Opinion ID: 539779
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Misappropriation Claims

Text: 48 Petitioners Kern River and Mojave allege that WyCal's proposed pipeline route is predominantly a combination of their proposed routes and thus takes a free ride on their earlier gathering of engineering and environmental data. They argue that the Commission should have deprived WyCal of any advantage from this alleged misappropriation either by ordering WyCal to reimburse them for this work or by staying its OEC application until their traditional certificates were issued. The Commission held these allegations to be outside the scope of its expertise and declined to rule on them, as it had in the past in similar cases. 12 Wyoming-California Pipeline Co., 45 FERC at 61,685. It suggested they pursue their remedies in the courts, which it believed were a more appropriate forum. Id.; Mojave Pipeline Co. (Order on Rehearing), 46 FERC p 61,311 at 61,932 (1989). We find this decision well within the Commission's discretion, if not compelled by law. 49 Petitioners' argument is that in determining the public convenience and necessity of a project, the Commission may not disregard the alleged violations of other laws such as copyright. But in NAACP v. FPC, 425 U.S. 662, 96 S.Ct. 1806, 48 L.Ed.2d 284 (1976), the Supreme Court held that general public interest standards such as those in the Natural Gas Act and the Federal Power Act 13 did not give the Commission authority, in performing its regulatory functions, to weigh evidence that a regulatee engaged in unlawful racial discrimination in its employment relations. Id. at 669-71, 96 S.Ct. at 1811-12. The broad public interest standards in the Commission's enabling legislation are limited to the purposes that Congress had in mind when it enacted this legislation. Id. at 670, 96 S.Ct. at 1812. This rule helps confine an agency's authorization to those areas in which the agency fairly may be said to have expertise. Bob Jones University v. United States, 461 U.S. 574, 611, 103 S.Ct. 2017, 2038, 76 L.Ed.2d 157 (1983) (Powell, J., concurring). 50 In NAACP v. FPC the Court identified the principal purpose of the Federal Power Act and Natural Gas Act as being to encourage the orderly development of plentiful supplies of electricity and natural gas at reasonable prices. 425 U.S. at 670, 96 S.Ct. at 1811. It acknowledged the existence of other subsidiary purposes, id., which it said included conservation, environmental, and antitrust issues, id. at 670 n. 6, 96 S.Ct. at 1812 n. 6. Indeed, this court as early as 1956 had said that the Commission must consider claims that a Sec. 7 certificate would cause anticompetitive effects. City of Pittsburgh v. FPC, 237 F.2d 741, 754 (D.C.Cir.1956); compare California v. FPC, 369 U.S. 482, 484-85, 82 S.Ct. 901, 903, 8 L.Ed.2d 54 (1962) (Commission must stay licensing proceedings to allow courts to dispose of antitrust claims). 51 That Congress should have had environmental and conservation factors in mind in establishing the Commission seems entirely plausible, as the enterprises licensed by the Commission necessarily and typically have dramatic natural resource impacts. Antitrust concerns may be less obviously inevitable (and therefore less likely to have been within Congress's intentions), but the natural gas and electricity enterprises under the Commission's wing typically enjoy some degree of natural monopoly. As regulation and antitrust law are complementary responses to monopoly (ways of increasing the chances that consumers will receive goods at the equivalent of competitive prices), a regulatory eye on such concerns will commonly be useful. By contrast, although petitioners characterize WyCal's behavior as unfair competitive practices, Joint Brief for Petitioners Kern River and Mojave at 29, in an attempt to make the analogy to antitrust stronger, all their claims either sound in copyright or are substantially related to copyright, 14 a field very distinct from Congress's main purposes in the Natural Gas Act and in which the Commission could never be expected to develop expertise. (Copyright is usually grouped with patent and trademark law. See 28 U.S.C. Sec. 1338 (granting federal district courts exclusive jurisdiction over copyright and patent claims as well as concurrent original jurisdiction over substantial and related unfair competition claims).) 