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From the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection
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Feds to begin review of Vineyard Wind’s second offshore wind project near Massachusetts and Rhode Island
By Renewables Now
The US Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) on Monday said it is launching the environmental review process for the Vineyard Wind South offshore wind project with a capacity of about 2 GW-2.3 GW.
The plan submitted by Vineyard Wind LLC, a joint venture between the renewables unit of Avangrid Inc (NYSE:AGR) and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners (CIP), calls for the installation of up to 130 wind turbines offshore Massachusetts and Rhode Island. The project is to be developed in phases, with phase one being the 804-MW Park City Wind project that has a power purchase agreement (PPA) with Connecticut’s Public Utilities Regulatory Authority.
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On June 30, BOEM will publish a notice of intent (NOI) to prepare an environmental impact statement (EIS) for the Vineyard Wind South project, which will initiate a 30-day public comment period. BOEM will then use the comments to prepare a scoping report identifying the issues that should be analysed in the Vineyard Wind South draft EIS.
The proposed project also includes two to five offshore substations, inter-array cables and up to five export cables that will link to the onshore grid in Barnstable County, Massachusetts at up to three onshore substations. Most of the project is located within Lease OCS-A 0534, with a small portion of the area within Lease OCS-A 0501 also identified for potential development, explains BOEM.
The land was worth millions. A Big Ag corporation sold it to Sonny Perdue’s company for $250,000.
Story by Desmond Butler
Graphics by John Muyskens
Videos by Joy Sharon Yi and Erin Patrick O’Connor
Washington Post, June 29, 2021
It was a curious time for Sonny Perdue to close a real estate deal.
In February 2017, weeks after President Donald Trump selected him to be agriculture secretary, Perdue’s company bought a small grain plant in South Carolina from one of the biggest agricultural corporations in America.
Had anyone noticed, it would have prompted questions ahead of his confirmation, a period when most nominees lay low and avoid potential controversy. The former governor of Georgia did not disclose the deal — there was no legal requirement to do so.
An examination of public records by The Washington Post has found that the agricultural company, Archer-Daniels-Midland (ADM), sold the land at a small fraction of its estimated value just as it stood to benefit from a friendly secretary of agriculture.
Perdue did not respond to repeated requests for comment on the real estate deal. Jackie Anderson, a spokeswoman forChicago-based ADM, denied that the company sold the property at a discount, saying that ADM began negotiations with Perdue’s former company, AGrowStar, in 2015 — well before Trump was elected — and could not find another buyer.
“This was nothing more than a business decision to sell a significantly underperforming asset,” she said.
Danny Brown, the former president of AGrowStar, confirmed negotiations began in late2015. But Brown said ADM wanted $4 million for the plant — 16 times what Perdue’s company ultimately paid for it.
The timing of the sale just as Perdue was about to become the most powerful man in U.S. agriculture raises legal and ethics concerns, from the narrow question of whether the secretary followed federal financial disclosure requirements to whetherthe transaction could have been an attempt to influence an incoming government official, in violation of bribery statutes, ethics lawyers say.
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Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey, RWJBarnabas Health break ground on new cancer hospital
Rutgers officials and New Jersey leaders attended Thursday’s ceremonial groundbreaking for the Jack and Sheryl Morris Cancer Center, which will function as a hospital and research facility. Photo by Daniel DellaPiazza / Rutgers University
By Joanne Chung, The Daily Targum
Construction on the new Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey began Thursday morning with a ceremonial groundbreaking for New Jersey’s first freestanding cancer hospital, according to an article from Rutgers Today.
The hospital will be called the Jack and Sheryl Morris Cancer Center, after New Brunswick development philanthropists Jack Morris and his wife Sheryl Morris, according to the article. It will offer inpatient and outpatient services and research laboratories, which will provide educational opportunities for students and a way for physician-scientists to apply the latest findings and treatments to patients.
The 510,000-square-foot, 12-story facility will also grant easier access to diagnostic tests, treatments and follow-up exams, according to the article. It will be able to offer wellness and education resources, including for cancer survivors.
