EnviroPolitics Blog

Sea level rise could bring worse problems than flooding to NJ cities

Camden flooding — *Rainwater remains on East State St. in the Cramer Hill neighborhood in Camden, NJ on Tuesday, November 26, 2024.*

By Steven Rodas | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com

The forecasted rise of sea levels throughout New Jersey keeps putting residents in difficult positions.

It’s already meant potentially coughing up millions in tax dollars to build a massive concrete wall in Highlands, adding structure elevations to building blueprints at the Jersey Shore and handing over the keys to environmental regulators statewide to move to non-flood zones.

There’s another factor that merits much consideration, according to researchers at Drexel University.

The combined sewer system.

And how not just rising ocean levels but more intense rainfall will make managing more water so much harder.

This older method of dealing with combined sewage — wherein rain and what you flush down your toilet at home end up in the same treatment plant — can mean that during storms or noteworthy downpours, this wastewater can back up in to homes and onto the streets.

Climate change causing the seas to rise — affecting water levels at the Delaware River and fueling frequent harsh rainstorms — will translate to more water which complicates the matter.

For Camden, the latest projections from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which also consider notable greenhouse gas emission levels, show parts of the city likely being inundated by roughly 2.5 and 3.5 feet of increased ocean levels by 2100. Some Rutgers University projections point to as much as 5 feet of sea level rise by the end of the century if measures aren’t taken to cull the amount of harmful gases.

Read the full story here

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Offshore wind developer to sit out NJ/NY plan for Trump’s term

A French energy company has paused its plans to build an offshore wind farm off New York and New Jersey for the duration of President-elect Donald Trump’s upcoming term.

A French energy giant is halting a plan to build an offshore wind farm near the New York-New Jersey coastline following President-elect Donald Trump’s victory earlier this month.

TotalEnergies SE, the Paris-based oil and gas conglomerate, said it would halt the project in what industry observers say is a sign of things to come under a second Trump administration.

“Offshore wind, I have decided to put the project on pause” with Trump’s return, Total CEO Patrick Pouyanne told a conference in London on Tuesday. His comments were reported by Bloomberg News.

A French energy giant said it would pause plans to develop offshore wind farms near the New York-New Jersey coastline.Bloomberg via Getty Images

Pouyanne said that the company plans to revisit the project in four years, when political winds in the US could shift once again.

Total’s subsidiary, Attentive Energy, was one of six companies that committed a total of $4.37 billion in 2022 to build offshore wind farms in New York Bight — the body of water that hugs the coastline stretching from Cape May Inlet in New Jersey to the Montauk Point on Long Island’s eastern tip.

The planned project is still in the early stages as the companies recently obtained leasing rights from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management — the federal agency which operates under the auspices of the Department of the Interior.

Many of the largest offshore wind companies put a brave face on the election results, pledging to work with Trump and Congress to build power projects and ignoring the incoming president’s oft-stated hostility to them.

Read the full story here

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Wyoming’s lamb herders losing out to Australia

The Wyoming Sheep Industry is facing stiff competition, with 70% of America’s lamb and sheep meat imported from Australia and New Zealand. Wyoming sheep herders are selling direct to consumers to try and gain market share.

By Jackie Dorothy, Cowboy State Daily

Winter’s arctic winds will soon be blowing over Wyoming, and, in preparation, the sheep herds have all been divided out along the plains. 2,000 ewes will be wintering in Brad Boner’s pastures in Converse County, waiting to give birth in the spring and start the cycle all over again.

Boner is a fourth generation Wyoming sheep herder, who has set aside approximately one third of his sheep herd for breeding stock. The rest of the lambs have been sold for meat. As he prepares to ship out his lambs this coming Monday for production, Boner said he is aware of the disadvantage Wyoming sheep herders have compared to their counterparts from Down Under.

“About 70% of the lamb sold or consumed in the U.S. is Australian and from New Zealand,” Alison Crane, the Wyoming Wool Growers Association director, said. “We import a ton. It’s a major discussion happening in the sheep industry nationally about how we got here. There’s just been a steady decline and inventory across the country since 1960. It is partly due to the Wool Act and the trade agreements that we had and tariffs.

“If you look at federal legislation and how our federal grazing has been managed since the 1960s, you can see how things have changed drastically,” she told Cowboy State Daily. “It opened up the floodgates for Australia and New Zealand to start importing lamb. Then we have continually decreased our inventory and opened up a bigger market for them.”

