As larger utilities seek to limit payments for customer-generated solar power, the ratepayer-owned Block Island Power Company convinced state legislators this session to remove a previous cap on its net metering program.
Block Island, Rhode Island, where the ratepayer-owned Block Island Power Company recently persuaded state lawmakers to remove a net metering cap. Credit: Timothy J. Quill / Creative Commons
A small Rhode Island utility this year did something virtually unheard of in its industry: It lobbied for permission to buy more solar power from its customers.
Net metering, in which utility customers are paid for unused electricity they send back to the grid, has been a contentious subject across the country. Many utilities see it as a threat to their profit-driven business models.
The Block Island Power Company, which serves about 1,600 members on the 10-square-mile island, is in a unique position as a ratepayer-owned nonprofit. The utility recently persuaded state lawmakers to remove a cap that had limited net-metered power to 3% of its peak load.
“We are proud to be one of the few electric utilities that are asking for a net metering cap to be lifted,” said Jeffery Wright, president of the utility, also known as the Block Island Utility District. “That is primarily because we are now a member-owned and -governed utility district.”
Rhode Island Gov. Daniel McKee signed legislation (SB 22) this month that allows the district — as well as the Pascoag Utility District in the northwestern corner of the state — to set its own maximum percentage, subject to approval by the state Public Utilities Commission.
The district reached the previous cap 18 months ago, and more than 30 applications for solar power have stacked up in the meantime, Wright said.
A Washington, D.C. judge has ruled that the conservative think tank the Competitive Enterprise Institute cannot be held responsible for an outside blogger’s 2012 online attack on a prominent climate scientist.
At the same time, the judge decided that a jury should decide whether the blogger, Rand Simberg, should be held liable for his post, which excoriated Pennsylvania State University climatologist Michael Mann and suggested that he had engaged in fraud. Mark Steyn, an outside blogger for the National Review, another conservative publication, also should face a trial over his own post, two days after Simberg’s, Superior Court Judge Alfred Irving Jr. ruled.
Steyn had quoted extensively from Simberg’s original broadside, comparing the climate scientist to Jerry Sandusky, the disgraced Penn State assistant football coach in the wake of Sandusky’s conviction for child sexual abuse, writing that Mann “molested and tortured data in the service of politicized science.”
After demanding a retraction and an apology that were not forthcoming, Mann sued for defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress.
The decisions last Thursday by Irving set the stage for a possible courtroom showdown on Mann’s seminal work, the iconic “hockey stick” graph of global temperature rise. But only the bloggers—not their publications—would face legal jeopardy.
In March, Superior Court Judge Jennifer Anderson granted National Review’s motion to be dismissed from Mann’s case on essentially the same grounds Irving cited in granting a summary judgment for the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), that the authors were not employees of CEI or the National Review.
Both Irving and Anderson are appointees of President George W. Bush.
Mann’s attorney, John Williams of Washington, D.C., said that the climate scientist is determined to pursue the nine-year-old case: “We’re pleased with the decision with respect to Steyn and Simberg, and look forward to trial.”
Mann’s legal team already has filed a motion for the court to reconsider its decision dismissing the case against National Review and is considering whether to appeal the CEI ruling.
CEI expressed confidence that Mann would not prevail. “The ruling is a testament to a robust public sphere where ideas are contested through evidence, speech, and debate,” said CEI President Kent Lassman in a statement posted online. “We expect that the remaining defendants will be vindicated in time.”
The Staying Power of Doubts
Mann’s “hockey stick” graph uses tree rings, boreholes, glacier retreat, and other proxies to show the global temperature record of the past 2,000 years, with a dramatic rise during the last half of the 20th century, giving the figure the look of a hockey stick laying on its side.
The judge declined a novel bid by Mann for a ruling on the validity of his science, refusing the scientist’s request that the bloggers be barred from using the defense that their critique of his science was “substantially true.” The ruling opens the door for them to bring into the trial contrarian science, as well as email exchanges between Mann and other climate scientists that were hacked from a university server in England and posted on the internet in 2009 in an incident that became known as “Climategate.”
“There remain a great number of genuine disputes of material fact as to the methods that Plaintiff used to develop his hockey stick graph, the conclusions to be drawn from the Climategate emails, and Plaintiff’s actions while under investigation,” wrote Irving. “A reasonable jury could find, from this evidence, in favor of either Plaintiff or the CEI Defendants.”
In one sense, Irving’s ruling demonstrates the staying power of the doubts raised by foes of climate action. Critiques leveled soon after Mann published his 23-year-old “hockey stick” research persist, even though 19 of the warmest years on record have occurred since then, and the scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming has grown substantially stronger.
The ruling also speaks to the high burden of proof for public figures like Mann in defamation cases under First Amendment law. Such a plaintiff must show that the defendants acted with “actual malice,” which means either knowing what was published was false or exhibiting reckless disregard for the truth, a standard established by the Supreme Court in rulings on libel suits against the news media, starting with New York Times v. Sullivan in 1964.
Irving spent much of his 34-page opinion sifting through which, if any, CEI officials bore responsibility for Simberg’s posting and whether there was any evidence they had a personal bias against Mann. He concluded that the sole CEI employee responsible for the posting of Simberg’s blog was a policy fellow just three years out of college, who “ran his eyes” over the article, checking for formatting errors and typos, paying no attention to the assertions the blog made. Irving said he saw no evidence that the fellow had great knowledge of the subject matter or animus towards Mann.