“There is nothing that feels better or more gratifying than helping others in need,” Jack Morris said. “Cancer touches the lives of everyone — and we believe that people should not have to travel to New York or Pennsylvania to get great cancer care. It has been our vision, our hope and our dream to have the top cancer center in the nation right here in New Brunswick.”
The center will be on Somerset Street next to the already existing Rutgers Cancer Institute and Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital, according to the article.
Construction for the $750 million project is expected to finish in 2024, according to the article.
“With the RWJBarnabas health system we are looking forward to a healthier future in which our citizens can receive all the care that they need without ever leaving the state of New Jersey,” said Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences Chancellor Brian L. Strom. “Now, in our tireless quest to improve the life and health of our citizens, New Jersey opens another front in the war against disease, focused on cancer.”
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Requiem for a Pipeline: Keystone XL
Its beginnings coincided with a booming oil market, but the pipeline also made a perfect target for activists demanding an end to fossil fuels.
Pipes for the Keystone XL pipeline stacked in a yard near Oyen, Alberta, Canada, on Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2021. Credit: Jason Franson/Bloomberg via Getty Image
By Marianne Lavelle, Inside Climate News June 20, 2021
It was meant to be an express line from North America’s largest proven oil reserve to its biggest refining center and to deepen the bond between Canada and the United States as petroleum partners.
And it would have stood—or rather, lain—four feet underground, as a 1,700-mile steel monument to humanity’s triumph over the forces that at the time seemed to threaten the future of an oil-driven economy. Conventional oil reservoirs might be running out and alarms might be sounding over the damage that carbon dioxide pollution was doing to the atmosphere, but the Keystone XL pipeline would show America’s determination to carve out ever new oil corridors.
At least, that’s how it looked in 2008, when TransCanada and its partners announced plans to forge a $7 billion link between Alberta’s tar sands and the Texas Gulf Coast. By the time the company now known as TC Energy announced earlier this month that it was giving up the effort to build the pipeline, it was clear that oil could not so easily conquer the realities of the 21st century.
The 13-year fight over Keystone XL transformed the U.S. environmental movement, and dramatically shifted the political center of the American debate over energy and climate change. Instead of trying to get people to care about the future impact of a gas—carbon dioxide—that they couldn’t smell or see, environmentalists began focusing on the connection between climate change and the here-and-now effects of fossil fuel dependence: the takeover of land; the risk to air and water; and the injustice to those in the path of the fossil fuel industry’s plans. President Barack Obama’s presidency was a barometer of this change. Early on, his administration seemed poised to approve Keystone XL. Near the end of his second term, Obama became the first world leader to block a major U.S. oil infrastructure project over climate change.
But as Keystone XL’s brief revival under President Donald Trump demonstrated, the battle over oil’s future is far from over. Climate activists are pushing for President Joe Biden to stop Line 3, another Canadian tar sands pipeline now under construction in Minnesota. But the larger issue for the climate action movement is whether the United States can enact a comprehensive policy that truly reshapes energy use, as Biden has pledged to do, phasing out dependence on oil and its imprint on the American landscape.
Related:
‘Drill, Baby, Drill’
TransCanada announced its plan to build the Keystone XL in July 2008. In the oil and gas industry’s view it seemed impeccable timing, coinciding with a surging oil market. The price of crude soared past $140 a barrel that month; no one knew at the time that the record price was a peak the market would never hit again. It seemed like the world was entering an era of sustained high oil prices that would pump nothing but profit out of the energy-intensive production of thick, sticky bitumen from the sandy soil of remote Alberta.
Politically, a proposal to double the amount of Canadian oil coming into the United States also seemed well-timed. Even though both candidates for the 2008 presidential election said they favored action on climate change, there was no talk of it on the campaign trail or in debates. A bill to cut U.S. carbon emissions died in the Senate that summer, with neither Republican John McCain nor Democrat Barack Obama showing up to vote. People were worried about high gasoline prices. The chant that shook the rafters at the Republican convention was “Drill, Baby, Drill.”
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