WolfeNotes.com

DEP Says Hudson Oil Shipment Risks “Not On DEP Radar”

Neither DEP nor State Office of Emergency Management are aware of shipments of over 1 billion gallons of oil down the Hudson River

Trenton — The Christie administration has posted a sprawling post-Sandy Hazard Mitigation Plan that conflicts with its own announced projects, ignores known threats, and contains numerous flaws, according to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). PEER is calling for legislative hearings on the plan, which was required as a prerequisite for significant federal infrastructure aid but was prepared by a private consultant with no outside review.  PEER, 3/20/14

[Update: 4/5/14 – another example of where our neighbors in NY are involved and the Christie Administration is not:

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo nevertheless directed state agencies in late January to review their emergency and spill response plans and report back to him by the end of April. The state’s top environmental and transportation officials met with their federal counterparts last week to discuss the issue.

But there remains considerable uncertainty about how authorities would respond to an accident or a spill in the Hudson River. The Coast Guard conducted a drill in New Windsor last November. The mock event involved the derailment of four train cars and a 50,000-gallon spill in the Hudson from a storage tank.

“We continue to look for ways to improve coordination and response with our federal and local partners and, as directed by Governor Cuomo in his recent executive order, are evaluating the state’s spill prevention, response and inspection program for rail, ship and barge transportation of crude oil and other petroleum products,” said Emily DeSantis, the Department of Environmental Conservation’s spokeswoman.   ~~~  NY Times 2/27/14 – end update].

Scott Fallon of the Bergen Record has an important story about risks of new shipments of crude oil down the Hudson River, see:

• Oil boom boosts flow along the Hudson, and fears of spill risk

Shockingly, DEP is quoted as saying that those risks are “not on DEP’s radar”:

“It hasn’t been put on our radar by anyone,” said Larry Ragonese, a spokesman for the Department of Environmental Protection. “We haven’t had any real input.”

That is shocking, because DEP regulates the NJ refineries that receive the oil shipments, and DEP has direct regulatory responsibility for those oil refineries and for protecting the Hudson River and surrounding NJ communities under numerous State environmental laws.

But, there is another place where those risks should be assessed and protective strategies put in place: The NJ Hazard Mitigation Plan.

That Plan has an entire Chapter 5.19 on risks from chemical and oil shipments, see: Risk Assessment – Hazardous Substances.

Here is what Chapter of the Plan says about oil shipments to NJ refineries – it says NOTHING about shipments down the Hudson River from North Dakota via Albany:

The cities of Linden and Elizabeth, located on New Jersey’s highly industrialized northeast coast, are home to Conoco Phillips’ Bayway Refinery (formerly owned by Exxon). The northernmost refinery on the east coast of the United States, Bayway processes 238,000 barrels (10 million gallons) of crude oil per day. The crude oil is brought in by tanker ships from the North Sea, Canada, and West Africa. Once processed, 145,000 barrels of gasoline and 110,000 barrels of distillates per day are transported to east coast customers via pipeline transport, barges, railcars, and tank trucks. In addition, a petrochemical plant produces lubricants and additives and a polypropylene plant produces over 775 million pounds per year of polypropylene (American Littoral Society 2013).

So neither DEP nor State Office of Emergency Management are aware of shipments of over 1 billion gallons of oil down the Hudson River?

Are you kidding me?

Or are they covering up that information?

NJ Assembly Speaker Prieto needs to get the Legislature involved immediately in oversight of the Christie Hazard Mitigation Plan, as we’ve called for.

Record story quotes Prieto supporting that:

After being informed by The Record about the shipments down the river, Assembly Speaker Vincent Prieto, D-Secaucus, last week called on Governor Christie to conduct a comprehensive review of the state’s readiness to handle spills and emergencies. “We’ve seen several recent examples of the damage that can be caused by oil spills,” said Prieto, whose district includes part of the riverfront. “Nobody wants to see that repeated along the Hudson.”

Here is the history of spills and accidents Prieto correctly refers to, ironically from the Christie Hazard Plan:

Despite documenting hundreds of chemical and oil spills, there Christie Plan downplays and rates those risks as “low”

Time To Rethink RGGI In Light of Upcoming EPA Rules On Existing Power Plants

Lower RGGI Cap or A Ratcheted Down & Stricter EPA Rule

The Senate Environment Committee heard S151 yesterday, and re-engaged the RGGI debate, just 2 days after a NJ court Ordered the Christie Administration to reconsider the Governor’s unilateral decree to leave the RGGI pact without complying with public rule making procedures.

The Court’s decision was another rebuke to the Gov.’s abuse of executive power – and the Court gave the Administration just 60 days to comply.

The bill – co-sponsored by Senate President Sweeney – is another political challenge to the Gov.’s decision to leave RGGI.

