Credit: Amanda Brown“A Win for Progress: Murphy Can Continue His Green Initiatives” blares the happy headline of the Sierra Club’s quarterly newsletter sent to its 21,000 Garden State members, followed by a Cliffs Notes version of the “green initiatives” he was reelected to continue.
“We endorse Murphy” over Republican Jack Ciattarelli, writes Sierra Club’s political chair Karen Becker. For starters, Ciattarelli was a no-show for the group’s pre-election interview that Murphy attended and apparently aced. The interviewers were especially taken with Murphy’s “eagerness to partner with us in solidarity with our green initiatives.”
The article describes Murphy’s “green record” and his second-term agenda that promises more of the same: “… during his first term … established an Energy Master Plan, an environmental roadmap addressing climate concerns,” including a promise to create “an equitable green job workforce.”
So far, so good.
However, while Murphy’s “(energy) plan lacks a robust timeline … (during) October 2019 the Governor released the state’s first Climate Change Resilience Strategy, appointed the state’s first Chief Resilience Officer, established an Inter-agency Council on Climate Resilience, and directed the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) to develop … short- and long-term action plans addressing the impacts of climate change.”
In short, promises to plan “resilience,” joined with much bureaucratic shuffling of offices and officers with new job titles, convening of interagency councils, and urgent calls for “resilience” — whatever “resilience” means to this governor. You may recall Gov. Chris Christie’s empty sloganeering of “Jersey Strong” that he rode to an undeserved second term.
So it seems Murphy’s “green” amounts to more planning, which he announced shortly before Election Day, along with pledges to partner with the Sierra Club. Noticeably absent from the endorsement was any action taken by Murphy or his DEP during his first term that demonstrably cuts greenhouse-gas emissions — despite the catastrophic impacts heading our way as sea levels rise, soon to submerge large portions of shore communities from Hoboken to Atlantic City.
Meanwhile, a dozen gas pipelines and power plant projects burning gas piped directly from the fracking fields of Pennsylvania threaten to undo all these promised initiatives. If completed and allowed to operate, these fossil-fueled fossils of obsolete technology would increase CO2 emissions by 32 million metric tons per year.
To put this in context, “New Jersey’s total GHG emissions from all sources in 2015 were about 101 million metric tons … (T)hese new projects would increase total GHG emissions by approximately 30%, in clear conflict with the Paris Climate accord, New Jersey’s 2007 Global Warming Response and Air Pollution Control Act and the Murphy administration’s own stated policy in (Executive Order) 28” — as reported in “Fighting Climate Change in New Jersey: The Urgent Case for a Moratorium on all Fossil Fuel Projects,” written by a consortium of more than 50 environmental, grassroots and faith-based groups, including the Sierra Club, known as Empower NJ.
To put it bluntly, Murphy could have done a lot more to fulfill his lofty second-term promises during his first term as chief executive.
A glaring example of the governor’s reluctance to take decisive action in lieu of promised planning for a second term has engendered the Moratorium Monday Movement, which has deluged the State House with phone calls, faxes and emails calling upon Murphy to declare a moratorium on further permits to build or operate the fracking gas facilities coming our way.
Contrary to the misleading ads clogging the airways, natural gas is not a clean-burning or clean-transporting or clean-mining (fracking) fuel. It is not a renewable fuel. It is among the worst of the worst of greenhouse gases: Methane gas is 86 times worse than coal when measured over a 20-year lifecycle.
If ever completed and operated, those pipelines, compressor stations and power plants will make it impossible to achieve Murphy’s oft-touted goal of 100% renewable energy by 2050 and 80% reduction in greenhouse gases by 2030 as the Corzine-era Global Warming Response Act mandates.
Since Murphy has taken no action to stop these projects, did he really earn Sierra Club’s full-throated endorsement for a second term? His opponent was the Trump-leaning state legislator Ciattarelli whose most notable policy pronouncement was a ban on profanity in public, making Murphy an easy choice for the Sierra endorsement.
Questions also should be raised about DEP Commissioner Shawn LaTourette, a Murphy appointee plucked from the ranks of corporate law before becoming the state’s top enforcer of Murphy’s green agenda. So far, the signs are not encouraging.
For example, LaTourette was recently asked during an NJ Spotlight News TV interview how the DEP would spend the $170 million in Build Back Better funds dedicated to replacing lead-lined water pipes that poison thousands of New Jerseyans. His convoluted answer came down to this: He’ll use the fed’s money to do more “planning.”
We also got a look at the three new commissioners Murphy appointed to lead the Pinelands Protection Commission, replacing (among others) Ed Lloyd a long-serving and dedicated conservationist and a former professor of environmental litigation at Rutgers and Columbia University law schools.
One of Murphy’s nominees represented the Chemistry Council of New Jersey.
Not exactly an auspicious start for a second term.
To be sure, after environmental leaders threatened to condemn the governor’s rash act in a press conference in early December, the governor withdrew the chemical industry rep and agreed to reinstate Lloyd.
And on Dec. 22, while most New Jerseyans were distracted by holiday shopping, and the governor was vacationing in eco-friendly Costa Rica, LaTourette rejected a rule-making petition filed last summer by Empower NJ.
The petition called on the DEP to enact strict regulatory limits on greenhouse-gas emissions from fracking-gas pipelines and utility power plants and to impose a moratorium on permits for these climate-crashing facilities until those limits are in place.
LaTourette’s lengthy opinion denying the petition is a masterpiece of sophistry and obfuscation that goes out of its way to “to stick a finger in the eye of activists whom the DEP ridiculed as ‘simplistic,’” according to Bill Wolfe’s blog, WolfeNotes.com. The petition was filed last summer but wasn’t rejected until the governor won his second term.
One paragraph sums up the convoluted reasoning behind the rejection:
“Consistent Statewide climate policy development underway since January 29, 2018, has demonstrated that New Jersey’s response to the climate crisis is not a matter of environmental regulation alone; rather, it is a composite of concerted structural, economic, and societal change across sectors, aided by supportive regulatory reform where applicable. The complexity of achieving emissions reductions on the scale necessary does not lend to simplistic regulatory formulations as proposed by petitioners.”
I’ve read and reread this eye-crossing statement several times and still can’t follow the commissioner’s reasoning. Does he reject any incremental regulation of greenhouse-gas pollutants because it is not a total solution “across all sectors”? LaTourette is a lawyer, so he must know that to be effective a regulation does not need to be a total solution to be valid.
Whatever may be motivating him this confused and confusing statement deserves a loud chorus of “blah blah blah.”
Gov. Murphy, tear down this wall blocking effective regulation of the climate-busting projects headed our way. There’s still time, but not much.