For about a month now, we've been tracking the rollbacks of various environmental regulations

and at the same time the fast tracking of permits for new oil and gas projects.

What we've seen doing this reporting is that there's this sort of two-part lever happening.

You've got the EPA working on rollbacks at the same time that the Federal Energy Regulatory

Commission, other is known as FERC, is working on rubber stamping any oil and gas project

that crosses its desk.

FERC is an almost impossible institution to write about or even think about and that's

kind of by design.

It's incredibly complex and basically sort of a black box.

Even when they do publish their reasoning behind different decisions, it's so hard to

parse that it's almost impossible to understand and that's from someone who reads energy policy

stuff all the time.

I can only imagine what a layperson would do with the FERC website.

Those kinds of things are what a new lawsuit against FERC is trying to undo.

The lawsuit was filed in the DC District Court by Food and Water Watch and Berkshire Environmental

Action against the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and it charges that the National

Body that regulates new gas infrastructure projects is failing to consider the climate

impacts of the pipelines and related infrastructure that it's tasked with reviewing.

Now this is important because a few years ago, legislation was passed that requires FERC

to consider climate change impacts of the projects that it's approving or not.

Except FERC hasn't really done that.

They've restricted emissions reviews to just looking at the construction fees of the

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