WolfeNotes.com

Is The Honeymoon Over Yet?

The following is the Biden Administration’s official scientific, legal, and regulatory assessment of the recent IPCC Report:

On August 9, 2021, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a new report detailing observations of a rapidly changing climate in every region globally. This report does not present sufficient cause to supplement the EIS, at this time. See Stand Up for California! v. United States Dep’t of the Interior, 994 F.3d 616, 628 (D.C. Cir. 2021). The report as well as additional analysis of climate change may be a significant consideration in the Department’s decisions regarding oil and gas leasing programs in the future.

Those astonishing findings are found on page 7 of the Record of Decision for Gulf of Mexico Outer Continental Shelf Oil and Gas Lease Sale 257, approving federal leasing of over 78 million acres of the Gulf of Mexico for fossil fuel exploration.

If the IPCC Report – which essentially projects the end of human civilization – does not provide “sufficient cause” to stop the expansion of fossil extraction, what would it take?

Exactly what “cause” would be “sufficient”? How much science and data does it take? (and keep in mind that, in this case, the Biden administration is not talking about “sufficient cause” to justify the phase out of fossil, just stopping the expansion.)

And the regulatory application of this finding was merely for the NEPA basis for updating an EIS – not to support a permit or lease denial or revocation, which would require an even higher regulatory and scientific burden of proof to be “sufficient cause”!

In addition to finding the IPCC Report insufficient and neglecting to enforce the Biden Executive Order 1408, the Biden Administration effectively ignored the massive wildfires in the west and hurricanes and floods in the east. The Biden Administration found:

There are no new circumstances, information, or changes in the proposed action or its impacts that require supplementation of the 2018 GOM Supplemental EIS.

No new circumstances! No new information! No changes in impacts! Imagine that!

And the Biden administration did not even unequivocally commit to relying on the IPCC Report in future decisions regarding oil and gas leasing, noting that the Report merely “may be” relied on instead of “will be”,  with a date certain commitment, not some vague “future” time:

may be a significant consideration … in the future.

I am indebted to an article in Jacobin for learning of these findings, which should be page 1 news in every main stream media outlet in the country, because they expose the Biden climate policy as pure rhetoric – at best, totally inadequate, or, more critically, as I’ve written, a fraud.

Why are the beltway environmental groups still praising Biden? Why aren’t they organizing massive protests?

Thankfully, some environmental groups are at least challenging this legally: (from the brief)

Lease Sale 257 will result in the production of up to 1.12 billion barrels and 4.4 trillion cubic feet of fossil fuels over the next 50 years. The combustion of these fossil fuels for energy and transportation is the main human activity that emits carbon dioxide and contributes to a warming climate. The lease sale will thus contribute substantially to greenhouse gas pollution that, if not curbed, will exacerbate the climate crisis and burdens on communities in the Gulf of Mexico, which are already suffering from climate warming impacts like rising seas and worsening storms.

Here’s the larger story: (Jacobin):

With the help of the nonprofit public interest organization Earthjustice, several environmental and Gulf groups have now launched a lawsuit against the administration to stop the Gulf lease sale. The complaint argues that the environmental analysis behind the lease sale is based on outdated and arbitrary science, in violation of federal law.

“We’ve been very patient with his administration,” says Hallie Templeton, deputy legal director for Friends of the Earth, one of the environmental groups involved in the litigation. “The honeymoon’s over. It’s now September, they’ve been in office for eight months. It’s time for them to show that they have priorities and are meaningfully going to move in the right direction.”

By way of comparison with the “Honeymoon” metaphor, the Murphy Administration has been in office for 4 YEARS – a lot more than Biden’s 8 months – and done nothing to regulate or reduce greenhouse gas emissions, yet NJ’s Green Mafia and media continue to cheerlead.

When will mainstream media reporters get into the regulatory weeds and report this story?

It should be a prominent part of every story on climate and every story on Biden climate, energy and infrastructure plans.

Diamond Creek fire ( 7/27/17)  on the border of the Pasayten Wilderness, from Hart’s Pass in Okanogan National Forest

No wakeup calls. No lessons learned. No real reforms.

The Worship of Mammon

After Ida – just like after Sandy – it’s business as usual in Trenton (see:

• We’re All Okies Now – The Dustbowl As Metaphor For Global Warming Crisis

No wakeup calls. No lessons learned. No real reforms.

