"U.S. Energy Regulator Still Advancing Obama-Era Climate Guidance"

"In what appeared to be a belated adoption of an Obama-era directive, the U.S. energy agency responsible for approving multibillion-dollar natural gas pipeline projects has directed companies to start disclosing potential climate change impacts.

On Wednesday, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission posted a new manual on environmental reporting, updating its guidance for the first time since 2002. The two-volume, 470-page handbook advises project developers to include in their applications potential greenhouse-gas emissions, a cause of global warming that President Barack Obama said the agency should start taking into account in reviews. A previous version of the manual doesn’t mentioned climate change.

The guidance comes just in time for President Donald Trump to potentially kill it. Trump has promised to roll back the environmental and climate policies imposed by his predecessor. Both he and newly appointed Environmental Protection Agency Chief Scott Pruitt have questioned the science behind global warming and whether humans are to blame."

Catherine Traywick reports for Bloomberg February 23, 2017.