WolfeNotes.com

photo by Asbury Park Press

In some good news, it looks like there’s behind the scenes progress on reversing Governor Christie’s veto of the Barnegat Bay “Total Maximum Daily Load” (TMDL) bill (for details on that, see:  Governor Christie’s Veto of the Barnegat Bay TMDL Bill – What It Really Means

According to another great story by Kirk Moore in today’s Asbury Park Press: Biological index would measure Barnegat Bay’s health – EPA pulls for nutrient limits:

BARNEGAT BAY –” By the middle of next year, scientists could have a new biological yardstick for measuring the health of Barnegat Bay, consisting of multiple factors that can help track where nutrient pollution comes from and its effect on bay life.

Such an index would be a long-sought tool in ongoing efforts to restore the bay to health.

For years, environmental advocates have called for tough standards on the amount of nutrients entering the bay” mostly nitrogen compounds from fertilizer and stormwater runoff that, over time, alter bay ecology at a basic level.

“The sea grass begins to decline, and you have less habitat for the fish and crabs,” said Michael Kennish, a research professor with the Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences at Rutgers University, who is heading the effort to build a biometric index for the bay. “The science is clear on this: What you need to do is get a reduction in the nitrogen.”

As a result, the federal Environmental Protection Agency is pushing the state Department of Environmental Protection to establish nutrient limits. They would be known as TMDLs” total maximum daily loads” said John Sess, a spokesman for the EPA’s Region II office, which has worked closely with the state for years on Barnegat Bay. …

Setting hard and precise TMDLs ultimately could give DEP legal and regulatory authority to enforce protections for the bay. That would include buffer zones around tributary streams and fixing upstream pollution sources as they are found, according to Bill Wolfe of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a former DEP employee who used to work on TMDL plans.

We recently have had conversations and have been pushing EPA to enforce the Clean Water Act’s TMDL requirements in NJ, especially on Barnegat Bay. So we are pleased to see EPA publicly supporting those efforts.

However, it is unclear at this time exactly how EPA is intervening, so we must reserve judgement until we have reviewed the documents to be assured that they are enforceable commitments, not press soundbites.

As we wrote, a TMDL has been legally mandated for Barnegat Bay since 2002. According to a EPA/DEP Memorandum of Agreement, a TMDL must be completed by NJ DEP no later than March 31, 2011.

Much more to follow – We will keep you posted as this issue develops.

Just think if you could earn more than a 100,000 % (1,000 times) return on investment! (in one year, no less).

According to PolitickerNJ, that’s what nuclear giant Exelon got.

According to NJ Election Law Enforcement Commission records, corporate energy giant Exelon spent over $860,000 on lobbying.

Gee, so what did they get for all that money?

By investing $860,000 in NJ politicians, Exelon saved $800 million in costs of installing cooling towers at their Oyster Creek nuclear power plant, the nation’s oldest and unsafe zombie nuclear plant.

In December 2009, the NJ Department of Evironmental Protection issued a draft water pollution control permit to mandate that Exelon install cooling towers. (click here to view permit)

Exelon then claimed that the $800 million cost of cooling towers would force them to close the plant. Sounds good to me!

But pro-business Governor Chris Christie’s DEP Commissioner Bob Martin – a former energy consultant with no environmental experience – reversed that December DEP permit decision.

Martin reversed the prior DEP “Best Technology Available” determination and signed an agreement with Exelon that allowed the plant to operate for 10 more years WITHOUT the expensive cooling towers.

According to the the December 21, 2010 Asbury Park Press story: “Critics Blast Agreement That Avoids Cooling Towers At Oyster Creek”

Allowing the Oyster Creek nuclear reactor to operate through 2019 without cooling towers will undermine efforts to reduce fish losses and thermal impacts at other power stations and could conflict with forthcoming federal rules for cooling towers, critics contend. …

The result “is a horrible precedent, reversing the draft NJPDES permit’s best available technology determination,” said Bill Wolfe of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a former DEP employee and agency critic.

So, in addition to the avoiding an $800 milllion cooling tower cost, Exelon gets 10 years more of profits – hundreds of millions of dollars more.

Not a bad return on an $860,000 investment!

