A coalition of leading environmental organizations – the Delaware Riverkeeper Network, PennFuture, Clean Air Council, Environment New Jersey, and Penn Environment – submitted a 17-page legal Petition (Petition) to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) urging the federal government to override the regional Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC) and “promptly initiate rulemaking” necessary to protect aquatic life in the Delaware Estuary, including the federally endangered Atlantic Sturgeon that are the brink of extinction.
The Petition states that “because the DRBC is failing to discharge its duty to protect the health of the Delaware River Estuary at the expense of valuable aquatic life—including the federally endangered Atlantic Sturgeon” and because the 4 watershed states have similarly failed to carry out needed protections, “Petitioners now request of the EPA to promptly exercise its Clean Water Act Section 303(c)(4)(B) authority to prepare and publish proposed regulations setting forth a revised [Water Quality Standards] that includes a designated use for fish “propagation” and upgraded D.O. criteria to support that revised designated use.”
According to the petition, the DRBC and the watershed states have failed to recognize that the Delaware Estuary, from Trenton to the top of the Bay, is being used for maintenance and propagation of resident fish and other aquatic life; as well as for spawning and nursery habitat for anadromous fish; and have similarly failed to take action to institute water quality legal standards essential for protecting critical species such as the federally endangered Atlantic Sturgeon of the River.
According to the organizations, the Delaware River Basin Commission, and the four watershed states, have been repeatedly and formally urged to recognize these aquatic life uses, and to upgrade associated water quality protections, particularly dissolved oxygen standards.
These requests, dating back more than a decade, have failed to spark needed protective action other than additional scientific research which the organizations say is unneeded given the robust scientific data already available on the record.
RADISSON, Quebec — Hundreds of feet below a remote forest near the Hudson Bay, Serge Abergel inspected the spinning turbines at the heart of the biggest subterranean power plant in the world, a massive facility that converts the water of the La Grande River into a current of renewable electricity strong enough to power a midsize city.
Mr. Abergel, a senior executive at Hydro Quebec, has for years been working on an ambitious effort to send electricity produced from the river down through the woods of northern Maine and on to Massachusetts, where it would help the state meet its climate goals.
Yet today, work on the $1 billion project is at a standstill.
An existing transmission corridor in Maine was widened to accommodate the new line.
Over the past few years, an unlikely coalition of residents, conservationists, and Native Americans waged a rowdy campaign funded by rival energy companies to quash the effort. The opponents won a major victory in November, when Maine voters passed a measure that halted the project. Following a legal fight, proponents appealed to the state Supreme Court, which will hear arguments on the case on May 10 about whether such a referendum is legal.
At stake is more than one transmission line. The fiercely contested project is emblematic of fights going on around the country, as plans to build clean energy infrastructure run into opposition from residents resistant to new development, preservationists, and other companies with their own economic interests at stake.
“At the end of the day, everyone might want more transmission for renewable energy,” said Timothy Fox, vice president at ClearView Energy Partners, an independent research firm. “But no one wants it in their backyard.”
The project in Maine, known as New England Clean Energy Connect, or NECEC, is the kind of large-scale, clean-energy infrastructure that will be required if the United States is to shift away from fossil fuels — a transition scientists say is urgently needed in order to prevent further catastrophic climate change. According to a major study by Princeton University, the country must triple its transmission capacity by 2050 to have a chance at reaching its goal of not adding any more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by that point.
For years, everything in Maine was going according to plan.
State and federal regulators closely studied the project and gave approvals at every stage. Governors in Massachusetts and Maine were on board.
And Hydro Quebec and Avangrid, its partner on the project that will operate the transmission lines and equipment in the U.S., spent hundreds of millions of dollars readying construction and installing the first 78 of more than 832 new high-voltage transmission poles that would allow energy produced in northern Canada to keep the lights on in Boston.
In Bingham, Me., signs advertised opposition to the hydroelectricity project.
But there was resistance to the project almost from the start. Maine residents, frustrated by years of poor service by Central Maine Power, a local utility owned by Avangrid, found common cause with environmental organizations skeptical of hydropower.
Those local groups found deep-pocketed supporters in three energy companies that operate natural gas and nuclear plants in the region and which stood to lose money if cheaper hydropower entered the New England grid.
After opponents got a referendum question about the project on last November’s ballot, both sides threw money at the issue, spending more than $100 million — a record for a Maine initiative — on a slugfest that tied the transmission project to hot button issues like gun rights and the Affordable Care Act.
Though Hydro Quebec and Avangrid outspent the opposition by a margin of 3 to 1, residents were not sold on the merits of the project. On Election Day, 59 percent of Maine voters approved a measure that brought work on the NECEC to a screeching halt, at least for the time being.
If the Maine Supreme Court sides with Hydro Quebec and Avangrid, work on the project could resume and electricity could be flowing from the reservoirs of Canada into the New England grid as soon as 2024.
But if the NECEC is scrapped, it will represent a major setback for those working to wean the United States off fossil fuels, according to independent energy experts. Development of a utility-scale clean energy project requires time and money, and the prospect that it could be killed by voters — even after it is vetted and permitted by government regulators — would inject a level of risk that could scare away investment.
“As hard as it is to explain and defend a project like this, it is so easy for people to come and torpedo it, and they don’t even have to tell the truth,” said Mr. Abergel. “If you can put a stop to these long-term projects a year before they’re completed, it raises big questions about the energy transition and how we’re going to get it done.”
Serge Abergel, Hydro Quebec U.S.’s chief operating officer. “As hard as it is to explain and defend a project like this, it is so easy for people to come and torpedo it, and they don’t even have to tell the truth,” he said.
