Commissioner Richard Glick Statement
October 15, 2020
Docket No. CP20-21-000
Order: C-2
I dissent in part from today’s order[1] because it fails to comply with our obligations under section 7 of the Natural Gas Act[2] (NGA) and the National Environmental Policy Act[3] (NEPA). The Commission once again refuses to consider the consequences its actions have for climate change. Although neither the NGA nor NEPA permit the Commission to ignore the climate change implications of constructing and operating the Louisiana Connector Amendment Project (Project), that is precisely what the Commission is doing here.
That is a shame. As I have previously explained, the Commission’s stubborn refusal to take climate change seriously has forced me to vote against NGA section 7 certificates that I might otherwise support. Today’s order is the perfect example. The Environmental Assessment (EA) discloses that constructing the Project will emit a total of 530 tons of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions while its annual operation will emit 356,053 tons of GHGs.[4] I believe that, based on our current knowledge, neither those GHG emissions nor their contribution to climate change is significant. Accordingly, had the Commission bothered to perform the necessary analysis, this is a certificate that I could have supported.
But neither today’s order nor the EA says a word about the significance of the Project’s GHG emissions or their contribution to climate change. Prior to issuing a section 7 certificate, the Commission must find both that a proposed project is needed, and that, on balance, its potential benefits outweigh its potential adverse impacts.[5] I simply cannot fathom how the Commission can claim to make that determination without meaningfully considering a project’s contribution to climate change. By the same token, asserting that the Project will have no significant environmental impacts while at the same time refusing to assess the significance of its impact on the most important environmental issue of our time is the opposite of reasoned decisionmaking. Instead, it is just the latest example of how this Commission is bound and determined to act like climate change does not exist.
For these reasons, I respectfully dissent in part.
[1] Port Arthur Pipeline, LLC, 173 FERC ¶ 61,073 (2020).
[2] 15 U.S.C. § 717f(c).
[3] National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, 42 U.S.C. §§ 4321 et seq.
[4] Louisiana Connector Amendment Project EA at 35-37 & tbls. 4 and 5.
[5] See Sierra Club v. FERC, 867 F.3d 1357, 1373 (D.C. Cir. 2017) (explaining that section 7 of the NGA requires the Commission to balance “‘the public benefits [of a proposed pipeline] against the adverse effects of the project,’ including adverse environmental effects” (quoting Myersville Citizens for a Rural Cmty. v. FERC, 783 F.3d 1301, 1309 (D.C. Cir. 2015)).