The judge added, however, that it was clear that “many writers and employees at CEI held a deep bias” against Mann and sought to tarnish his work, but they were not responsible for the Simberg blog.
Irving seemed to put equal weight on conspiracy theories that surrounded Climategate and the eight investigations by U.S. and U.K. government agencies and institutions concluded that there had been no wrongdoing by Mann or the other scientists. In 2016, a Washington, D.C. Court of Appeals looked at this same evidence, and concluded that Mann’s lawsuit had a likelihood of success on the merits.
Irving said his conclusion would have been different if CEI employees with demonstrated enmity toward Mann had any hand in publishing the Simberg blog, which the judge concluded clearly sought to convey that Mann “had engaged in fraud or the like.”
“It is likely that, had the CEI employees with deep bias against Plaintiff had a hand in publishing the Simberg Article, the Court of Appeals’ reasoning would stand today, as the investigatory reports exonerating Plaintiff are extensive, numerous, and reliable,” wrote Irving.
The judge’s ruling, if it stands and the case proceeds to trial, means that the bloggers will have to defend the accusation that they recklessly ignored those reports. But for now, the publishers who gave the bloggers a platform have succeeded in their bid to avoid liability, by virtue of the arm’s length relationship they maintained with the authors who wrote under their banner.
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The U.S. House of Representatives has approved a bill that would require the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to establish national drinking water standards for perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS).
As reported by The Hill, the PFAS Action Act of 2021 passed the lower chamber with bipartisan support, 241-183.
The legislation, introduced by Michigan Reps. Debbie Dingell and Fred Upton would demand that the EPA regulate the most common PFAS—PFOA and PFOS—within two years of enactment, as well as designate these two compounds as “hazardous substances” under the Superfund law within a year.
To date, the EPA has only established “health advisory levels” for PFAS compounds.
“Nearly every American has PFAS coursing through their blood,” Dingell said, during a debate on the House floor prior to the July 21 vote. Her co-sponsor, Upton, recalled a 2014 lead contamination tragedy in Flint, Michigan, stressing that his state knows “a little bit about water contamination.”
“PFAS is bad too — really bad,” Upton said. “And EPA has been slow at the switch.”
The bill would give the EPA five years both to determine whether all PFAS should be designated as hazardous and to submit a review of the agency’s PFAS cleanup efforts. The EPA would also have 180 days to add PFOA and PFOS to the Clean Air Act’s hazardous pollutants list and would need to develop effluent limits for PFAS under the Clean Water Act.
The EPA administrator would need to mandate “comprehensive toxicity testing” on all PFAS by sorting compounds into tiered categories and adjusting testing accordingly. A final rule on testing would occur within two years.
The bill would limit industrial discharges of PFAS and allocate $200 million annually from 2022 to 2026 for wastewater treatment, as well as restrict the incineration of PFAS wastes. The agency would make PFAS-free labels available for relevant products while establishing a household well water testing website that clearly communicates public health risks.
“This approach puts the focus on following the science, by tailoring testing to relevant subgroups of PFAS and focusing regulation on the riskiest chemicals,” said Rep. Frank Pallone of New Jersey.
Brick (NJ) police have been stepping up their patrols at the popular F-Cove anchorage where boaters gather daily during the summer months. The cove, which was dug to support a lagoon community that was never built, and was later conveyed to the state and federal governments for preservation, swells with boats on weekends.
Beginning the weekend of July 17, the Brick Police Marine Unit, consisting of two boats, four officers and two EMTs, made thirteen vessel stops and issued nine summonses for a variety of maritime law offenses, including careless operation, wake zone violations and registration and licensing issues. The following day, the unit conducted eleven vessel stops and issued fifteen summonses.
F-Cove, in Brick, on a summer day. (Photo: Daniel Nee)
During that weekend, police presence was heavy in and around the F Cove. Agencies that worked together to monitor and patrol there included the Ocean County Sheriff’s Office, the New Jersey State police and the US Fish and Wildlife Service.
New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D) appointed state Sen. Chris Brown (R) to a position in the Department of Community Affairs’ Division of Local Government Services on July 19.
The position required Brown to leave the state Senate. Brown started his new job on July 20.
Brown first won election to the Senate to represent District 2 on Nov. 7, 2017, defeating incumbent Colin Bell (D) 53.52% to 46.48%. Brown had announced in February that he would not seek re-election.
Vacancies in the New Jersey Legislature are filled by interim appointment by the county leadership of the party that last controlled the district.
The New Jersey Senate is the upper chamber of the state legislature. Currently, there are 25 Democrats, 14 Republicans, and one vacancy in the Senate.
Mercedes-Benz says it is “shifting from electric-first to electric-only,” with plans for having battery-electric vehicles (BEV) in all segments the company serves by next year, and from 2025 onward, all newly launched vehicle platforms to be electric-only. By 2025, customers will be able to choose an all-electric alternative for every model the company makes.
“The EV shift is picking up speed – The tipping point is getting closer, and we will be ready as markets switch to electric-only by the end of this decade,” says Ola Källenius, CEO of Daimler AG and Mercedes-Benz AG.
“This step marks a profound reallocation of capital. By managing this faster transformation while safeguarding our profitability targets, we will ensure the enduring success of Mercedes-Benz. Thanks to our highly qualified and motivated workforce, I am convinced that we will be successful in this exciting new era.”
