Tag Archives: accountability

SpectraBusters moves to intervene on Sabal Trail et al.

No domestic need for the fracked methane, which Spectra Energy’s CEO has said it wants to export; no insurance despite Spectra’s track record of safety violations; environmental destruction of water and soil: for these and other reasons SpectraBusters, Inc. has filed a motion to intervene with all three parts of the fracked methane pipeline project including Sabal Trail, using a form of filing that other groups could copy.

300x222 All three dockets selected, in How to intervene, by John S. Quarterman, for SpectraBusters.org, 17 December 2014 How can eminent domain be conferred on Sabal Trail, where there is no benefit to the public, there is zero provision for disaster accountability, and no real attempt at a real environmental impact study? Along with the EPA, a taxpayer funded agency, we’d like answers to these questions that we have posed to FERC for the past year.

Here’s how you or your organization can file a motion to intervene.

Filed with FERC 24 December 2014 as Accession Number: 20141224-5069, “Motion to Intervene of SpectraBusters, Inc. under CP15-17, et. al..” Continue reading SpectraBusters moves to intervene on Sabal Trail et al.

Who funds FERC?

If you guessed the taxpayers, as I did, nope. On FERC’s own About FERC web page:

The Commission is funded through costs recovered by the fees and annual charges from the industries it regulates.

To make it even richer, the sentence before that reads:

There is no review of FERC decisions by the President or Congress, maintaining FERC’s independence as a regulatory agency, and providing for fair and unbiased decisions.

But FERC’s web page says nothing about FERC’s independence from the industries it regulates.

Here’s Investopedia’s definition of regulatory capture:

Regulatory capture happens when a regulatory agency, formed to act in the public’s interest, eventually acts in ways that benefit the industry it is supposed to be regulating, rather than the public.

Maybe that’s why Continue reading Who funds FERC?