Environmentalists Claim Positive Impacts That Even DEP Doesn’t
Environmental Claims Reveal Incompetence And Political Cheerleading
Usually, I am forced to criticize DEP for exaggerating or completely making up environmental benefits of their proposed rules and minimizing the flaws and loopholes.
But in this case, it’s the environmentalists – not the DEP – who are the ones exaggerating the benefits and fabricating flat out false claims. And they are not even mentioning the major flaws!
Why would environmental groups make unfounded and false claims praising DEP’s proposed rules, when not even DEP is making those claims?
Specifically, environmental groups – led by Sierra Club and Clean Water Action – issued an action alert today to their members urging them to testify at DEP’s hearing on Wednesday on proposed flood rules (see my prior post on that).
The Alert provides a misleading and false summary of the DEP’s proposed inland flood rules, starting with three major blatantly factually false claims, which I bullet verbatim below in italics (emphasis mine) and rebut below in red:
“The Inland Flood Protection updates include:
- Using current rainfall information in designing stormwater management systems
FALSE: the DEP did not use the storm event frequency, rainfall, stormwater volume, or flood elevations that NJ has experienced in several major storms and floods over the last 2 decades. DEP continued to rely on the obsolete 100 year storm, plus a 25% “safety factor”
- Designing stormwater systems to treat the larger storms that are expected to occur by 2100.
FALSE – climate models predict even larger than the 500 year storms we’ve already been hit by. See above.
- Requiring new development to stay out of the current floodplains of rivers. Currently, we underestimate these floodplains because we use 20-100 year old data that does not account for recent development and increased rains due to climate change.
FALSE – there is no such mandate to “require new development to stay out of current floodplains”.
In fact, in addition to no such requirement, the proposal even fails to repeal the Christie DEP rollback of the 300 foot buffers on C1 streams that allows new development to encroach on streams.
These falsehoods reveal gross incompetence of the technical requirements of the regulations at issue.
They also suggest a corrupt cozy relationship with the Murphy DEP.
You can check the DEP’s own press release and compare the DEP’s claims with the environmentalists claims above. DEP never says the rules would “require new development to stay out of current floodplains”. DEP also does not make blanket claims about future storms.
Get the facts! Read this:
The alert even starts off with a misleading claim (that sounds exactly like the DEP press office spin – so I will assume former DEP staffer Anjuli from Sierra Club wrote it!)
The New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection is asking to hear from you on the proposed Inland Flood Protection Rules.
DEP is legally required to allow public testimony – they are not “asking to hear from you”. Another lie.