I wrote a letter to Legislators I have worked with for years recommending real reforms, and they are so deep in denial that they don’t even give me the dignity of a response.

But lots of self serving press releases; “bold” tweets; empty platitudes paraded around in “serious” Op-Ed’s; window dressing gestures; and cheerleading by the usual Neoliberal sycophants.

Lots of diversionary press stories and apologetics (hey – one should never “cast aspersions”!) – with no focus on the root causes and real science based solutions.

Lots of human interest stories about heroic resilience, “NJ Strong”, and bold political leadership – voluntary private local efforts displace government responsibility.

Lots of scientists and “experts” downplaying problems and dancing gently around “policy issues” as they effectively unwittingly manufacture paralyzing uncertainty in their cowardly equivocations.

The land grant public universities abandon their independent, public interest, and critical role and instead promote toothless and knowingly failed voluntary local “solutions” that present absolutely no threat to the political status quo, corporate power, or development and financial interests.

Lots of government abdication.

(And we warned you: (NJ Spotlight)

Bill Wolfe, a retired DEP policy analyst and the current author of an environmental blog, said the comments “reflect an astonishing abdication of DEP’s regulatory responsibilities,” particularly coming from an administration that claims to be a leader in battling climate change.

“DEP must regulate to achieve deep emissions reductions and reduce risks as clearly reflected by an overwhelming scientific consensus,” Wolfe said. “Delay only makes matters worse.”

Lots of well fed Foundation and corporate funded faux “environmental leaders” and boutique activists providing political cover and lying to the public.

Lots of corporate spin and business community concerns about the costs of reforms and impacts on the economy.

And lots of NJ Spotlight stenography of those corporate lies.

Lots of opportunist media mouthpieces, who desperately seek their names in the paper at all costs, not matter what drivel they are spouting.

Lots of empty virtue signaling and identity politics, which intentionally divert from the substance to give politicians false praise and DEP a pass.

Lots of denial and flat out lies and propaganda.

We’re doomed and we really deserve it.

Diogenes

After the dust settled on Hurricane Katrina’s deadly devastation of New Orleans, the news media disclosed the fact that the levees failed due, in part, to the fact that they were designed and constructed to meet lax standards by the US Army Corps of Engineers.

As a result of the public outrage that ensued, the USACoE levee standards were strengthened and upgraded to protect against a Category 3 storm.

That is not adequate, but it improved protections over the status quo.

We have a very similar situation now unfolding in the deadly Hurricane Ida flooding, which was exacerbated by historic failures of NJ’s flood protections laws and DEP regulations.

As a result of these flaws:

• thousands of people live in dangerous flood hazard areas and don’t know it.
• people are unknowingly buying homes in hazardous locations and putting their families and financial futures at risk.
• billions of dollars of property located in dangerous flood hazard areas is not insured.
• developers are being allowed to build in hazardous locations and pass the costs on to the public.
• we are wasting billions of dollars on fatally flawed “resilience” projects that are “antiquated” and designed to fail because they are designed to meet “obsolete” DEP regulatory standards that do not reflect climate science.

The current DEP regulations do not consider climate change impacts and risks.

Gov. Murphy’s promised DEP climate regulations have been stalled for 4 years, despite the fact that DEP has “emergency rulemaking” powers and could adopt regulations immediately.

In response to this inaction, I fired off this request to legislators:

Dear Chairman Smith and Senators:

In light of the most recent round of catastrophic flooding, I strongly urge you to hold oversight hearings and enact legislation to address the following “significant deficiencies” in current NJ law and regulation:

1. Amend the following statutory law to eliminate the 100 year design flood and address climate science and projected storm intensity:

58:16A-55.2. Structure or alteration within area subject to inundation by 100 year design flood of nondelineated stream; approval; conditions 

2. Amend the following statutory law to eliminate the “right to rebuild”:

58:16A-55.1. Repair or rebuilding of lawful preexisting structure within flood hazard area

3. Amend the following statutory law to eliminate preference for private property rights over public safety and the public interests: (Flood Hazard Area Control Act):

“No such approval by the department shall impair or affect any property rights otherwise existing which might be invaded by the construction or maintenance of any such structure or alteration. “

4. Conduct oversight of DEP regulations to reform, at a minimum, the above regulatory provisions that implement the above statutory flaws and the following “significant deficiencies” identified by FEMA:

“To highlight, FEMA finds that the abandonment of the nonstructural stormwater management in design and the absence of restrictions in the increase in runoff volume post-development to be significant deficiencies.

