The Biden administration on Monday scrapped a controversial Trump-era legal opinion that gutted protections for hundreds of species of migratory birds. 

In December 2017, Daniel Jorjani, then the top lawyer at the Department of the Interior and a former longtime adviser to the fossil fuel mogul Koch brothers, issued an interpretation of the 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA) that effectively legalized all unintentional migratory bird deaths, including those caused by chemical spills, oil and gas operations, power lines and wind turbines.

Jorjani argued that the law was only meant to prohibit the intentional hunting, capturing or killing of bird species, and that as long as a company or individual does not mean to kill birds, they are protected from prosecution. 

The move broke from decades of legal precedent, opened the door for gross negligence and dropped incentives for the industry to proactively mitigate often-foreseeable […]