52 Indeed, we really do not see how the contrary rule could work. Would the agency have to decide whether the regulatee actually violated any federal law? If so, it would have to investigate and adjudicate questions under numerous statutes on which it had no expertise. Or would it merely determine whether the regulatee had done something arguably in conflict with the policy behind another statute? Here the regulatee could be disadvantaged even though it had actually done nothing in violation of law. 53 We think it plain the Commission had no duty to address these issues, assuming arguendo it had authority to do so.IV. Environmental Issues 54 California contends that FERC has not fully complied with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), 42 U.S.C. Secs. 4321 et seq. Its attack is in the blunderbuss style, but three points deserve express treatment. The most interesting is the argument that the Commission could not have balanced the adverse environmental effects against the need for the project because under the OEC procedures it makes no particularized inquiry into the economic benefits of the pipeline. Two of our cases speak of a NEPA requirement that responsible decisionmakers ... fully advert[ ] to the environmental consequences of a proposed action and decide[ ] that the public benefits ... outweigh[ ] the[ ] environmental costs. Illinois Commerce Comm'n v. ICC, 848 F.2d 1246, 1259 (D.C.Cir.1988); Jones v. District of Columbia Redevelopment Land Agency, 499 F.2d 502, 512 (D.C.Cir.1974). Though the Commission engaged in an individualized consideration and balancing of environmental factors, as required by Calvert Cliffs' Coord. Comm. v. United States Atomic Energy Comm'n, 449 F.2d 1109, 1115 (D.C.Cir.1971), its evaluation of the nonenvironmental aspects of the pipeline was not individualized. As to them the Commission stated that the interests of the public articulated in our adoption of the optional certificate process [i.e., Order No. 436] outweigh, on balance, the relatively insubstantial environmental harm which will result from a properly mitigated WyCal pipeline. Mojave Pipeline Co., 46 FERC at 61,168 (emphasis added). 55 California's insistence on a particularized assessment of non-environmental features finds no support in the statutory language. See NEPA Sec. 102, 42 U.S.C. Sec. 4332 (requiring the agency to consider a variety of environmental, not economic, factors). Its theory would disable any number of efforts at streamlining the resolution of regulatory issues that have nothing to do with the environment. An agency's primary duty under the NEPA is to take[ ] a 'hard look' at environmental consequences. Kleppe v. Sierra Club, 427 U.S. 390, 410 n. 21, 96 S.Ct. 2718, 2730 n. 21, 49 L.Ed.2d 576 (1976). We will not extend that statute well beyond its realm so as to create unnecessary conflicts with others. 56 We recognize that in the OEC context the Commission's generic affirmative finding may sweep in an occasional project that is, quite apart from environmental factors, only marginally desirable. If the environmental features were a significant net negative, a project not in the overall public interest could slip through. But the mere possibility of such a project, and of the Commission's failing to spot it as a loser, is not enough to justify our burying the Commission in red tape. Errors are always possible; it is not our province to inflict such burdens on the system in pursuit of an illusory perfection. See Strycker's Bay Neighborhood Council v. Karlen, 444 U.S. 223, 100 S.Ct. 497, 62 L.Ed.2d 433 (1980); Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Corp. v. NRDC, 435 U.S. 519, 98 S.Ct. 1197, 55 L.Ed.2d 460 (1978). 57 Second, California charges that FERC committed a procedural foul by issuing WyCal a conditional OEC before the environmental hearing was completed. While it is generally true that NEPA procedures must insure that environmental information is available to public officials and citizens before decisions are made and before actions are taken, 40 CFR Sec. 1500.1(b) (emphasis added), we held in Illinois Commerce Comm'n that this did not prevent an agency from making even a final decision so long as it assessed the environmental data before the decision's effective date. 848 F.2d at 1259; see also 40 CFR Sec. 1506.1(a). Here, the Commission's non-environmental approval was expressly not to be effective until the environmental hearing was completed. See WyCal Declaratory Order, 44 FERC at 61,013; Wyoming-California Pipeline Co., 45 FERC at 61,676. Similarly, the Commission's deferral of decision on specific mitigation steps until the start of con struction,, when a more detailed right-of-way would be known, was both eminently reasonable and embraced in the procedures promulgated under NEPA. See 40 CFR Secs. 1505.2(c), 1505.3. 58 Third, California objects that the Commission failed to assess cumulative impacts from successive similar pipelines. As the proceeding was intended to treat all three then pending proposals for pipelines from Wyoming to the Enhanced Oil Recovery market, Mojave Pipeline Company, 42 FERC at 62,003, such impacts were a theoretical possibility. But the ALJ and the Commission found that the EOR market would not support more than one interstate pipeline, see Mojave Pipeline Co. (Initial Decision on Environmental Issues), 45 FERC p 63,005 at 65,022, 65,036 (1988); Mojave Pipeline Co., 46 FERC at 61,162, a prediction California does not dispute. 15 As successive pipelines were not reasonably foreseeable, there was no need to consider the cumulative impacts of more than one pipeline. Moreover, the Commission included conditions in the final OEC that would allow it to mitigate the cumulative effects from construction of two pipelines. Id. 59