On August 3, 2021, a panel of U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit judges unanimously ruled that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) did not go far enough in considering environmental justice and climate impacts in its 2019 approval of the Rio Grande and Texas liquified natural gas (LNG) projects.[1] When the commission did its environmental review of the projects, it found that it could not determine the impacts the projects would have on the climate crisis because there is no universal methodology for calculating the impacts. However, petitioners said that FERC could use the social cost of carbon or another generally accepted metric to evaluate the impacts of the projects. In his dissent of FERC 2019 approval, Chairman Richard Glick, who was a commissioner at the time, argued that under federal law, the commission was not allowed to "assume away" the impacts of these projects and that the commission's assessment was inadequate.

The judges found that FERC's analyses of the projects' impacts on climate change and low-income or minority communities in Cameron County, Texas, were "deficient" under the National Environmental Policy Act, the Natural Gas Act, and the Administrative Procedure Act. The panel did not vacate FERC's approval of the projects, though. Instead, the court's decision remands the decision back to the commission to review again.

[1] https://www.cadc.uscourts.gov/internet/opinions.nsf/1F97B59429C7D4F6852587260052CC71/$file/20-1045-1908759.pdf