish standing by showing
“an actual or threatened injury in fact that is fairly traceable to
the defendant’s allegedly unlawful conduct and likely to be
redressed by a favorable court decision.” Am. Anti-Vivisection
Soc’y v. USDA, 946 F.3d 615, 618 (D.C. Cir. 2020) (internal
quotation marks omitted). An organization demonstrates a
sufficient injury in fact by alleging a “‘concrete and
demonstrable injury to the organization’s activities’ that is
‘more than simply a setback to the organization’s abstract

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social interests.’” Id. (quoting Havens Realty Corp. v.
Coleman, 455 U.S. 363, 379 (1982)). However, the
“expenditure of resources on advocacy is not a cognizable
Article III injury.” Turlock Irrigation Dist. v. FERC, 786 F.3d
18, 24 (D.C. Cir. 2015) (internal quotation marks omitted). We
hold that because the Center identifies no harm to its own
activities apart from its advocacy, it has failed to demonstrate
that it suffered the required injury and therefore lacks
organizational standing.
CBD alleges that BLM’s failure to engage in ESA
consultation has deprived CBD of information about the
challenged permits’ impacts on threatened species and habitats
that would have otherwise been disclosed in the final biological
opinion. As a result, to pursue its mission of “getting [species]
the ESA protection they need to survive,” the Center has had
to expend resources pursuing Freedom of Information Act
requests for relevant government data with which to advocate
for reforms to the ESA consultation process to better protect
climate-imperiled species. Hartl Decl. ¶ 14 (J.A. 583). Those
injuries are insufficient to support organizational standing.
The Center does not assert an injury to its non-advocacy
operations analogous to the harms to animal-rescue and
cruelty-prevention activities that supported organizational
standing in American Anti-Vivisection Society and People for
the Ethical Treatment of Animals v. U.S. Dep’t of Agriculture
(PETA), 797 F.3d 1087 (D.C. Cir. 2015). See also Action All.
of Senior Citizens v. Heckler, 789 F.2d 931, 937 (D.C. Cir.
1986) (finding standing where plaintiff organizations “rest[ed]
their claims on programmatic concerns, not on wholly
speculative or purely ideological interests in the agency’s
action”). In PETA, we emphasized that the challenged agency
inaction affected the organization’s public education program
because the agency’s failure to produce for birds the inspection

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reports the agency routinely generates for other animals whose
handling and care it regulates shifted to the plaintiff
organization the burden to “investigate and respond to
complaints about birds subjected to inhumane treatment,
and/or to obtain appropriate and necessary relief for these
animals.” 797 F.3d at 1095-96. In American Anti-Vivisection
Society, organizational standing rested on a program of public
education, including “How To Guides, webinars, and
informational pamphlets that are designed to help shelters and
care facilities tend to the needs of birds” left unprotected due
to the agency’s failure to promulgate statutorily required
standards for the humane treatment of birds in captivity. 946
F.3d at 619 (internal quotation marks omitted).
CBD’s asserted injuries, by contrast, are limited to issue
advocacy. It explains that it must work harder to gather
information and expend additional resources to lobby the
federal government, file rulemaking petitions, request
improved policies, and in other ways urge the government to
better protect endangered and threatened species and habitats.
Hartl Decl. ¶¶ 9-14 (J.A. 582-84). Unlike the organizations in
the decisions on which it relies, CBD does not identify
programmatic expenditures it must make to fill the gap left by
the Department of the Interior’s failure to analyze and propose
measures to ameliorate effects on endangered species of
climate change caused by the permitted oil drilling. Our
conclusion is bolstered by the Supreme Court’s recent decision
in FDA. v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, 602 U.S. 367
(2024), which described Havens Realty—the foundation of our
organizational injury precedents—as an “unusual case” and
cautioned against extending it beyond circumstances in which

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the challenged action “directly affected and interfered with [a
plaintiff’s] core business activities.” Id. at 395-96.
V.
For the foregoing reasons, we affirm the judgment of the
district court.
So ordered.

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