Joint Joke Today

Serious Climate Change, Coastal Issues, & Christie Political Accountability Ignored

I posted this photo on August 12, 2012, just weeks before Sandy hit. Note the vulnerable houses – sunrise in Mantoloking, ground zero for Sandy.

The annual summer joint meeting of the Legislature’s Senate and Assembly Environmental Committee’s meets today in Lavallette at 10 am  in the First Aid Building – here is the agenda:

The Senate Environment and Energy Committee and the Assembly Environment and Solid Waste Committee will meet to hear testimony on the cleanup of the Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge after Superstorm Sandy.  The committees will also hear testimony on the need for soil restoration standards.

Yesterday, I wrote a post about why – with Christie bragging about dismantling NJ environmental programs on a national stage – that hearing amounts to political malpractice.

So today, I thought I’d highlight a few issues that are being ignored – obviously the most impotent (haha! is that a Freudian typo? I meant “important”!) being climate change, especially given that tomorrow is the first public hearing on Christie’s Energy Master Plan.

It’s not hard to build many linkages between climate change and coastal issues.

But the traditional focus of the special joint hearing has been coastal issues, so I thought I’d rehash an excerpt, with good links, to a post I did in August 12, 2012, just weeks before Sandy struck.

Here’s my set up for the context at the time of the August 2012 Hearing – note especially the last paragraph:,

The context for this year’s hearings is framed by another year of stinging jellyfish and growing threats of ecological collapse and harmful algae blooms in Barnegat Bay –

But far more serious problems lay buried beneath the radar.

Every now and then, a crisis provides a glimpse of the scope of those problems, which quickly fade in the 24 hour news cycle.

That is a radical departure from how things worked back in the day – like when rivers caught fire, politicians responded to public demands and passed the Clean Water Act.

For example, the recent Monmouth County water pipeline break was a perfect illustration of NJ’s multiple vulnerabilities to global warming – extreme weather, storm surge, sea level rise, coastal hazards, infrastructure, and climate change adaptation.

Unfortunately, things have not changed much, but actually gotten worse across the board, since then (see this and this and this).

The Legislature is abdicating it’s oversight and legislative roles to set policy that better protects the coast and respond to climate change – an existential threat ignored by Gov. Christie.

The foreground – and the house it was shot from – were wiped out by Sandy. How’s that for a caption?