The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit has granted requests from EPA and energy industry groups to transfer litigation over a biological opinion (BiOp) assessing the agency's Clean Water Act (CWA) cooling water intake rule from a federal district court and consolidate it with a suit over the rule pending in the appellate court. The decision, announced in an April 14 order, is a loss for environmentalists that had urged the court to allow their suit over the adequacy of the BiOp to proceed separately in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The BiOp is an assessment conducted of the CWA rule's impacts by the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), and advocates say the study is flawed. The order is available on InsideEPA.com. See page 2 for details. (Doc. ID: 180685)
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