EnviroPolitics Blog

Big BPU decision coming today: How to bring offshore wind energy to NJ towns, businesses and residents

After months of review, the state is expected to announce today how it plans to bring electricity from yet-to-be-built offshore wind farms to homes and businesses in New Jersey over the coming decade.

By TOM JOHNSON, NJ Spotlight News

The highly anticipated decision by the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities is crucial to the Murphy administration’s plan to rely on power from offshore wind turbines to smoothly transition the state away from its dependence on fossil fuels, which now provide more than 40% of electricity to customers.

Thirteen developers have submitted more than 80 proposals to the state agency as well as to the PJM Interconnection, the operator of the nation’s largest power grid. The projects vary in scale, scope and ambition.

Some involve upgrading existing onshore transmission lines at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Others envision building offshore substations and burying new transmission lines up to 50 miles or more off the Jersey coast in the New York Bight. The latter project is proposed by Ørsted/PSEG.

The 80 projects include those from Atlantic City Electric, Jersey Central Power & Light and PSEG, the owner of the state’s largest electric utility; offshore wind developers, and transmission companies. Depending on what and how many projects are selected by the BPU, costs are expected to run into billions of dollars, a cost ultimately to be paid by utility customers in New Jersey.

One unlikely outcome

The state also has the option to choose none of the projects, although most participants view that as unlikely.

“This is a big deal,’’ said Paul Patterson, an energy analyst at Glenrock Associates. “It is one of the most critical parts of offshore wind development. This is an issue not just for New Jersey, but for other parts of the country from Virginia to Maine.”

“This could set a road map for other states on how offshore wind can work,’’ said Doug O’Malley, director of Environment New Jersey and a longtime offshore wind advocate. “This has been a very, very competitive process.”

Read the full story here

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Bill Stepien, ex-Trump and Christie GOP strategist, did not deny 2020 election results, but many of his clients do

By IAN T. SHEARN, Contributing Writer NJ Spotlight News

Despite unpleasant departures from his two most famous clients — first, former Gov. Chris Christie and more recently, former President Donald Trump — Bill Stepien, New Jersey’s most prominent GOP operative endures.

Since Stepien’s well-publicized, self-proclaimed falling-out with Trump after the 2020 election where he served as campaign manager, his consulting firm, National Public Affairs, has collected over $3 million in political consulting fees, according to Federal Election Commission reports. The lion’s share of it has come from 17 Republican congressional candidates running in this year’s midterm elections.

Almost all of Stepien’s congressional candidates are MAGA loyalists — many of them endorsed, and some hand-picked, by Trump. And 11 of them are unapologetic election deniers, which was the very issue Stepien claims caused his break from Team Trump.

“I didn’t think what was happening was necessarily honest or professional,” Stepien testified to the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol. “That led to me stepping away,” he added in a video clip played by the committee at a televised public hearing in June.

Jeff Van Drew’s campaign paid Stepien’s firm $155,000 for consulting during this year’s primary, which Van Drew won with 87% of the vote.

For the most part, the national media portrayed Stepien as a Trump aide who spoke truth to misguided power. That appears to be true, but it didn’t stop Stepien from being paid by candidates pushing the election-denying fervor that has since consumed the Republican Party.

“Stepien is your classic follow-the-money kind of guy. … His story is similar to a lot of people in this business,” said Carl Golden, a longtime Republican insider who is now senior contributing analyst with the William J. Hughes Center for Public Policy at Stockton University. “And it certainly hasn’t hurt his bottom line.” (Golden is a regular opinion writer at NJ Spotlight News.)

Lucrative list of clients

Stepien, who declined requests for an interview, has a client list that includes New Jersey’s own Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-2nd), along with five other members of Congress who on Jan. 6, 2021 voted to reject President Biden’s victory: Reps. Ronny Jackson (R-TX), Warren Davidson (R-Ohio), Jason T. Smith (R-MO), Mary E. Miller (R-IL) and Markwayne Mullin (R-OK).

Stepien’s most lucrative client — with $744,000 in consulting fees — is Wyoming’s Republican House candidate Harriet Hageman, who trounced incumbent Liz Cheney in this year’s GOP primary. Cheney, the current vice chair on the House Select Committee, was publicly ostracized by Trump and stripped of her party leadership position after she supported Trump’s second impeachment last year.

