The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals has just thrown out another federal permit for Dominion Energy’s Atlantic Coast Pipeline.

In a crushing and unanimous 50-page decision, a three-judge panel of the Fourth Circuit vacated the Fish and Wildlife Service Biological Opinion and Incidental Take Statement, which had given Dominion permission to construct the pipeline despite the threatened harm to four endangered species along the route.

This is just the latest blow to Dominion’s $8 billion corporate boondoggle. Every federal permit that has been challenged in the Fourth Circuit for both the Atlantic Coast and Mountain Valley Pipelines has been thrown out by the court.

Every single one.

And this is the second time the court has vacated Fish and Wildlife permits for the Atlantic Coast Pipeline. An earlier permit issued by FWS in 2017 was vacated by the court in May 2018 as having been arbitrary and capricious. That decision and others led to the suspension of construction activities in December 2018 across the entire length of the pipeline route.

One year later, the reissued permit has now met the same fate. And the court did not mince words:

“We agree with Petitioners that the FWS again acted arbitrarily.”

The latest decision came in a case brought by Defenders of Wildlife, the Sierra Club and the Virginia Wilderness Committee, which are represented by the Southern Environmental Law Center. They challenged the FWS failure to protect four endangered species: the rusty patch bumble bee, clubshell, Indiana Bat and Madison Cove Isopod.

Read the entire article at Medium Blog by Jonathan Sokolow on July 26, 2019