Remarkably, so called ‘grassroots environmental advocate” Dave Pringle of the NJ Environmental Federation STILL defends Christie for this corrupt deal:

Dave Pringle, campaign director for the New Jersey Envronmental Federation, lands somewhere between his colleague and the administration. According to Pringle, the administration played the hand it was dealt in dealing with Exelon.  The only stick available to the DEP was the cooling towers, which Pringle agreed would likely have landed the state in court with an uncertain future.

The resulting deal, Pringle said, is about the best that could be expected.

Please stop feeding this beast.

As I’ve written here, Propublica must be recognized for their superb “Buried Secrets” investigative work on the fracking issue. They put the story on the radar screen.

But, now that the paper of record – the New York Times – has weighed into the debate with a massive three part investigative series, the rats are scurying to cover their asses.

The Times reporting documented lax regulation, irresponsible gas industry behaviors, and disclosed internal EPA documents and inteviews with scientists that showed politicization of the science.

The Times showed that everything from EPA reviews of  NY State’s Environmental Impact Statement to EPA’s regulation, scientitific investigations, and reports to Congress were deeply impacted by political interference by powerful special interests.

For example, the Times reported that EPA had planned to call for a moratorium on fracking in the New York City watershed. The Times disclosed internal EPA documents that indicated that EPA scientists recommendations were removed from the publicly released letter to NYS DEC. The Times quoted EPA scientists saying the EPA decision could be explained with one word: “politics“.

In an obvious damage control effort, just days afer the Times series ran, EPA cracked down on Pennsylvania.

In a March 7, 2011 letter to Pennsylvania DNR, EPA raised concerns with federal oversight of Clean Water Act permits, requesting the state to perform additional tests within 30 days on water at treatment plants.

Not to be denied their day in the sun, in an exclusive interview, Propublica followed the Times with another revealing episode – a revealing admission by a former Bush EPA Assistant Administrator for Water, Benjamin Grumbles.

Grumbles was directly involved with the Bush/Cheney Energy Task Force – the industry dominated group that drove the EPA study that led Congress – in the 2005 Energy Policy Act – to exempt fracking from federal environmental laws, including the Safe Drinking Water Act.

Now that the NY Times has disclosed how corrupt EPA fracking decisions were, Propublica gave Grumbles a chance to seek some form of professional salvation, if not redemption.

In an interview with Propublica, Grumbles tried to downplay how he looked the other way as corrupt Bush White House politics over-rode EPA science.

In amazingly contradictory spin, despite the NY Times disclosures, Grumbles still tried to deny it all:

Q: You’re referring to the exemption passed by Congress as part of the 2005 Energy Policy Act, which prohibited the regulation of fracturing under the Safe Drinking Water Act. What did you think about the idea of an exemption?

The career staff and I felt that when Congress provides a permanent exemption in an environmental statute, they need to be very careful about that and they need to have some built-in review process or safeguards so that if there is a risk presented, either the states or the EPA can then revisit it.

Q: Why, then, did you relinquish authority to both regulate the process and to revisit the issue?

I was disappointed, and I think others at EPA were disappointed, that the language [of the exemption] did not include the type of safety net language that I suggested.

It is not for one office and one agency to announce a position of the executive branch. And our view was, we had concerns about the scope of the language, we provided technical assistance and information, and ultimately Congress decided not to include the language that we had suggested. I was disappointed by that, but there is always tomorrow, and there is always the opportunity for additional facts to get Congress to revisit the exemption.

Q: So, were you overruled?

No, I felt that the commission’s report [the 2004 EPA study] was an important piece that indicated that this was not presenting a significant threat to groundwater. I did feel as a matter of policy that the exemption was broader than it should have been at the time.

We certainly did not ask Congress to exempt hydraulic fracturing. We opposed the language, and we did provide information to executive committees.

Q: How did politics influence the EPA’s oversight of this issue?

What came across clearly to the EPA was that the [Bush] administration did not want us to take a formal position of opposition to the exemption. It wasn’t so much a pressure. It was just very clear, here is the situation: EPA officials or career staff are not to take a position of opposition or support for the legislation.

I’m not saying that there was political pressure in some sense of being told not to say certain things. This is the case in all high-profile legislative and congressional issues over my six years at EPA.

When it comes to working with Congress, the EPA is one important voice in where the executive branch is coming from, but it is not the only voice. So, as is always the case with any administration, there was coordination of the process with the Department of Energy, Office of Management and Budget, the White House. I know the office of the vice president [Dick Cheney] was involved, but I honestly did not see much involvement at all.