Read the full story here

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Massive new container terminal coming to the Port of Baltimore

Officials said the new container terminal will give Baltimore’s port a substantial competitive advantage up and down the Eastern Seaboard.

By Lorraine Mirabella, Baltimore Sun

A sprawling new container terminal will be built at Tradepoint Atlantic, the logistics hub on the former site of Bethlehem Steel in Sparrows Point, easing capacity issues and boosting potential growth for the Port of Baltimore.

Tradepoint Atlantic announced a joint investment and partnership Tuesday with developer Terminal Investment Limited to create the 165-acre terminal with an on-dock rail facility at Coke Point. It is expected to employ about 1,000 people.

“This is one of the most important and consequential announcements we have made since setting out with our initial plans to redevelop the former Sparrows Point Steel Mill,” said Kerry Doyle, managing director of Tradepoint Atlantic, in an announcement.

Terminal Investment Limited is a Switzerland-based company owned by the shipping giant Mediterranean Shipping Co., one of the world’s largest operators of container ships and the Port of Baltimore’s largest shipping line.

While officials declined to disclose how much was being invested in the terminal, similar facilities run into the hundreds of millions of dollars. They also said it was a multiyear project and didn’t say when it might open.

The plans represent the next major phase of development at the 3,300-acre industrial center that has attracted more than 20 companies, such as Amazon, Under Armour, FedEx, BMW, and Volkswagen. The project is expected to create hundreds of other jobs throughout the permitting and construction process.

The container terminal would be the second built in the past decade in the United States, where ports have been experiencing congestion amid surging global trade. The other opened in Charleston, South Carolina, last year.

Officials said the new container terminal will give Baltimore’s port a substantial competitive advantage up and down the Eastern Seaboard.

The investment will create much-needed additional container-handling capacity in Baltimore and help drive economic growth, Ammar Kanaan, CEO of Terminal Investment Limited, said in the announcement.

“At the same time, we are confident that the new container terminal will constitute an important contribution to the development of Baltimore as a gateway for intermodal transport,” Kanaan said.

Read the full story here

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Only 5% of plastic waste generated by US last year was recycled, says Greenpeace

Americans discarded 51m tons of plastic in 2021 – of which almost 95% ended up in landfills, oceans, or scattered in the atmosphere

By Nina Lakhani The Guardian in New York

Only 5% of the mountains of plastic waste generated by US households last year was recycled, according to new research by Greenpeace.

Americans discarded 51m tons of wrappers, bottles, and bags in 2021 – about 309lb of plastic per person – of which almost 95% ended up in landfills, oceans, or scattered in the atmosphere in tiny toxic particles.

Plastic can take hundreds of years to break down – and we keep making more

The plastics problem is not just down to wanton consumerism or laziness – in fact, the situation would still be bad even if every household separated every piece of plastic and disposed of it in a dedicated recycling plant, according to Greenpeace.

Not a single type of plastic packaging in the US meets the definition of recyclable used by either the Federal Trade Commission or the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s new plastic economy initiative, the report found.

Even plastics long considered recyclable – bottles and jugs (PET #1 and HDPE #2) –fall far short of the 30% recycling rate needed to meet the definition of recyclable by the foundation. The reprocessing rate for the rest of the plastics used by millions of people every day to wrap leftovers, eat takeout or return unwanted online purchases is less than 5%.

The recycling sham will anger those who have spent time diligently washing out plastic containers and bottles, in the belief that they’d end up reprocessed and repurposed into another plastic package the world probably didn’t need.

“Corporations like Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Nestlé, and Unilever have worked with industry front groups to promote plastic recycling as the solution to plastic waste for decades. But the data is clear: practically speaking, most plastic is just not recyclable. The real solution is to switch to systems of reuse and refill,” said Lisa Ramsden, Greenpeace USA senior plastics campaigner.

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The report, Circular Claims Fall Flat Again, updates the 2020 survey of 370 recycling plants which found most plastics were not widely accepted, and even the bottles and jugs were not completely recycled or recyclable. Not much has changed, in fact, the official recycling rate in the US has fallen from a high of 9.5% in 2014 and 8.7% in 2018. At that time, the US, like many countries, exported millions of tons of plastic waste to China and counted it as recycled even though much of it was burned or dumped.

