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NJ students rally against controversial Meadowlands power plant project

A protest against a power plant project in the Meadowlands drew hundreds.
A protest against a power plant project in the Meadowlands drew hundreds. (Photo: Tom Nobile/northjersey.com)

Tom Nobile reports for the North Jersey Record

A marching protest to “Save Our Lungs” by blocking a controversial power plant proposal in the Meadowlands drew hundreds of protesters to Ridgefield High School on Saturday, who sought to press Gov. Phil Murphy’s administration into rescinding permits granted to the project. 

The march featured a strong contingent of local high school students from across the county, who partnered with environmental organizations such as the Sierra club and Food and Water Watch to rally against the gas-fired power plant in an area already graded an ‘F’ for clean air by the America Lung Association. 

Federal data shows that the plant, slated for North Bergen, would likely pump millions of tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, enough to become the highest emitter of carbon dioxide in the state, tied with the Phillips 66 Bayway Refinery in Linden. 

“Today we live in a world where we have to fight for the privilege to breathe clean air,” Yoon Yung Kim, a high school student, said Saturday. “No amount of money is worth risking our lungs and our health.”

A collage of signs filled Ridgefield’s streets on Saturday as protesters embarked on a march from the high school to the plant’s proposed site less than a mile away. Horns honked and residents waved from their windows to chants of “It’s not fair, we need clean air” and “Hey Governor Murphy, don’t do us dirty.”

“Speak now or forever hold your breath,” one sign read. 

“I am committed to protesting and marching until this project is finally rejected,” said Arturo Garcia, a Ridgefield student who helped organize the march. 

The plant, dubbed the North Bergen Liberty Generating station, is proposed by Diamond Generating Corp, a subsidiary of Mitsubishi. 

To date, more than 40 towns have passed resolutions against it, including mayors of many Meadowlands communities along with the Bergen County League of Municipalities.

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New York City will push skyscrapers to slash emissions

CAMILA DOMONOSKE reports for National Public Radio
April 23, 20197:23 AM ET Heard on Morning Edition

Pedestrians walk in Brooklyn on an unseasonably warm day in February 2017, when temperatures reached near 60 degrees. To take action against climate change, New York City is requiring large buildings to retrofit their structures to improve energy efficiency.Spencer Platt/Getty Images

On the steps of New York City’s City Hall last week, about 100 people gathered to enthusiastically chant their support for a landmark climate bill.

It didn’t target cars or coal, but another major emitter — in fact, the source of nearly 70% of New York City’s greenhouse gas emissions. It’s a sector that dominates New York’s skyline, but has largely managed to dodge the spotlight when it comes to climate change.

“Dirty buildings,” they shouted, “have got to go!”

The City Council passed a measure Thursday to require owners of large buildings to invest in retrofitting and improving their structures to slash their contribution to climate change.

Cities around the world have been calling for greater efficiency from new construction, and a number of cities have pledged to make all buildings carbon-neutral by 2050.

But Mayor Bill de Blasio says New York’s new measure, which he will sign into law soon, is the first in the world to actually mandate changes from existing buildings.

Under the law, which its supporters hope will serve as a model for other cities around the world, owners will need to improve insulation, lighting, heating and cooling systems, among other changes, to reduce the amount of energy their buildings use.

The goal is ambitious: The city’s largest buildings will have to cut their emissions by 40% by 2030, and by 80% by 2050. The cost of the necessary changes is estimated at some $4 billion, although some of those costs will be recouped by building owners through energy savings and the added value of an energy-efficient building.

“These are very intense goals, but reachable goals,” de Blasio told NPR in an interview. “These buildings are the single biggest piece of the [climate change] problem that hasn’t been addressed, and we had the tools to do it right now.”

If building owners do not comply with the measure, they will face substantial fines — $1 million or more per year for the largest buildings.

The Empire State Building, shown here in 2010, looks the same as ever. But the landmark is now packed with energy-efficiency retrofits, invisible to tourists and even tenants.Spencer Platt/Getty Images

“Silver buckshot”

So what does it actually take to make an old skyscraper energy-efficient?

A city icon — the 102-story Empire State Building — provides a glimpse.

Actually, there’s not much glimpsing involved. For the past 10 years, the landmark has gone through an ambitious energy-efficiency overhaul, but the vast majority of the changes are invisible.