FEMA is also concerned that the proposed rule does not consider future conditions of increasingly intense precipitation that is expected with climate change. 

The use of the term Green Infrastructure will not offset the proposed changes to the nonstructural stormwater management strategies and the multiple missed opportunities to reduce riverine and urban flooding impacts.”

I appreciate your prompt and favorable consideration of this request.

I am available to respond to any questions you may have.

Respectfully

Bill Wolfe

We’ll keep you posted on the response by Legislators – but I’m not holding my breath.

Ditto media coverage by NJ news media, especially NJ Spotlight.

And I didn’t even mention the need for a more aggressive and legislative mandate for “strategic retreat”.

Legislature Must Repeal 100 Year Storm and “Right To Rebuild” Flood Damaged Structures

DEP Must Update Flood Hazard Regulations And Maps To Consider Climate Change

After another cheerleading Op-Ed and set of misleading stories today by NJ Spotlight that miss the point and – by citing FEMA standards – divert attention from NJ DEP regulatory failures, I thought I’d provide some legislative text to improve the press coverage and stop the cheerleading by environmental groups.

If Gov. Murphy and DEP Commissioner LaTourette are serious about “resilience”, protecting the public, and adapting to climate change, they must make the following reforms immediately.

NJ Spotlight Again Diverts From Flawed Or Non-Existent DEP Climate Plans And Regulations

Focus On FEMA Diverts From DEP and Misses The Mark

[Update: 9/19/21 – So called “Resilience” (aka “flood mitigation”) projects not only failed in Jersey City (as discussed below). Hoboken is another major example of failure: (Fund for a Better Waterfront)

Since Superstorm Sandy hit the region nine years ago, Hoboken, aided with a $230 million federal grant, has made a concerted effort to implement a series of flood mitigation measures. New parks on the western side of town include stormwater detention systems. Rain gardens and bioswales have been constructed throughout town. Three wet weather pumping stations, costing tens of millions, have been built since 2010. Yet what has been completed to date was overwhelmed by Ida, which put parts of town under several feet of water, flooding basements and causing untold damage. ~~~ end update]

NJ Spotlight political reporter David Cruz – who I previously praised for opening Pandora’s Box on climate regulations and the “resilience” sham – did a followup story.

Sadly, that story put the final nail in closing Pandora’s box, following corporate PR efforts by PSE&G and efforts by the Murphy administration to divert attention and bury any story about the administration’s actual policy and that would expose the actual regulatory record and fatal flaws in NJ’s billion dollar funded “resilience” projects.

Last night, Cruz ran a followup piece on NJ TeeVee.

Despite the facts I provided to him, the narrative thrust of his new take on the issue is that the problem is not the “obsolete” and “failed” “resilience” projects he originally reported on in Jersey City.

Instead, Cruz now reports that the problem is really a plethora of very good “resilience plans” that just have not been funded!, see:

• No Shortage of Resiliency Plans In NJ, Just Funding

This is completely false.

Cruz reported on a hodgepodge of local and private groups voluntary plans for specific narrow purposes. Some were not even “plans”, but the equivalent of press releases. These “plans” are all fatally flawed, not because they were not funded, but because they are based on obsolete or lax DEP regulatory standards (i.e. amount and intensity of rainfall, volume and rate of runoff, flood hazard maps, storm surge and flood elevations, etc).

(it’s actually good that these local voluntary piecemeal “resilience plans” were never funded because they were designed to fail – read on)

The real unreported “Pandora’s box” story is:

The planning and regulation of resilience is a State responsibility, under federal and NJ State laws. Here is just one example: (link)

58:16A-50. Short title; declaration of policy

a. This act shall be known and may be cited as the “Flood Hazard Area Control Act.” is in the interest of the safety, health, and general welfare of the people of the State that legislative action be taken to empower the Department of Environmental Protection to delineate and mark flood hazard areas, to authorize the Department of Environmental Protection to adopt land use regulations for the flood hazard area, to control stream encroachments, to coordinate effectively the development, dissemination, and use of information on floods and flood damages that may be available, to authorize the delegation of certain administrative and enforcement functions to county governing bodies and to integrate the flood control activities of the municipal, county, State and Federal Governments.

