EnviroPolitics Blog

Catherine McCabe, NJDEP’s commissioner, retiring on Jan. 15

NJDEP Commissioner Catherine McCabe will be retiring on Jan. 15, 2021.

By Tom Johnson, NJ Spotlight

Department of Environmental Protection Commissioner Catherine McCabe plans to retire effective Jan. 15, ending a three-year stint during which she sought to spur more aggressive action by the agency in fighting climate change and tackling problems faced by environmental justice communities.

McCabe announced her departure Tuesday in an early morning e-mail, telling staff she had advised Gov. Phil Murphy of plans to retire early next year. “As with all personal milestones for me, this was a family decision,’’ the note said, while expressing an interest to spend more time with her children and grandchildren.

In a news release by the governor’s office, Murphy said he will announce a successor in the coming weeks. The odds-on favorite appears to be Shawn LaTourette, a deputy commissioner and chief of staff at DEP, who sources said has had a key role in running the agency over recent months.

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Other McCabe coverage:
DEP Commissioner Catherine McCabe to Retire (NJ Business Magazine)
LaTourette may be early front runner for Environmental Protection cabinet post (NJ Globe)
Catherine McCabe, the state’s top environmental regulator, to retire (NorthJersey.com)

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Trump threatens to veto major defense bill unless Congress repeals a legal shield for tech giants like Facebook. Google and Twitter

By Tony Romm, Washington Post

President Trump on Tuesday threatened to veto an annual defense bill authorizing nearly $1 trillion in military spending unless Congress opens the door for Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites to be held legally liable for the way they police their platforms.

Trump delivered his ultimatum — calling for the repeal of a federal law known as Section 230 — in a pair of late-night tweets that transformed a critical national security debate into a political war over his unproved allegations that Silicon Valley’s technology giants exhibit systemic bias against conservatives.

“Section 230, which is a liability shielding gift from the U.S. to ‘Big Tech’ (the only companies in America that have it — corporate welfare!), is a serious threat to our National Security & Election Integrity,” Trump tweeted.

Unless the “very dangerous & unfair Section 230 is not completely terminated as part of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA),” Trump continued, “I will be forced to unequivocally VETO the Bill when sent to the very beautiful Resolute desk.”

Section 230: The little law that defined how the Internet works

FCC push to rethink legal protections for tech giants marks major turn amid months of political pressure

Section 230 is a broad, decades-old federal law that spares a wide array of sites and services from being held liable for the content posted by their users — and, in the process, the decisions about the posts, photos and videos that tech companies take down or leave online. It is considered one of the Web’s foundational laws, crafted in large part to facilitate free expression digitally.

Many lawmakers — Democrats and Republicans — increasingly have come to question whether the protections are outdated, conferring legal immunity on tech giants at a time when they have failed to crack down on hate speech, election disinformation and other harmful content online. But Trump and his Republican allies have seized on the debate to advance their arguments that Facebook, Google, Twitter and others should be penalized for exhibiting systemic political bias against conservatives — a charge for which they have provided scant evidence, and one that tech giants long have denied.

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Joe Biden taps adviser who ties gasoline price to emissions

President Obama high-fiving Jared Bernstein in 2010. President-elect Joe Biden named Bernstein to the Council of Economic Advisers. Pete Souza/White House/Flickr

By Scott Waldman, E&E News reporter

President-elect Joe Biden’s financial policy will be shaped — at least in part — by an economic adviser who believes fossil fuels are “severely underpriced” because they don’t consider the harm caused by climate change.

Biden announced yesterday that Jared Bernstein would be one of three members of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. Bernstein previously served as Biden’s economic adviser during his vice presidency, from 2009 to 2011, and was a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a progressive think tank in Washington.

If his past comments are any guide, Bernstein will be the leading climate voice in the group.

Bernstein has argued that there hasn’t been a proper accounting of the economic harm caused by climate change and that bold ideas — such as the Green New Deal — are necessary to address the real cost of human-caused global warming.

In a piece published last year by Vox, he wrote that a true accounting of climate change means making corporations responsible for “polluting the environment pay for the damage they’re doing to the rest of us.”

“If the price system isn’t picking up the true cost of the damage and short-sighted people — which is most of us — are okay with that, then there’s a role for government to realign the higher social cost of fossil fuels with its lower actual cost,” he wrote.

Bernstein will be part of the three-member Council of Economic Advisers, which will be chaired by Cecilia Rouse. Rouse, who must be Senate-confirmed, is the dean of the Princeton University School of Public and International Affairs and would be the first Black woman and the fourth woman overall to lead the CEA.

The third member will be Heather Boushey, president and co-founder of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. As the name suggests, the Council of Economic Advisers shapes the president’s financial policy.

Biden’s economic policy advisers are part of a “dream team,” Jason Furman, the chair of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, wrote in a Twitter post.

Bernstein “is a keen analyst and passionate advocate for working people who is also trusted and respected across the political spectrum. He brings macro, trade, labor & more to the role,” Furman wrote.

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Ex-Penn St. president’s Sandusky-related conviction restored

A federal appeals court on Tuesday reinstated former Penn State President Graham Spanier’s conviction for child endangerment over his handling of a report that former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky had sexually abused a boy in a team shower. (Matt Rourke/AP)

By MARK SCOLFORO ASSOCIATED PRESS

A federal appeals court on Tuesday reinstated former Penn State President Graham Spanier’s conviction for child endangerment over his handling of a report that former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky had sexually abused a boy in a team shower.

