Will FERC finally see a pipeline it doesn't love?
Fossil fuels' favorite regulatory agency has a new chairman who seems serious about climate change. The horror. The horror.
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Donald Trump never saw a rule he didn’t want to break so he stocked the federal regulatory agencies with political hacks from the very industries they were supposed to be regulating. The results were totally predictable—a rollback of anything that dared suggest that polluters be liable for the massive and endless stream of merde (everything sounds better when you say it in French) they pump into our air and rivers and steams.
Even before Trump, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), an extremely powerful independent agency established by Congress in 1977 to oversee the country’s transmission lines, pipelines, natural gas infrastructure, hydroelectric dams, electricity markets, and, by extension, the price of renewables and fossil fuels, was seriously FERCed up. (There, now that I’ve said it, we can move on.)
The agency was little more than a rubber stamp for the energy giants. I can’t find a single example of a project where FERC analyzed climate and environmental justice concerns before approving major interstate fossil fuel projects. It’s almost like their decision-making process was to gather the Koch brothers in a room with maps and have them throw darts to choose which black community to build giant transmission towers in and which Indian reservations to run a pipeline through.
There are signs that FERC is about to change thanks mainly to the commission’s new chair, Richard Glick, who has been the lone Democratic member of the commission since 2017. Last week, for the first time in its 44-year history, FERC assessed a natural gas pipeline project's contribution to climate change.
Republicans on the commission were shocked, shocked I tell you, that FERC weighed downstream greenhouse gas emissions related to a project operated by Northern Natural Gas Co., which had sought approval of a pipeline replacement running 87 miles between South Sioux City, Neb., and Sioux Falls, S.D. The agency ultimately approved the project after the assessment of its greenhouse gas emissions.
Glick added that the commission will continue to assess the full climate impacts of projects on a case-by-case basis until FERC institutes an umbrella greenhouse gas policy. He has also pressed the commission to take environmental justice into account when considering projects and has created a new senior position to coordinate that work. .
There are other encouraging signs that FERC is getting serious. In a 3-2 vote last month, the commission began what some legal experts are calling “a seemingly unprecedented” review of a proposed natural gas compressor station in Weymouth, which Massachusetts residents have been fighting for more than six years, and is already operational.
Activists have long opposed the compressor (which is kind of a pipeline flow booster) on the grounds that it is dangerous (compressors have been known to catch on fire and explode and this one is located in a densely populated area near schools, senior housing and a busy highway); it is near two state-designated “environmental justice” communities that already have a lot of nasty stuff; natural gas pipelines emit a lot of the greenhouse gas methane; and the demand for natural gas has lessened.
The fact that FERC would even entertain the thought of reviewing approval for an already operational utility has sent shock waves throughout the natural gas industry because of the potential precedent it could set.
FERC is also investigating whether any natural gas or electricity market violations occurred during the cold snap that left millions without power in Texas (although it doesn’t have much jurisdiction in Texas) and opened a new proceeding to study the effects of climate change on extreme weather and how it impacts electric reliability.
While commendable and righteous, all of this progressive to-ing and fro-ing has not amounted to much so far. FERC still hasn’t seen a pipeline it didn’t like but it’s making the right noises and, for the first time, it seems possible. What it has done for sure is galvanize an army of fossil fuel lobbyists and hacks who have descended on the Capitol Building like the Proud Boys on a mission from God to track down senators and representatives and neutralize them with offers of campaign cash.
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Dig Deeper
How a pipeline-loving agency could be the key to Biden’s climate plan
Why A Federal Order In The Weymouth Compressor Case Has The Natural Gas World Worried
FERC makes major shift on pipeline CO2 emissions
With Emissions in Mind, FERC to Reconsider Interstate Natural Gas Pipeline Approval Process
The results are in. Degrowth is a terrible environmental strategy.