DEP is the lead agency delegated authority to develop and enforce those plans though regulations.

The State of NJ has no “resiliency plan”.

The DEP has abdicated its statutory responsibility by delegating that planning to local governments and/or outsourcing and privatizing that planning to DEP funded private groups.

DEP has abandoned their regulatory role – the Murphy DEP has not adopted a dingle climate regulation (for greenhouse gas emissions “mitigation” or climate impact “adaptation”).

I told Cruz all that. I also told him that NJ Spotlight was intentionally missing the story and that their coverage was being corruptly influenced by politics and donors.

Cruz responded with a personal attack:

Bill.

You don’t know me. If you think that I’m writing a press release for a donor, then it’s best that you don’t get to know me. For all your public mouthing off on social media, I would think you’d have something intelligent to say. So far, a lot of bluster. Thanks for not much.

You don’t know how journalism and journalists work.

I don’t know where you developed the notion of funders getting involved in stories.

It’s a fantasy. I was trying to figure out if you were an activist or a gadfly.

You’ve answered my question.

I fired back this:

Dave – Gadfly? I’ve written and worked on dozens of DEP regulations and worked in the field for 35 years (at a policy level, with Gov.’s Offices back to Tom Kean). I was a media critic before Chomsky’s “Manufacturing Consent”. NJ Spotlight (and Tom Johnson when he was at the Star Ledger) used to quote me all the time. So did Ed Rogers of NJN. I even had a column at NJ.com.

If you deny any role of funders in stories, you are naive beyond repair.

Self censorship by journalists reflects the boundaries they know exist, and those boundaries are political (not fact based) and part of those politics is the desire of funders.

You surely know all this.

Here’s my response, in detail:

A Note To NJ Spotlight On Cheerleading Versus Journalism

http://www.wolfenotes.com/2021/09/a-note-to-nj-spotlight-on-cheerleading-versus-journalism/

But Mr. Cruz is not the only problem at NJ Spotlight – the corruption is systemic.

Another example of this lack of accountability and diversion from DEP and regulatory flaws is today’s NJ Spotlight story by Andrew Lewis:

• Another flood brings same question to Manville: Stay or go?

That story not only ignores DEP’s planning and regulatory role, it buries the lead on fatal flaws with FEMA flood mapping in this quote, several paragraphs into the story:

“We don’t have flood insurance,” Carl said. When he and his wife bought the house in 2019, they learned that the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s flood zone ended just short of their house, running through the center of their backyard. But that worried them little. “We knew about Lost Valley, so we knew there was a chance of flooding, but everybody said it was a one-in-ten-thousand chance.”

Obviously, FEMA’s flood plain maps were wrong. And DEP’s flood plain maps are wrong for the same reasons.

They are wrong because they fail to consider climate science.

Ironically, FEMA themselves criticized NJ DEP for this failure, calling it a “significant deficiency”. FEMA wrote THIS to DEP:

To highlight, FEMA finds that the abandonment of the nonstructural stormwater management in design and the absence of restrictions in the increase in runoff volume post-development to be significant deficiencies.

FEMA is also concerned that the proposed rule does not consider future conditions of increasingly intense precipitation that is expected with climate change. 

The use of the term Green Infrastructure will not offset the proposed changes to the nonstructural stormwater management strategies and the multiple missed opportunities to reduce riverine and urban flooding impacts.

Let me rephrase FEMA’s warning to NJ DEP – maybe NJ Spotlight will report it:

[the DEP] rule does not consider future conditions of increasingly intense precipitation that is expected with climate change. 

As a result of these flaws, thousands of people live in dangerous flood hazard areas and don’t know it.

As a result of these flaws, people are unknowingly buying homes in hazardous locations and putting their families and financial futures at risk.

As a result of these flaws, billions of dollars of property located in dangerous flood hazard areas is not insured.

As a result of thee flaws, developers are being allowed to build in hazardous locations and pass the costs on to the public.

As result of these flaws, we are wasting billions of dollars on fatally flawed “resilience” projects that are “antiquated” and designed to fail because they are designed to meet “obsolete” DEP regulatory standards that do not reflect climate science.

As the late great reporter William Greider said: Who will tell the people?