USA - 'Obvious Violation Of Federal Law': FORTHCOMING LITIGATION COULD GUM UP AMERICA’S LARGEST-EVER OFFSHORE WIND FARM

• The Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) and The Heartland Institute requested that BOEM and the NMFS begin to revise an allegedly inadequate environmental review and associated North Atlantic Right Whale harassment authorizations within the next 60 days, or the organizations will go to court to challenge the agencies’ actions, an outcome which could possibly disrupt CVOW’s timeline.
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• “This letter officially puts BOEM on notice that CFACT is prepared to file suit in order to expose the agency’s clear violation of federal law in failing to protect the North Atlantic right whale,” Craig Rucker, CFACT’s president, said of his organization’s filing and its implications.

Pending legal challenges against the Biden administration could disrupt the timeline for construction of a Virginia offshore wind farm poised to be the largest in the U.S.

The Heartland Institute and the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) filed a 60 day notice of intent to sue the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) and the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), a subagency of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), on Monday, citing an allegedly deficient biological review underlying the agencies’ authorizations for construction teams to legally harass a number critically-endangered North Atlantic Right Whales. The two groups request that the agencies rescind the allegedly deficient review, known as a “biological opinion,” within 60 days and issue a revised number of harassment authorizations.

If the agencies choose to disregard the request and do not rework the number of authorized whale disturbances to align with a new assessment, the organizations will take to the courts to challenge the biological opinion, according to the notice’s text. The notice and the possibility of expensive, time-consuming litigation adds to the risks that Dominion Energy’s Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind (CVOW) project faces, according to CFACT.

“This letter officially puts BOEM on notice that CFACT is prepared to file suit in order to expose the agency’s clear violation of federal law in failing to protect the North Atlantic right whale. By refusing to consider the cumulative impact of the dozens of industrial offshore wind facilities, consisting of several thousand individual turbines planned for the East Coast, it adopted a piecemeal approach, which only considered each individual offshore wind project in isolation,” Craig Rucker, CFACT’s president, said of his organization’s filing and its implications. “This is clearly a ploy to artificially reduce the total impact of these projects on the North Atlantic Right Whale. This obvious violation of federal law was ignored by the oversight agencies but will not be tolerated by the courts.”

The notice asserts that the CVOW project’s biological opinion, issued by NMFS and adopted by BOEM, runs afoul of the Endangered Species Act primarily because the assessment does not adequately consider the cumulative impacts that other East Coast offshore wind projects will have on migrating North Atlantic Right Whales that travel near the other developments in addition to CVOW, according to its text.