Q: How did you get the message that the EPA shouldn’t take a formal position on the exemption?

They would say, ‘continue to monitor this issue, work with congressional offices, explore the language, but don’t take a formal position either for or against the language that was being developed in Chairman Barton’s committee.’ [Joe Barton, House Energy and Commerce Committee]

Q: Were you or the EPA ever instructed on what, specifically, to conclude in your research?

I never received any political pressure to do anything, or to take any particular view other than to not have an official position of opposition to the legislation that Chairman Barton and others were working on in the House and the Senate.

As we wrote, the Times’ series had an impact in Trenton on Monday, and likely will be brought up tomorrow in Senate hearings.

Fracking is a national issue, so the battle in Congess may heat up as well, as a result of the Times‘ series. According to E&E Reporter:

Three House Democrats from New York are urging U.S. EPA to review its decision not to seek a moratorium on hydraulic fracturing in the New York City watershed.

“We ask that you also look into contamination concerns in New York and look into the withdrawal of the planned call for a drilling moratorium in the New York City watershed,” said the letter, signed by Reps. Carolyn Maloney, Maurice Hinchey and Jerrold Nadler.

The letter to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson pointed to “disturbing” reports in a recent New York Times article about fracturing indicating that politics played a role in an EPA decision not to support calls for a moratorium on use of the high-volume process in the upstate area where the city gets its water

Let this be a lesson – hit the links and read the Propublica and NY Times stories. There is a massive amount of good information there.

More to follow.

Will Democrats Take on Governor Christie and Big Polluters to Protect NJ Drinking Water?

Oil (R), gas (C) and chemical industry (L) lobbyists oppose fracking bills. When Jim Benton (R) of the NJ Petroleum Council talks, people listen.

In the wake of last week’s Trenton hearings by the Delaware River Basin Commission and a scathing investigative expose by the New York Times (see: Regulation Lax as Gas Wells’ Tainted Water Hits Rivers and  Wastewater Recycling No Cure-All in Gas Process and Pressure Limits Efforts to Police Drilling for Gas) today, the Assembly Environment Committee held followup hearings on legislation to restrict fracking.

As expected, lobbyists for the big polluting chemical, oil, and gas industries were out in force.

Back on December 9, the Committee took testimony on A3313 (“a bill that would prohibit hydraulic fracturing (hydrofracking) in the State for the purpose of natural gas exploration or production”), and A3314, (“a bill that would prohibits any New Jersey member of the Delaware River Basin Commission from supporting or voting to support the issuance, by the commission or any other entity, of any permit or other kind of approval to withdraw water for the purposes of hydraulic fracturing for natural gas exploration or production.“)

We wrote about that hearing in this post.

After testifying on those bills back in December, talking with legislative staff, and offering requested amendments, it was my understanding that the bills were going to be expanded and strengthened.

But for some reason, the Committee did a U-turn, abandoned those bills, and instead heard a toothless package of aspirational bills that will not work.

Today, the Committee heard A3653 (Wagner, D-Bergen). This bill establishes a temporary moratorium on the practice of hydraulic fracturing in the State for the purpose of natural gas exploration or production until the United States Environmental Protection Agency has concludes its study and issues its findings on that drilling practice, and the Department of Environmental Protection determines that the findings warrant an end to the moratorium.”

Assemblyman Conaway (D-Burlington)

Assemblyman Conaway set the tone for the hearing by noting that he had viewed the documentary “Gasland” and seen tap water explode.

He asked some tough questions of an industry economist from Virginia.

Conaway asked how the gas industry could claim they were “responsible” and  how they were addressing the externalities and cumulative impacts of thousands of fracking wells, which had poisoned drinking water supplies and individual wells.

The industry economist was literally laughed out of the room when he responded by claiming that the States had tough environmental regulatory oversight of the gas industry.

Assemblyman Barnes had the quote of the day (despite Jeff Tittel’s “Tiki Torch” quip!).

Barnes took exception to an industry economist’s testimony that the legislation would “send the wrong signal to investors” and that “NJ has a bad business climate due to over-regulation and high taxes”.