After China stopped accepting plastic waste in 2018 because it was basically garbage, too dirty to recycle, the shortfall in capacity was never recouped while plastic use kept rising.

Read the full story here

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Has Pa. turned a blind eye to the pollution potential of Shell’s giant ethane cracker?

The Shell facility opening soon has been granted a permit to emit more volatile organic compounds than the Clairton Coke Works, a notorious

*A view of Shell Chemical’s ethane cracker plant processing plant across the Allegheny River can be seen under construction on* Oct. 27, 2017, *in Monaca, Pennsylvania. Credit: Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images*

By Jon Hurdle, Inside Climate News

Fifteen years after Pennsylvania’s natural gas industry began to raise worries about air and water pollution, the industry’s critics now fear a new source of harmful emissions from the fledgling petrochemical industry, which is poised to become a major customer for the state’s abundant gas reserves.

In a state that has long nurtured the extraction of oil, coal, and now gas, environmentalists warn that a vast new Shell plant on the banks of the Ohio River 30 miles north of Pittsburgh will add to air and water problems in a region that has endured decades of pollution from the steel and coal industries.

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The plant, which is expected to open before the end of 2022, will convert ethane, a form of natural gas, into ethylene, a building block for plastics. The operation will produce millions of tons of tiny plastic pellets called “nurdles” which opponents predict will leak into the Ohio River and beyond during shipment, and will contribute to a flood of plastics that are polluting the world’s oceans and clogging landfills.

After being lured to Pennsylvania with the promise of $1.6 billion in state tax credits, and being awarded a state air permit to issue more volatile organic compounds than that emitted by the Clairton Coke Works, a notorious local polluter, the “cracker” plant appears to be getting the same easy ride from state officials as the fracking industry did starting in the mid-2000s, critics say.

The Shell plant, in Monaca, will take ethane, a liquid hydrocarbon separated from fracked natural gas, and “crack” its molecules to make ethylene and polyethylene resin pellets called nurdles, which are melted down and turned into all things plastic, from bottles to car parts.

“We are seeing a lot of these things repeat themselves with the cracker, and with the specter of petrochemical development in the region,” said Alison Steele, executive director of the Environmental Health Project, a nonprofit that has been monitoring the health impacts of the region’s natural gas industry, and representing affected residents, since 2012.

Read the full story here

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EPA’s Environmental Justice Efforts Moving Beyond Regulatory Structures and Into Programming

From The National Law Review

As we move toward two full years of the Biden Administration, we can see the US Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) environmental justice (EJ) efforts move from the creation of new offices and guidance materials toward seeing EJ-focused changes occurring in EPA’s efforts to regulate the physical environment. Below, we highlight three recent EJ-focused changes.

EPA’s Creation of its Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights

On September 24, EPA announced the creation of a new office merging functions previously managed by three existing programs at the agency: the Office of Environmental Justice, External Civil Rights Compliance Office, and Conflict Prevention and Resolution Center. The office will eventually be headed by a Senate-confirmed assistant administrator and be staffed by approximately 200 full-time employees. At the time the office was announced, EPA Administrator Michael Regan noted the move will embed “environmental justice and civil rights into the DNA of EPA and ensuring that people who’ve struggled to have their concerns addressed see action to solve the problems they’ve been facing for generations.”

The EJ office will supervise various activities we have previously covered, including weighing in on EJ issues in the compliance and permitting space; working to develop the capacity of environmentally overburdened communities to meaningfully participate in environmental decision making; and supervising EJ-focused spending included in the Inflation Reduction Act.

EPA’s Office of Land and Emergency Management Finalizes its EJ Action Plan

On September 30, EPA’s Office of Land and Emergency Management (OLEM) finalized its EJ Action Plan. OLEM’s Action Plan builds out EPA’s EJ efforts related to land resources governed by statutes, including the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) and the Comprehensive Environmental Recovery and Cleanup Act (CERCLA). OLEM’s EJ Action Plan builds out principles in EPA’s overall Equity Action Plan, which we discussed here.

Key efforts outlined in the OLEM EJ Action Plan include focusing OLEM’s efforts on environmentally overburdened communities, building out EPA’s RCRA site data resources to allow comprehensive mapping of RCRA sites with the potential for EJ impacts, working to prioritize EJ concerns as part of site assessment, and targeting funding in this space to EJ-impacted communities.

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