Whether the bill represents a real challenge of the Gov.’s abuse of executive power and a legitimate greenhouse gas emissions reduction effort remain to be seen. The last thing we need at this point are partisan stunts.

During the hearing, Chairman Smith had fun with Doug O’Malley of Environment NJ, one of the successful plaintiff’s in the lawsuit that led to the Court’s decision.

O’Malley played the Cheshire Cat, but perhaps prematurely, as the Court’s Order could turn out to be a Pyrrhic procedural victory, a point the Chairman’s later question “What happens if DEP proposes a regulation to exit RGGI” clearly brought out.

Tom Johnson at NJ Spotlight covered the hearing, see: SENATE COMMITTEE VOTES OUT BILL THAT WOULD REQUIRE RETURN TO RGGI

I had not planned to testify, but felt compelled to testified to clarify a few issues.

Again, unfortunately, I was forced to agree with Governor Christie regarding RGGI impacts on emissions from the power sector. RGGI simply does not provide incentives or enforceable regulatory sticks to reduce emissions from the NJ power sector. Just the opposite – it locks in and allows significant increases to current emissions.

And RGGI certainly does very little to implement the goals of the Global Warming Response Act, which require an 80% reduction by the year 2050.

During the few years it operated, RGGI allowances sold at the statutory minimum and the program generated about $50 million per year to fund energy conservation, efficiency, and low income consumer subsidy programs.

Those are great programs that provide great benefits, but the small emissions reductions they provide can be secured by other existing programs funded under the far larger Societal Benefits Charge ($400 million/year). Those programs can be mandated by BPU under the existing laws governing energy efficiency and renewable energy goals, and NJ’s renewable portfolio standards.

We don’t need RGGI to authorize or fund those programs. Far larger pots of money and legal leverage exist to fund and mandate far larger emissions reductions.

So the RGGI program’s justification should focus exclusively and be grounded in far larger potential emission reductions from the power sector.

And from that perspective, the program fails badly. Power sector emissions reductions are far more significant than the small reductions that result from RGGI funded conservation, efficiency, and consumer subsidy programs.

In addition to failing to make these critical distinctions between energy demand and supply and the various suite of programs that should target each (and who should pay and how those programs should be financed), I wonder whether the environmentalists who supported the bill read it.

1. The legislation requires that the trading program shall be:

“consistent with the terms of the Memorandum of Understanding signed by New Jersey and other states on December 20, 2005”.

The so called pollution cap under that 2005 MOU agreement is at least 35% above current emissions.

The bill will result in the OPPOSITE of what it claims: instead of providing incentives to reduce current emissions, it will provide incentives to increase them.

If the Legislature were serious, they would require that as a condition of NJ rejoining RGGI, that the cap be reduced so that real reductions occur based on current emissions. And they would put a number into law, say by 35% – and put the total NJ emission allowances in the bill to make them enforceable.

It is my understanding that the RGGI states are already engaged in negotiations to reduce the current cap, so this issue must be addressed by NJ policymakers anyway (assuming NJ were to re-enter RGGI).

2. As I testified, EPA is scheduled to propose regulations under the Clean Air Act to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from existing power plants in June 2014.

The Natural Resources Defense Council is suggesting that those EPA rules could reduce current emissions from existing plants by 21 – 31%, based on 2012 baseline emissions.

One compliance option under those rules may be participation in RGGI.

So this begs the question: which program will reduce NJ emissions deeper and faster: the EPA rules or the RGGI program?

How do those reductions compare with NJ’s GWRA 80% reduction goal?

So, before deciding whether to rejoin RGGI, state policymakers should be informed by a side by side analysis of RGGI versus the Obama EPA rule, in terms of total emissions reductions over time and the ability to monitor and enforce those reductions.

Again, if the legislature were serious about reducing emissions, then this would have been considered openly – before I had to raise it – and the Chairman would have formally requested that DEP perform that kind of side by side emissions analysis.

That didn’t happen either.

While I am not optimistic that the Obama EPA rule will be aggressive, particularly as applied to NJ which has a relatively low carbon energy infrastructure due to lots of nuclear power, at a minimum sound policymaking demands that side by side comparison.

Such a comparison would also hold the Obama EPA accountable and dispel the myth that the administration is engaged in a “war on coal” and test whether the Obama EPA is serious about using a big regulatory stick to reduce GHG emissions to respond to the climate crisis.

Ironically, the EPA regulation – which would apply nationally and in carbon intensive places like Pennsylvania – would eliminate the business community’s criticism about “leakage” and uncompetitive energy policy that discriminates against lower carbon higher cost NJ power.

In another irony, RGGI was created as an incremental regional state program to spur national action in Congress on a federal market based cap/trade program.

That market based approach has failed in Congress, and the Obama EPA is committed to a regulatory strategy.

So, we also need to rethink not only the numbers, but the fundamental policy choice of a market based or regulatory approach.