Asemblyman Barnes (D-Middlesex) (L) and sponsor Assemblywoman Wagner (D-Bergen)

Barnes said that the “signal” he wanted to send “was about clean water”

Noting that what is good for Pennsylvania may not be good for NJ: “Our role is to protect clean water of NJ and take a strong stand with other states that may negatively impact our drinking water.”

At the end of the hearing, prime sponsor Assemblywoman Wagner caucused with Chairman McKeon, who then announced that the sponsor and Committee would work with Senate sponsors to reconcile the Assembly bills with the far stronger Senate package which will be heard on Thursday.

The Assembly Committee then voted to release the bills, by votes along party lines, with the two Republican members (Coyle and Rudder) abstaining.

After the hearing, I spoke briefly with prime sponsor Assemblywoman Wagner, and asked why the stonger mandatory bills were abandoned. She told me that she wanted to “send a signal and take a small step by passing legislation the Governor would sign.”

I tried to warn against this approach, because Governor Christie’s DEP Commissioner has publicly announced support for fracking, has advocated “state primacy” in regulatory oversight of fracking operations, and is now pressuring the DRBC to expedite regulations that allow fracking to happen.

Thankfully, the Senate versions of A3313 and 3314 are up in the Senate Environment Committee on Thursday.

Senate bill (S2575) (Gordon, D-Bergen)  – This bill prohibits any New Jersey member of the Delaware River Basin Commission from supporting or voting to support the issuance, by the commission or any other entity, of any permit or other kind of approval to withdraw water for the purposes of hydraulic fracturing for natural gas exploration or production.

S2576 (Gordon, D-Bergen; Greenstein, D-Mercer/Middlesex) This bill prohibits hydraulic fracturing (:hydrofracking”) in the State for the purpose of natural gas exploration or production.

Delaware Riverkeeper, Sierra Club, NJ Environmental Lobby, NJ Conservation Foundation, Food and Water Watch, Sane Energy Project, and NJ Envrionmental Federation all opposed fracking and urged that the bills be strengthened.

Because I have been critical lately, I will note that I was surprised to hear Dave Pringle provide good testimony, that included implicit criticism of the Christie Administration’s flawed policy at DRBC. Pringle also managed to make Jim Benton of the NJ Petroleum Council lose his cool and whine to the Chair about Pringle’s “second interuption”. This prompted Chairman McKeon to suggest that “you guys can take it outside”.

Given that I tesified back in December, I did not today. We will testify before the Senate on Thursday.

[Important Clarification:

A NJ ban or moratorium on fracking in NJ is a symbolic gesture. Even sponsor Wagner acknowledged this fact, as it is extremely unlikely that any fracking will occur in NJ. There is no Marcellus shale play here, and any gas that is present would be the most expensive to exploit.

The primary threat to NJ from fracking in Pa and NY is to the Delaware River (and more gas pipelines through NJ forests and dangerous gas pipelines through NJ urban areas to serve NY markets).

Accordingly, the only way to block that threat is via the current DRBC moratorium, which would be lifted under deeply flawed proposed DRBC draft regulations.

The Legislature needs to act to set policy, stand up to and direct Governor Christie’s representation on DRBC NOT to vote to approve those regulations.

NJ’s representative on DRBC is DEP Commissioner Bob Martin, who has supported fracking and is seeking to fast track those regulations before the science is in, safer technology is developed, and protective regulations are adopted.

The issue of a NJ moratorium versus ban is Kabuki and a diversion.

I hear some people
been talkin’ me down.
Bring up my name,
pass it ’round.
They don’t mention
the happy times.
They do their thing,
I do mine.  

Ooh baby,
that’s hard to change.
I can’t tell them
how to feel.
Some get strong,
some get strange.
But sooner or later
it all gets real.

Walk on, walk on,
Walk on, walk on. ~~~ (“Walk On” – Neil Young).

I’ve been getting some pushback recently from expected places, including the DEP press office.

But I’ve also been hit unexpectedly from certain quarters, including my former boss, DEP Commissoner Brad Campbell.

So I am taking this opportunity to call out the critics. If you’ve got relevant input or a problem with what I’ve written, let us know.

Put up or shut up – don’t whisper behind my back.

The floor is yours.

You may post information, analysis, or criticism here as reader comments.

I also offer a guest column opportunity.

I also will respond to private email (I promise to post the substance of your concerns, but keep your name confidential).

This offer is extended to all, with one exception: Dave Pringle.

Bring it.