Joe Barton: “as we do this energy debate on the floor today, we are going to have a number of California-specific amendments. We are…”

“as we do this energy debate on the floor today, we are going to have a number of California-specific amendments. We are going to have a California-specific amendment on price caps. We are going to have a California-specific amendment on the oxygenate refuel requirement on the Clean Air Act. It is only fair that we have one California-specific amendment that would actually do some good. The Hinshaw pipeline exemption was put into law in 1954 because there were a number of States that wanted to gather natural gas, they wanted to distribute natural gas, and they did not want to be subject to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or, at the time, the Federal Power Commission, regulation in terms of the low-pressure sales of their natural gas pipeline. So they put in the Hinshaw exemption. One State, one State of all the 50 States that have tried to create Hinshaw pipelines used this exemption to thwart the Natural Gas Act of 1934, and that State is the State of California. They made a policy decision that an interstate, that is a pipeline that is going between States, when it hit the California border, they changed the size of the diameter of the pipe so they could call it an intrastate pipeline not an interstate pipeline.”