I’m a regulatory mandate advocate – the only proven approach.

But not of the NRDC backed “flexible, cost effective, state partnership based” variety of regulation.

No way carbon intensive states make any real commitments without a huge federal EPA regulatory stick.

Today, we have a guest post by my good friend and former colleague, Bill Neil.

Bill was the Director of Conservation, NJ Audubon Society and NJ Coastal Coordinator, American Littoral Society, from 1988-2001.

In a letter to Legislators, Bill explains why an important bill that is up today in Trenton is in the public interest. NJ is an anomaly in providing a statutory “right to- rebuild” storm damaged properties. The bill would revoke that “right”.

Enjoy it and realize how much we’ve lost with Bill’s departure. [Note: I took the liberty to edit with links to the bill and a NY Times book review].

Dear Chairman Smith and Senator Barnes:

I write in support of S-62, which would overturn the guaranteed right of affected property owners to rebuild in the wake of a natural disaster. Instead, destroyed or damaged homeowners would have to apply for a permit from the NJDEP, subject to the publicly vetted regulations which might deny, or allow rebuilding, with conditions rooted in science and historical records.   I also support a proposed logical amendment to make the comparable change to the Flood Hazard Area Control Act, an amendment which is based on solid evidence of where, and how frequently, structures are damaged, indicating this is not just a coastal problem.

Please note, for the record, that I was the lead negotiator for the New Jersey and national environmental groups seeking passage of Governor Thomas Kean’s coastal reform bill in 1988-1989, including a Coastal Commission,  when I worked for the American Littoral Society, then under the Direction of the late Dery Bennett. Dery was, without much exaggeration, the “soul” of state and national coastal conservation efforts, and he felt very strongly that preventing an “absolute right to rebuild” for coastal properties destroyed or damaged 50% or more, was a key, core component of any worthy coastal legislation. On that matter, we parted ways with Governor Kean.

In his recent book, “Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time,” [ see NY Times review] Columbia University professor of political science and history Ira Katznelson made a very telling observation about the nature of the American state and legislative process that developed in the wake of the New Deal, what has been described as “pluralist interest group bargaining” but which Katznelson refines to a “pluralist model of procedural politics.” He goes on to give a powerful description of what was more deeply at stake, and I think the parallels are clear for the matters in this bill.  The passages are from the Chapter entitled “Public Procedures, Private Interests”:

But just as planned administrative economic management or corporate forms of political negotiations do not come without cost, neither did this pluralist model of procedural politics.  Unchecked by the pursuit of a public interest, its formal neutrality opened the state to the distortions of private power.  The new public philosophy of group competition abdicated any democratic, as distinct from dictatorial, notions of a civic interest.  Placed under great stress, public authority to achieve common goals thus lacked means to articulate why private interests should not dominate decision making about public policy.

The resulting contest veered between an open and fair competition and a game with skewed rules and a syntax of inequality.  The more diffuse an interest – that is, the more civic and public – the less it could be served by this organization of political influence.  With planning replaced by bargaining, government, too, often came to be ‘captured by too-narrow a range of interests.

In the matter at hand, there is a clear and powerful case to be made that the public interest is being obscured, even though now it is  backed by repeated multi-billion dollar injections of federal money for disaster relief and aid to property owners, and to past and future defensive measures at the coast (and elsewhere), including the nation’s most expensive beach replenishment program.  Science tells us that the costs of defending private building interests at the coast will be going up, not down, due to rising sea levels and more intense storms, thanks to global warming. And let’s not forget that there is an additional cost to this physical situation: the costs of defending the private and public infrastructure that makes this living arrangement possible. The new scientific reality of global warning must be added to the long historical record of damage at the coast due to hurricanes (and inland flooding too, along Raritan Bay, the Passaic River…and other locales noted for repeated immersions) which, even hundreds of years before the global warming factor, tended to have long term but predictable cycles…and New Jersey and New York were  overdue…

Let us be clear, and let me be blunt about what the defenders of the status quo at the coast, and elsewhere, are demanding, enshrined very well in the existing”guaranteed right to rebuild” provision:  they are asking for unlimited federal and state dollars to defend their right to build, and re-build in demonstrably dangerous places, documented not in environmental imaginations or “planner’s projections” but by the boundaries drawn in reality by nature herself.  Or by acts of God, if you would prefer.  And they want that right to continue in perpetuity.   In their best case, they claim that the gold mine which is the NJ coast pays for itself, which conveniently ignores the fact that it could continue to due so, assuming that claim might be true,  at a much safer distance from the danger zones, ones which will continue to expand and encroach upon human property lines. And claim human lives as well.

Has their ever been a clearer case of the public interest being overwhelmed by a tiny minority of  wealthy property owners, tempered by the acknowledged fact that there are clearly some much poorer citizens also in harm’s way?  And this despite the fact that the public interest side is fully willingly to make the distressed parties “whole,” including relocation expenses.