“It comes back to the food security issue,” Boner said. “If we aren’t producing the sheep here, we’re dependent on somebody else to provide it for us. The Australian market share has continually grown over the last 20 years. Their dollar is weaker than ours and so we have a 35% disadvantage against them in just in the exchange rate which is very hard to compete against. They also have lower production costs than us. They have no predators and all this combined makes them very difficult to compete with.”

Read the full story here

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Residents invited to combine food donations with their recycling

Atlantic County, NJ residents can easily donate non-perishable food items to those in need on their recycling day between Monday, December 2, and Friday, December 13, 2024, as part of the Atlantic County Utilities Authority’s (ACUA) 34th Annual Holiday Food Drive.

To participate, residents can simply place a clearly marked bag of donations at the curb on their scheduled recycling day during the two-week period. ACUA’s recycling crews will then collect and deliver donations to the Community FoodBank of New Jersey (CFBNJ), Southern Branch, in Egg Harbor Township.

“Our food drive makes it very easy to help others in need this holiday season,” said ACUA President Matthew DeNafo. “We hope you’ll join us by placing out a bag of donations. Our crews will handle the rest.”

Suggested donations include canned tuna and meats, soups, meals in a can, cereal, peanut butter, feminine hygiene products or diapers. No perishable, frozen items or food in glass jars.

According to statistics provided by CFBNJ:

Nearly 35,000 people in Atlantic County are food insecure, including 10,000 children.
Atlantic County has one of the highest rates of food insecurity in the state, about 1 in 8 people.
Atlantic County has one of the highest rates of child food insecurity at 17.4% (about 1 in 6).

CFBNJ provides donated food to more than 300 partner agencies across Atlantic, Cape May and Cumberland counties for distribution. These charities include emergency food pantries, homeless shelters, soup kitchens, and other charitable feeding programs.

Since its inception, the ACUA Holiday Food Drive has provided more than one million lbs. of food to those in need.

Atlantic County residents not serviced through ACUA’s curbside recycling program can bring donations to the ACUA Geo Administrative Building at 6700 Delilah Rd., or to the Community FoodBank of New Jersey’s Southern Branch located in Egg Harbor Township at 6735 Horse Pike.

For more information, call (609) 272-6950 or visit www.acua.com/fooddrive.

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NJ Gov. Phil Murphy has a surprise Christmas gift for you

By Drew Sheneman | For The Star-Ledger

‘Tis the season of giving, just not as much as before. It had to happen eventually, the days of fat wads of federal pandemic cash distributed amongst the states have come to an end and with it the enthusiasm with which it was spent. Memos leaked this week of the Murphy administration requesting such belt tightening measures as pay and hiring freezes, unless mandated by law, and spending cuts in the range of 5 percent. Party’s over, if you can call a global pandemic a party.

This shift to this new relative austerity isn’t exclusive to New Jersey. Plenty of states have been warning about the dreaded “fiscal cliff” when the once plentiful federal funds were set to dry up. There are bound to be plenty of budgets in the upcoming year that are no where near as fat and sassy as they used to be.

Read the full story here

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Hapag-Lloyd Secures Green Methanol Supply from China for Retrofitted Containerships

From gCaptain

Hapag-Lloyd has secured a major agreement with Beijing-based clean energy provider Goldwind for the annual supply of 250,000 tons of green methanol.

The deal marks a crucial step in the shipping giant’s decarbonization journey, with the green methanol blend expected to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 70 percent.

What is green methanol? Green methanol is a low-carbon liquid fuel that’s produced without polluting emissions and is a promising alternative to fossil fuels. It’s made from green hydrogen and non-fossil carbon, which can come from agricultural and forestry waste or be captured from the atmosphere.

“We are fully committed to the 1.5-degree target of the Paris Agreement… This will bring us an important step closer to our goal of achieving net-zero fleet operations by 2045,” said Rolf Habben Jansen, CEO of Hapag-Lloyd AG.

The green methanol supply could potentially reduce Hapag-Lloyd’s fleet operations’ CO2e emissions by up to 400,000 tons annually compared to conventional fuels. This aligns with Hapag-Lloyd’s ambitious target to cut absolute fleet GHG emissions by approximately one-third by 2030, compared to 2022 levels.

Read the full story here

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