Failure Is Baked In To Murphy DEP Climate And Natural Resource Damage Lawsuits
Murphy Administration Has Promoted Expansion Of And Failed To Regulate Methane
DEP Has Serious Leadership And Ethics Problems
Bill Potter has an important Op-Ed today at NJ Spotlight, read the whole thing:
Bill’s emphasis on the role of methane in the climate emergency can not be over-stated.
But he left out important context and pending methane regulatory decisions by the Murphy administration, including new pipeline and gas infrastructure approvals. For an analysis of those projects and their climate impacts, read the Empower NJ report:
Bill also did not mention the failure of DEP’s recently adopted environmental justice and power sector carbon dioxide emissions regulations to address methane. Both rules do not apply to methane at all.
DEP also abandoned the proposed fossil boiler replacement rule, a huge concession to the fossil industry.
And on May 1, 2023, the Murphy DEP just adopted a massive carbon infrastructure expansion program, the so called “Underground Storage Caverns”. That initiative has gotten no media coverage or opposition by climate activists as far as I know. I wrote about the details in this post:
So, it’s not just Murphy administration lawsuits that fail to consider methane.
But in addition to the methane issue, I wanted to highlight important issues implicit in Bill’s tangential mention of DEP’s Natural Resource Damage (NRD) lawsuits, an issue I’ve written about extensively. Bill notes (emphasis mine):
Ultimately, the antagonists are likely to settle before the case can be heard, which has its own set of risks. Recall the “natural resources” damage suit against ExxonMobil that claimed more than $7 billion in cleanup costs to remedy decades of contamination but ended in a pennies-on-the-dollar settlement of $225 million, ordered by Gov. Chris Christie.
Yes, it is very likely that DEP will settle both the climate and NRD lawsuits for pennies on the dollar, and for many of the same reasons (in addition to those noted by Bill in his Op-Ed – see this NJ Law Journal expose:
I sent my friend Bill, who I’ve admired and worked with for decades (including the victorious Hopewell ELSA sewer line extension and the Mercer County incinerator lawsuits!), this note to suggest additional DEP legal and ethical weaknesses:
Hey Bill – nice job and thanks for doing that!
The pennies on the dollar NRD settlements are baked into the flawed DEP NRD program, and there is little leadership at the top to bolster the DEP’s legal prospects.
Commissioner LaTourette successfully litigated NRD lawsuits representing corporate chemical industry (let me know if you want case citations) and he also previously represented BASF as a private attorney, a conflict he failed to disclose and he also failed to recuse from – veery troubling given his high profile public role in the DEP’s NRD settlement with BASF at Ciba-Geigy Toms River.
US Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas, Chief Justice Roberts, and Neil Gorsuch are not the only ones with ethical problems!
And the consumer fraud claims put DEP on even thinner ice.
Be well,
Wolfe