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Op-Ed: Here comes the sun for less than you thought it would cost even with today’s low gas prices

With the cost of renewable energy sources continuing to decline, New Jersey will benefit — but it needs to get a couple of things right first

Barbara Blumenthal

Barbara Blumenthal
Plummeting costs for solar and onshore wind power are changing America’s energy landscape and accelerating the shift away from dirty fossil fuels.
In states as diverse as Iowa, Texas, Minnesota, and Arizona, competitive bids show that renewables can beat the costs of new natural gas plants in many places, even with today’s low gas prices. As the costs of renewables continue to decline, market forces will drive the replacement of coal and natural gas with safe, clean, affordable energy across much of the country.
These underlying cost trends explain why New Jersey will benefit from the clean energy law Gov. Phil Murphy signed last year, which requires quickly ramping up our renewable requirement to reach 50 percent in 2030.
Two factors are needed to achieve New Jersey’s low-cost clean energy future: a new planning framework that identifies the right mix of energy resources to dramatically reduce emissions at the lowest cost for New Jersey; and cost-effective programs to attract those resources.
Regulators are already taking a critical step to improve New Jersey’s approach to solar incentives for new solar projects. The state Board of Public Utilities has undertaken a year-long process to determine how to close the existing incentive program to new projects and replace it with a new, more cost-effective set of incentives, as is required under the Clean Energy Law. Soon, consumers will get much more solar built in New Jersey for every dollar spent.

Must fix existing solar program

Though New Jersey ranks fifth in the nation for installed solar capacity, the state’s existing solar program — based on tradeable credits called SRECs — has several major flaws.
First, it provides a single price for all projects. Solar installations built years ago, when costs were much higher, get the same price as projects built today at substantially lower costs. Under the current program, all projects receive SRECs that sell today for $220 each — whether they need to be that high or not.
Second, SREC market prices have been highly volatile, so investors and lenders have required a significant risk premium to finance projects. New Jersey consumers have been paying that premium, buried in their utility bills.
Even after the current SREC program closes, consumers will continue to pay for SRECs generated from each project for up to 15 years. These SRECs will continue to trade at volatile market prices which can range from a legislated maximum price (set at $268 for 2019) to a low of perhaps $10. This price risk can only become more extreme, for both customers and existing solar projects, once the SREC program is closed to new solar projects. Imagine a competitive market that bans new entrants no matter how high the price gets.

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High-tide flooding worsens, more pollution carried to sea

A Charleston, South Carolina resident removes debris from a drain during tidal flooding in October 2015. The city now experiences 50 days of "sunny day" flooding a year.
A Charleston, South Carolina resident removes debris from a drain during tidal flooding in October 2015. The city now experiences 50 days of “sunny day” flooding a year. PAUL ZOELLER/THE POST AND COURIER VIA AP

As sea levels rise, high-tide flooding is becoming a growing problem in many parts of the globe, including cities on the U.S. East Coast. Now, new research shows that as these waters recede, they carry toxic pollutants and excess nutrients into rivers, bays, and oceans.

JIM MORRISON reports for Yale environment 360


As high-tide flooding worsened in Norfolk, Virginia in recent years, Margaret Mulholland, a biological oceanographer at Old Dominion University, started to think about the debris she saw in the waters that flowed back into the Chesapeake Bay. Tipped-over garbage cans. Tossed-away hamburgers. Oil. Dirty diapers. Pet waste.

“This water is coming up on the landscape and taking everything back into the river with it,” says Mulholland, a professor in the Department of Ocean, Earth, and Atmospheric Sciences. “I was thinking how no one is counting this stuff (as runoff pollution). It drove me nuts.”

Nuts enough that she decided to sample those waters. That’s why on a recent Saturday morning she was steering her Chevy Bolt EV toward a narrow, flooded ribbon of Norfolk’s 51st Street at high tide. Marsh grasses bordered an inlet of the Lafayette River on one side of the street. A line of houses set back from the street rose on the other. Soon she came upon an overturned trash can, its contents underwater. A few feet away was a box. She opened it, and inside was a toilet. “Oh, this is good,” she said, pulling out her phone for a photo.

It’s an apt metaphor for her pioneering research project, which she has dubbed Measure the Muck.

With global sea levels steadily rising — already up 8 inches in the past century and now increasing at an average of 1.3 inches per decade — the incidence of high-tide “sunny day” or “blue sky” flooding is on the rise, especially along the U.S. East Coast. Those flooding events now routinely wash over sections of cities, and when the waters recede they take with them an excess of nutrients and a toxic mix of pollutants that flows into rivers, bays, and oceans.

Norfolk, which experienced fewer than two days of high-tide flooding annually in the early 1960s, had 14 in 2017. In Wilmington, North Carolina, tidal flooding grew to 84 days in 2016, up from two days 50 years ago. In Lewes, Delaware at the mouth of Delaware Bay, flooding days have topped 25 in recent years, a five-fold increase over a decade ago.