The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled a lower-court judge had improperly vacated Spanier’s misdemeanor jury conviction for the 2001 incident.

Spanier’s defense attorney declined comment.

A federal magistrate judge in April 2019 threw out Spanier’s conviction a day before he was to turn himself in to begin serving a jail sentence of two months, followed by two months of house arrest. The judge gave prosecutors three months to retry Spanier, but that has been on hold during the appeal.

Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro said in a release that Spanier “turned a blind eye to child abuse by not reporting his knowledge of Jerry Sandusky’s assaults to law enforcement.”

U.S. Magistrate Judge Karoline Mehalchick in Scranton had agreed with Spanier that he had been improperly charged under a 2007 law for allegations that dated to 2001.

Prosecutors had argued the 1995 and 2007 versions of the law encompassed and criminalized the same conduct.

U.S. Circuit Judge Mike Fisher, joined by two others, wrote in the opinion released Tuesday that Spanier’s due process rights would only be violated if the state Superior Court’s ruling against him that upheld his conviction had been an ‘unexpected and indefensible’ interpretation of the child endangerment statute in light of prior law.”

“We conclude that it was not,” wrote Fisher, a former Pennsylvania attorney general and state senator.

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FBI probe focuses on Buffalo trash disposal contracts, contributions to mayor

The FBI has questioned the former CEO of a waste disposal company, Modern Corp., about the contracts it received from Buffalo Mayor Byron W. Brown’s administration and its contributions to Brown’s political campaign committee.

Buffalo Mayor Byron W. Brown

By Dan Herbeck, Buffalo News

The former chief operating officer of a Lewiston waste disposal business testified before a federal grand jury earlier this year about campaign donations to Mayor Byron W. Brown and the company’s contracts with the City of Buffalo, two sources said.

Gary E. Smith, the former Modern Corp. executive, was also questioned three times by FBI agents investigating the criminal activities of G. Steven Pigeon, the former Erie County Democratic Party chairman and lobbyist.

Pigeon has been cooperating with the FBI since pleading guilty to political corruption charges more than two years ago.

According to two sources with knowledge of the investigation, Smith told authorities that the mayor never demanded campaign donations from him in exchange for Brown approving Modern Corp.’s city contracts.

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Smith also told authorities he does not know what conversations Pigeon had with the mayor, the two sources said.

Those sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told The Buffalo News that Smith gave authorities the following information:

• In 2015, Pigeon worked for Modern as a $25,000-a-month lobbyist, and one of Pigeon’s duties was trying to convince Brown and other city officials to give Modern a no-bid extension on its contract to dispose of the city’s garbage. The contract was worth about $5.5 million a year.

• Pigeon at one point asked Smith to pay him an additional $5,000 a month for Maurice Garner, a close political associate and confidante of Brown, in hopes that Garner could help convince the mayor to approve the contract extension. The Modern executive balked at the $5,000 but agreed to pay Pigeon an additional $2,500 a month for Garner’s help. Smith told authorities he does not know whether Pigeon gave that money to Garner.

• An aide to the mayor told Smith in May 2015 that the city had decided to extend Modern’s contract, but the city quickly changed course and put the contract up for public bidding after FBI agents and State Police raided Pigeon’s home office in downtown Buffalo, seizing his computers and business records.

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E.P.A.’s Final Deregulatory Rush Runs Into Open Staff Resistance

By Lisa Friedman, New York Times

WASHINGTON — President Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency was rushing to complete one of its last regulatory priorities, aiming to obstruct the creation of air- and water-pollution controls far into the future, when a senior career scientist moved to hobble it.

Thomas Sinks directed the E.P.A.’s science advisory office and later managed the agency’s rules and data around research that involved people. Before his retirement in September, he decided to issue a blistering official opinion that the pending rule — which would require the agency to ignore or downgrade any medical research that does not expose its raw data — will compromise American public health.

“If this rule were to be finalized it would create chaos,” Dr. Sinks said in an interview in which he acknowledged writing the opinion that had been obtained by The New York Times. “I thought this was going to lead to a train crash and that I needed to speak up.”

With two months left of the Trump administration, career E.P.A. employees find themselves where they began, in a bureaucratic battle with the agency’s political leaders. But now, with the Biden administration on the horizon, they are emboldened to stymie Mr. Trump’s goals and to do so more openly.

The filing of a “dissenting scientific opinion” is an unusual move; it signals that Andrew Wheeler, the administrator of the E.P.A., and his politically appointed deputies did not listen to the objections of career scientists in developing the regulation. More critically, by entering the critique as part of the official Trump administration record on the new rule, Dr. Sinks’s dissent will offer Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s E.P.A. administrator a powerful weapon to repeal the so-called “secret science” policy.

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E.P.A. career employees this month also quietly emailed out the results of a new study concluding that the owners of half a million diesel pickup trucks had illegally removed their emissions control technology, leading to huge increases in air pollution. And some senior E.P.A. staff members have engaged in back-channel conversations with the president-elect’s transition team as they waited for Mr. Trump to formally approve the official start of the presidential transition, two agency employees acknowledged.

Current and former E.P.A. staff and advisers close to the transition said Mr. Biden’s team has focused on preparing a rapid assault on the Trump administration’s deregulatory legacy and re-establishing air and water protections and methane emissions controls.

“They are focused like a laser on what I call the ‘Humpty Dumpty approach,’ which is putting the agency back together again,” said Judith Enck, a former E.P.A. regional administrator who served in the Obama administration.

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