New England Natural Gas Pipeline Saga Continues Its Bureaucratic Groundhog Day
https://www.rstreet.org/2019/03/08/new-england-natural-gas-pipeline-saga-continues-its-bureaucratic-groundhog-day/...In an earlier episode, we read how Obama-era federal guidance on climate change is still operating in the U.S. court system, even after the Trump administration rescinded that guidance. In this episode we discover how new life was given to a 124-mile proposed Constitution pipeline from Pennsylvania to New York thanks to an appeals court decision about a different project on the other side of the country.
Still there?
The issue on the West Coast concerned hydropower dams, and FERC oversees both natural gas and hydropower infrastructure. It seems the states of California and Oregon and the large utility PacifiCorp were engaged in a conspiracy of sorts to place any state-level decision on dam decommissioning into a legal limbo that could last forever unless courts intervene.
The states got away with it by asking PacifiCorp to continually defer, for almost a decade, the Clean Water Act’s statutory deadline to convey a state water-quality certification by withdrawing and then resubmitting a water-quality certification each year. FERC cannot issue a federal license until state water certification takes place, which has mired the project in a kind of bureaucratic Groundhog Day situation.
In January, the U.S. Appeals Court for the D.C. Circuit decided in the case Hoopa Valley Tribe v. FERC that it had finally had enough, stating that the one-year deadline must be adhered to. This opened the door for FERC to look again at the Constitution pipeline, because basically the New York Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) behaved in a similar manner before ultimately denying Constitution’s application in April 2016. FERC had rejected rehearing Constitution’s request for a permit until the Hoopa Valley case. But on Feb. 28, it told the D.C. Circuit it will now reconsider Constitution’s request....