In Charleston, South Carolina, the incidence of sunny day flooding increased to 50 days in 2016, up from four days annually 50 years ago, causing millions of dollars in damage and disrupting travel to the city’s hospital district.

In Miami, sunny day flooding is becoming increasingly severe, accelerating to nearly 20 days a year. In Philadelphia, tidal flooding due to rising sea levels was responsible for 83 out of 120 days of flooding from 2005 to 2014.

An overturned trash can sits in high-tide floodwaters on 52nd Street in Norfolk, Virginia. MARGARET MULHOLLAND

According to a report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), high-tide flooding frequency along the southeastern coast of the United States rose 160 percent from 2000 to 2017. And with sea levels expected to rise another 3 to 6 feet by 2100 because of melting ice sheets and glaciers, scientists warn that much worse is to come. NOAA projects that as many as 85 days of high-tide flooding will occur annually along the southeastern U.S. coast by 2050.

Until Mulholland, however, few if any researchers had examined exactly how much pollution this sunny day flooding was creating. And what Mulholland found shocked her. Analysis of water samples indicates that one morning of tidal flooding along the Lafayette River in Norfolk poured nearly the entire annual U.S. Environmental Protection Agency allocation of nitrogen runoff for the river — 1,941 pounds — into Chesapeake Bay.

“That’s striking,” she says. “How do we expect to restore the bay if we’re not counting a lot of what’s going in?”

Mulholland is focused on measuring nitrogen, including ammonium, because of its effect on algae blooms, which create oxygen-depleted dead zones in bay waters. She said that other pollutants — including oil, gasoline, and trace metals — are also washing into waterways, as evidenced by the petroleum sheens visible on the water during high-tide flooding. “We can see it, and it would be great if we could measure it in the future,” she says. “But we don’t have the analytical chops to measure it so far.”



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Suburban Philly recycling programs address challenges as they settle into the ‘new normal’

Waste Management technicians clear plastic bags and plastic sheeting from a recycling center screen. Plastic bags and sheeting are a major challenge for recyclers, as they snarl sorting equipment, cause contamination, and drive up processing costs.Waste Management technicians clear plastic bags and plastic sheeting from a recycling center screen. Plastic bags and sheeting are a major challenge for recyclers, as they snarl sorting equipment, cause contamination, and drive up processing costs. (Waste Management)

Dana Bate reports for WHYYWhen China implemented stricter standards last year for the recyclable material it would accept, requiring it to be no less than 99.5 percent pure, many suburban Philadelphia municipalities cooled their heels to see whether the restrictions would eventually ease.“That’s happened in the past,” said Frank Chimera, area senior manager of municipal sales for Republic Services, a major recycling processor in the region. “They’ve become restrictive for a few months, and then turned it around and started relaxing the standards again.”That didn’t happen. If anything, China has signaled it will only become tougher on accepting America’s recyclable trash. And now, recycling programs face this challenge: finding a way to undo habits built up over decades, so that they can find markets for the incoming waste.“For a long time, more was better, and a lot of programs were set up to drive more recycling,” Chimera said. “We ran that way as a country for probably 20 years.”That was fine, as long as China was willing to take our waste, from soiled pizza boxes to dirty peanut butter jars. Now that the rules have changed, municipalities have had to adjust, in some cases changing their programs ‚ and, in nearly all cases, re-educating the public about what is recyclable material.For Delaware County recycling manager Sara Nelson, that has involved creating a brochure for residents on how to recycle properly, outlining what is recyclable and what is not, and how to throw items out properly. (Wash out all jars. Break down all cardboard boxes. No plastic bags).“People want to do the right thing,” Nelson said. “They just need to know what the right thing is.”Like this? Click to receive free updatesThe difficulty, however, is that within Delaware County, individual townships have their own rules. Some take plastics #1 through #7. Others only take certain numbers. That’s the case in other outlying counties, too, including Montgomery and Bucks.“There’s not a lot of standardization from township to township, city to city, state to state, on what is acceptable and what’s not,” Chimera said. “Some of that depends on the recycling facility that it goes to.”One town may encourage residents to recycle egg cartons or orange juice cartons, while another a few blocks away may refuse those items.“There’s all these little differences that make it confusing,” said Veronica Harris, recycling manager for Montgomery County.She said a statewide standard would cut down on the confusion. So would a system where major packaging producers such as Coca-Cola, Unilever, and General Mills had more skin in the game.One such model, known as an “extended producer responsibility” model, or EPR, involves a system in which producers take back their packaging. Canada has embraced that model, and Europe and California have been studying it.“It puts the players at the table,” Harris said.“Right now, we have no efficiency. We’re all just swimming in our little ponds, trying to figure things out as best we can,” she said. “But with EPR, now you have a system in place that really gets to the root of what’s going on and tries to make it cost-efficient and operationally efficient.”Read the full storyLike this? Click to receive free updates

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NJ enviros say ‘let’s wait and see’ on EPA truck emissions

David Matthau reports for New Jersey 101.5:

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has announced plans to decrease the amount of allowable nitrogen oxide pollution emissions that come from the engines of diesel and heavy-duty truck engines.

