Senate Environment Committee Begins New Year Appeasing Animal Murderers, Gun Nuts, & The Cranberry Industry

“Educating Kids to be Terrorists Against Peaceful Animals Bill”

After December to Remember, Democrats Join Republicans To Troll for the Bait, Bullet, & Ag Vote

No Mention of Gov. Christie’s Record, The Day Before State of the State Address

It was sickening and physically painful to listen to the testimony (listen here if you’d like).

In a shocking and shameful display – with Senate President Sweeney sitting in and breathing down their necks – the Senate Environment Committee today released a disgraceful package of bills promoting hunting, needlessly killing beaver, encouraging very young children’s access to guns, and eliminating longstanding restrictions on hunting on Sunday.

That’s right – the NJ Senate Environment Committee released a bill to encourage young children to  go into the woods with guns – kids as young as 10 years old and before they are given gun safety training. An accident waiting to happen, for sure.

Have legislators lost their minds?

It was – by far – the worst legislative hearing I can recall.

Seriously, it sounded like some gun club from Idaho hijacked the Committee – accompanied by the Kansas Farm Bureau and the Cranberry Growers Association.

The Committee even released a bill that everyone agreed would violate the federal Clean Water Act.

Remarkably, Chairman Smith even criticized the fact that NJ’s wetlands program was more stringent than the federal wetlands program, contradicting 25 years of NJ law and policy.

As I wrote last week, California Gov. Jerry Brown rose to the climate change imperative and used his fourth Inaugural address to ramp up renewable energy goals to 50% by 2030.

Yet NJ Democrats – on the day before NJ’s climate denying and worst environmental Governor ever is set to make his State of the State address – decided to hear the most reactionary right wing package of bills ever.

This continues the Democrats’ December to Remember.

Senate President Sweeney – a man with Gubernatorial ambitions – obviously wants no focus, contrast, or criticism whatsoever on Gov. Christie’s environmental record.

Here’s the bills they heard – hit links and read them yourself or listen to the harshly critical testimony opposing them.

• Beaver slaughter (S2492 – Sweeney/Oroho)

• Hunting On Federal Military Bases (S1683 Oroho/Bucco)

• Hunting On Sundays (S699 – Kyrillos)

• Young Kids With Guns – Gun Promotion (S573 – Smith/Sweeney)

• Violation of Clean Water Act – Loophole to Allow farmers to destroy wetlands (A1958)

• Stewardship – For Paint Manufactures (S1420 Beach/Whelan)

If the concept of “stewardship” is sufficiently elastic that it would allow commercial logging on state lands, why couldn’t it also be used to justify a massive cost shift from paint manufacturers to consumers for disposal of household paint?

A representative of retail hardware stores that sell paint called the bill a “gateway drug“, opening the door to shifting industry cost responsibilities to consumers for many items, like batteries, mattresses, etc.

Yet paint manufacturers used Orwellian language to describe the bill as “stewardship” – explicitly noting that costs would be passed through to consumers. Manufacturer praised the “sustainable financing” placed on the back of consumers – not industry -for what they called “end of life management” (another Orwellian euphemism for disposal).

This is the opposite of the kind of product cradle to grave liability approach under federal Superfund and RCRA – that kind of scheme need to be expanded to the manufacturing sector as a whole, like they do in Germany’s Green Dot program. That way, manufacturers have incentives to be real environmental stewards and do real “source reduction”, design products for reuse and recycling, and sound disposal, instead of shifting the external costs of production to consumers.

All this made the “sustainability” bill I wrote about meaningless.

It sure  looks like the year 2015 is shaping up to be a long hard slog.