Recently, our federal regulators gave a favorable environmental review to the Mountain Valley Pipeline, and are expected to do the same for the Atlantic Coast Pipeline later this week. This is not surprising, as we’ve known that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) serves more like a rubber-stamp for the gas industry than an environmental regulator. But now we know the degree of special interests behind decision-makers in this process is even worse than we thought, making it even more important to resist. NPR just released a deep-dive investigation of the ties between FERC and the energy industry. “It's hard to see where FERC ends and industry begins,” it writes. The agency serves as a one-way street into the fossil fuel industry, and is ridden with potential conflicts of interest, NPR found. Dozens of agency staff members have had to recuse themselves over the years while job-hunting at oil and gas companies. On top of this, the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) has been coordinating with Dominion behind the scenes. Dominion wants to build a compressor station for the Atlantic Coast Pipeline in Buckingham County — so it ghostwrote testimony and hand-delivered it to local Virginia regulators. Furthermore, the DEQ hired a contractor that works for Dominion to carry out part of its environmental review. The Atlantic Coast and Mountain Valley pipelines would threaten drinking water supplies, wrench land from homeowners, remove miles of mountain ridgetops, accelerate global warming, and destroy iconic views of the beautiful Appalachian Trail — yet none of the gas is necessary. We can and should push for clean, renewable energy projects instead. We need McAuliffe and the DEQ to stop corruption and REJECT the Atlantic Coast and Mountain Valley pipelines. Stay tuned for more about our on-the-ground efforts in coming weeks.