The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has long been regarded by advocates of responsible energy development in Alaska as a special corner of the world where reason, sound legal judgment, and good ideas go to die.

And for good reason. No matter the administration, no matter the depth, length or quality of MMS environmental report, no matter the number of permits sought and secured, the Court has, for the better part of the past five years, consistently come down in favor of groups whose raison d’être is to impede, delay and outright deny Americans access to the energy resources they rightfully own.

And the bench has had plenty of occasions to build on that esteemed resume. Consider these stats from a column in Dec. 2008 by Institute for Energy Research president Tom Pyle, which ran in the San Francisco Chronicle:

According to the Department of the Interior, the number of suits filed in federal court to delay, defer or outright deny the development of domestic energy resources has grown more than 700 percent in the past decade; from 167 protests per year between 1997 and 2000, to 1,180 a year from then until now. And because petitioners don’t actually have to win the case to delay energy development ad infinitum, why would anyone stop?

Of course, seasons change from time to time, so do people, and in extreme cases, even the courts occasionally turn over a new leaf. Look no further than a decision rendered by the Ninth Circuit late last week on a series of leases being challenged by environmentalists in the Beaufort Sea. The Anchorage Daily News picks up on the story:

An appeals court has ruled that the federal government did not violate environmental law when it conducted a 2007 oil and gas lease sale in the Beaufort Sea off Alaska’s northern coast.

A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday affirmed a lower court decision that said the federal Minerals Management Service properly conducted Lease Sale 202.

You can download the full opinion – which was released to the public as a judicial memorandum – here. Most of it is legal gobbledygook, we’ll grant, but the language is sufficiently strong in some areas as to instill in the casual reader a distinct sense that the court found absolutely zero merit in the environmentalists’ tired old “you didn’t file a long enough report!” arguments. From the brief:

North Slope Borough and the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission challenge the Minerals Management Service’s decision not to prepare a supplemental environmental impact statement for a proposed oil and gas lease sale on a tract of the outer-continental shelf in the Beaufort Sea. The parties are familiar with the facts; we need not recount them. The district court found that North Slope failed to show that MMS acted arbitrarily or capriciously. We agree, and affirm.

Bam! That’s a serious judicial smackdown, is it not? Still, Beaufort’s neighbor to the west – the Chukchi Sea – hasn’t been so lucky. Same issues that held up the Beaufort, and were categorically dismissed by the Ninth Circuit, continue to wrack Shell’s operations in the Chukchi, as the ADN piece makes plain:

Shell also holds leases in the Chukchi Sea off Alaska’s northwest coast, where a Washington, D.C., appeals court ruled in April that the MMS under the Bush administration did not properly study the environmental effect of expanding oil and gas drilling on the environment and marine life. That lawsuit was brought by three environmental groups and the village of Point Hope.

Maybe we should ask the Ninth Circuit to assert primacy over the case from DC and render another verdict like it did for the Beaufort? And then maybe we can all get together, mount a phalanx of unicorns and fly to Atlantis for a lunchtime lobster roll.

What a day that’d be! You fly, we’ll buy.