The NEPA mandate and federal regulation of the natural gas industry. [NEPA (National Environmental Policy Act)]

Utility regulators increasingly take responsibility for the [open quotes]extemalities[close quotes] associated with their decisions, meaning the economic and social costs related to rate decisions or other kinds of authorizations. Yet, when Congress adopted the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA), it intervened to ensure protection of the natural environment, not from abuses by the citizenry but from the activities of the federal government itself. Comprised of action forcing procedures, NEPA was designed to infuse the decisional processes of federal agencies with a broad awareness of the environmental consequences of their actions. NEPA encourages decisionmakers to counterbalance the organic statutory and political missions of their departments or agencies with a sensitivity to the ecological consequences of their directives and authorizations. This paper examines how the requirements of NEPA have fared in the environment of classical public utility regulation at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Commission proceedings did not evidence any widely held opinion that economic regulation of the gas industry is hostile to the NEPA process.