Thank you for your time and attention to this important matter, of interest to citizens everywhere, not just New Jersey.

Sincerely,

William R. Neil*

2008 Gainsboro Road

Rockville, MD 20851

*Former Director of Conservation, NJ Audubon Society and NJ Coastal Coordinator, American Littoral Society, 1988-2001

Hundreds of Old Dumps Pollute Streams, Groundwater, & Air Quality

DEP Plays Regulatory Games To Waive Their Own Regulations

This is a story about how DEP is playing extremely destructive regulatory games to allow hundreds of old landfills to continue to pollute the environment and to keep that information from the public.

Turning lemons into lemonade, it’s now all swept under the rug by big plans to install solar on a handful of those landfills, as if that will cleanup the huge pollution problem those landfills pose.

We will tell this story in light of the most visible example right now,the Fenimore landfill in Roxbury, NJ.

What DEP landfill regulations require and what DEP actually has done there are completely at odds.

So after you read all those press clips and watch all the TV news videos of hundreds of angry people in Roxbury railing against DEP’s unilaterally imposed – without public opportunity to comment – Fenimore Landfill closure plan fiasco, first take a look at the big picture – from DEP’s 2006 Solid Waste Management Plan Update – section on Landfill Closure Planning:

Has DEP accomplished any of these objects at the Fenimore landfill?

Next, let’s look at the scope of the statewide landfill problem, again, based on DEP’s own 2006 Solid Waste Plan Update:

DEP landfill regulations flat out prohibit: 

(read the entire rule, you’ll be amazed at what is required –  especially

• 7:26-2A.6. Sanitary landfill environmental performance standards;  
• 7:26-2A.7 Sanitary landfill engineering design standards and construction requirements;
•  7:26-2A.8 Sanitary landfill operational and maintenance requirements
• 7:26-2A.9 Closure and post-closure care of sanitary landfills    

When the DEP authorized the “old” Fenimore landfill – which was not subject to certain closure and permitting portions of the above DEP regulations – to accept 400,000 cubic yards of construction and demolition waste, the landfill became a “new” landfill  subject to all these DEP landfill regulations.

The new disposal operation there also became subject to DEP Landfill closure regulations, which require things like this:

Before DEP can issue a landfill permit or closure plan approval, DEP must provide extensive notice and multiple opportunities for public review and public comment.

DEP rules require: (NJAC 7:26- 2

The DEP often tried to hide behind the fact that landfills that ceased operations prior to Jan 1982 are not subject to landfill closure requirements under State Landfill Closure laws. These landfills are now described as “legacy landfills”.

But that is just a big lie. And there it is in plain sight, for anyone willing to read the documents.

Gov. Christie’s  Hazard Mitigation Plan Is Vague – No Deadlines For Action

Source: NJ Hazard Mitigation Plan (March 2014)

The above table presents “high priority” actions from NJ’s Hazard Mitigation Plan – Section 6 – Mitigation Strategy.

The actions and initiatives involve conducting vulnerability assessment and mitigation planning for critical facilities in the highest risk flood zones – little things, like parking trains in flood hazard areas; and protecting drinking water and sewage treatment plants; and hardening energy infrastructure.

Like all the important stuff that was wiped out by Sandy.

If the print is too small to read, let me summarize:

• Projected timelines:        “to be determined”
• Projected resources:       “to be determined”
• Status:                                “ongoing“
• Responsible agencies: “local/regional authorities”

Understanding the last point, regarding the “responsible agency” is key – note that the State’s Plan makes all that a local government responsibility or the job or regional water and sewer authorities. Total state abdication. Get it?

Would you sign you kids homework if it contained bullshit like that?

So why should Congress, FEMA, HUD, EPA, and the US Army Corps provide billions of taxpayer dollars to fund it?

Of the dozens of actions and initiatives listed, there are two that are rated “highest priority” actions in the plan are 1) to incorporate existing earth quake studies into the plan; and 2) develop local government webpages.

This is not a joke.

Does it surprise you that this shoddy effort is being managed thusly:

The Governor of New Jersey has the overall responsibility for Emergency Management activities in the State.    

A number of federal and State programs support hazard mitigation in New Jersey. The Governor’s Office of Recovery and Rebuilding (GORR) was established to lead the recovery efforts after Superstorm Sandy. The GORR taps the institutional knowledge and bandwidth of New Jersey state agencies in recovering from Superstorm Sandy. The working group structure developed by Governor Christie’s recovery team is designed to complement the federal long-term recovery structure, allowing the State to efficiently identify federal resources and coordinate New Jersey’s recovery.

Given the Christie Administration’s supreme competence and stellar performance in Sandy recovery and administering federal grant money, don’t you just feel so much safer now?

But how could the NJ press corps miss this story? For details, see this.