Hydro Quebec has also been exporting power to the United States and other Canadian provinces for decades. Five lines run from the company’s grid into New York, Vermont, and Massachusetts, and another major transmission project is in the works to bring hydropower into the New York grid.
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Annual tagging program hopes to answer the question
From New York State’s Department of Environmental Conservation
Since 2003, fish biologists in DEC’s Hudson and Delaware Marine Fisheries unit have been studying the population, life cycle, and habitats of the endangered Atlantic sturgeon to manage and conserve this signature species.
Atlantic sturgeon spawned in the Hudson spend one to six years in the river before they migrate to the ocean. Annual counting and tagging of the young fish helps determine how the relative abundance (population) is changing over time in response to management actions such as the coast-wide fishing moratorium that was established in 1998. By analyzing several years’ worth of catch data, biologists can determine population trends in the Hudson River stock. Is it stable? Increasing? Decreasing?
The juvenile Atlantic sturgeon survey takes place in late February through early May in Haverstraw Bay, an overwintering area for these young fish. Fisheries staff use anchored gill nets to catch the sturgeon. The sturgeon are weighed, measured for length, and examined for previous tags. A small sample is taken from each fish for genetic and age analysis. Untagged fish are tagged under the dorsal fin with a Passive Integrated Transponder or PIT tag. This tag is similar to a microchip put in pets and is about the size of a grain of rice.
Since the start of the program in 2004, standardized monitoring suggests the Hudson River stock may be recovering in response to the coast-wide fishing moratorium. Additional years of monitoring will help establish recovery targets for the species as a whole.
West Milford resident Bret Jenkins stands in front of a trail that has been blocked by trees cut by the township. Jenkins says the township should have come up a better way to keep ATV riders out of the woods.
Some West Milford, NJ, residents are outraged that the township sent a crew into a wooded area on Earth Day last month to chop down trees and block the trails that ATV riders have been carving out for generations.
There is no public land anywhere in New Jersey where riding an ATV, quad, or dirt bike is legal. West Milford, with 87 square miles of mostly watershed, is cut with trails — and a favored spot for off-roading has long been a patch of municipally-owned forest off Macopin Road and behind the Camelot Estates.
Residents of Camelot Estates say they’ve shared the trails with dirt bikers for generations. But that share-the-road relationship ended on April 22, when, without warning, the township sent a crew with chainsaws into the forest to cut down the trees and lay them across the trails.
“I came home from work, took a walk in the woods, and I wanted to throw up,” said Dave Mussina, who lives on King Arthur’s Court at the edge of the woods. Mussina’s wife works from home and she heard the whirr of the chainsaws as they ripped through the natural playground where the couple’s six boys all play.
“I stopped counting at 85 the number of trees they took down,” Mussina said. “It’s completely absurd that these trees were cut down. It’s sick. And they did on Earth Day, no less.”
West Milford Township cut down these trees to block the trails used by ATV riders in a patch of woods behind Camelot Drive.
Visiting Professor Christina Gerhardt (right front), gives Princeton faculty, students, and community members an overview of Sayreville, New Jersey’s coastal history on a walk held on April 26 to discuss the impact of sea-level rise. Photo by Sameer A. Khan/Fotobuddy
FromDenise Valenti, Princeton University Office of Communications
In 2012, Hurricane Sandy inundated Weber Avenue in Sayreville, New Jersey, with 18 feet of water. If climate change continues unabated, it will be underwater permanently in less than 100 years thanks to a predicted sea-level rise of 4 to 8 feet.
Princeton researchers, students, and community members visited the now-desolate street this week in two groups as part of the High Water Line: New Jersey, a public-facing project initiated and carried out by Christina Gerhardt, the Currie C. and Thomas A. Barron Visiting Professor in the Environmental Humanities in the High Meadows Environmental Institute (HMEI) and visiting associate professor in HMEI and the German department.
Most residents along Weber Avenue and the surrounding streets are long gone, having accepted buyouts offered through New Jersey’s Blue Acres program after Hurricane Sandy. The area is adjacent to the Washington Canal, which connects the Raritan and South rivers not far from Raritan Bay.
Gerhardt brought the groups to the site to physically mark where the Raritan is predicted to claim the surrounding area once sea-level rise reaches 5 feet. Using a liner filled with blue-tinted, water-soluble chalk, they drew a line through the neighborhood, which borders township parks and facilities and where there are a few remaining homes.
“It depends on whether or not we get our act together and reduce carbon emissions,” Gerhardt said. If the planet warms further, she said, the impact will be more profound.
A 2014 map by New Jersey’s Department of Environmental Protection illustrates the vulnerability of New Jersey’s coastal communities to sea-level rise. Map courtesy of New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection
Through the High Water Line project, Gerhardt, founding director of Environmental Humanities at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, is illustrating the impact of urban sea level rise. In doing so, she hopes to spark curiosity and engagement with the issue, she said.
Since arriving at Princeton in the spring of 2021, Gerhardt has worked with Climate Central, an independent organization of climate researchers and journalists, to create a map of the historic and future shorelines in the region using their Surging Seas software suite. Climate Central’s coastal mapping tool is available for public use to visualize how New Jersey’s coastlines will change with sea-level rise.
Aaron Shkuda, program manager for the Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism and the Humanities and lecturer in architecture, said this week’s “walk-and-chalk” tours of the high water line, as Gerhardt calls them, are “like a living map. You’re moving through the space in order to understand it.”
The science on sea-level rise is clear, but Shkuda said even he feels a weariness from climate change narratives. “You can talk about x number of feet of sea-level rise, but when you actually see where the water might come from in the next five years, or a decade, or 50 years, that makes it all the more real to people and can drive them to action,” he said.
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