However, they haven’t indicated what the new allowable level will be.

Doug O’Malley, the director of Environment New Jersey, is expressing cautious optimism about the plan.

“The EPA has not updated these rules in more than 17 years. Our diesel trucks are still one of the largest sources of air pollution, especially in our cities. This is the pollutant that comes out of our cars, and certainly our trucks, that leads to smog,” he said.

“Obviously there’s a lot of trucks from out of state on the Turnpike, so we need to ensure that we have a strong-as-possible standard.”

O’Malley pointed out that up until now the Trump administration weakened environmental protections, not strengthened them.

“We want to see the ‘beef’ of this regulation; we want to make sure it’s for real, and we definitely want to make sure that states, whether they be New Jersey or California, can go above and beyond this federal standard,” he said.

He said states like New Jersey should be allowed to tighten diesel pollution emission because it is a major cause of air pollution that causes asthma and lung disease.

“Right now in New Jersey, especially in the summer months, we have way too many days that are unhealthy to breathe the air because of ozone,” he said.

Last summer, Environment New Jersey released a report showing New Jersey has more than 90 days a year when elevated pollution levels make breathing unhealthy.

The EPA isn’t expected to announce what kind of new emission standard it is proposing until the beginning of 2020.


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EPA to squeeze more emissions from heavy-duty trucks

Agency promises new standard for emissions of nitrogen oxide, a pollutant that’s a big issue in a corridor state like New Jersey

Tom Johnson reports for NJ Spotlight:
For the first time in 17 years, the federal government is planning to clamp down on a type of smog-forming pollution from heavy-duty trucks.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency this week announced it will come up with a new standard to decrease emissions of nitrogen oxide (NOx) from heavy-duty trucks and engines; the rule has not been changed since 2001.
The issue is important to New Jersey, a corridor state with significant truck traffic on interstate highways and urban areas in and out of its ports. Transportation is the major source of air pollution in the state, which has never complied with certain requirements of the Clean Air Act.
The pollutant targeted by the agency contributes to the formation of smog, or ground-level ozone, that can cause lung disease and asthma. New Jersey has failed to achieve the federal health quality standard for ozone, a pollutant formed by the baking of emissions from vehicles and power plants during hot summer months.
In announcing the initiative, the EPA said it would reduce emissions from the pollutant significantly, helping communities attain clean air standards. It is estimated heavy-duty trucks will account for one-third of NOx emissions from the transportation sector in future years.

EPA has been ‘rolling back’ other regulations

The agency’s announcement was welcomed by environmentalists, but greeted with some skepticism, considering the Trump administration has moved to freeze rules to tighten fuel-economy standards for light-duty vehicles and cars, a step being challenged by New Jersey and other states.
“Before this decision, the EPA has been rolling back, changing or delaying Obama administration efforts to reduce air pollution and transportation regulation,’’ said Jeff Tittel, director of the New Jersey Sierra Club. He fears the new proposal will deregulate how the standards are enforced.

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Chinese companies are getting around their country’s ban on scrap imports by buying U.S. plastic and paper plants

Scrap broker Song Lin, left, and his business partner Zhang Yan with discarded plastic barrels at the recycling plant they intend to open in Montezuma, Ga. The barrels, from nearby dairy farms, will be turned into pellets for export to China.
Scrap broker Song Lin, left, and his business partner Zhang Yan with discarded plastic barrels at the recycling plant they intend to open in Montezuma, Ga. The barrels, from nearby dairy farms, will be turned into pellets for export to China. Photo: Melissa Golden for The Wall Street Journal 

Bob Tita reports for the Wall Street Journal:

Chinese companies are setting up shop in the U.S. to obtain the scrap paper and plastic their government has deemed too dirty to import.

U.S. shipments to China of old cardboard, newspaper and discarded plastic slowed after China this year implemented more-stringent standards on the purity of imported scrap. That change has left Chinese packaging companies and plastics manufacturers short on materials.

Some of them are buying or building plants in the U.S. to manufacture the paper for corrugated boxes, pulp and plastic pellets for which they can’t find enough raw material in China.

Companies including some of China’s biggest paper makers are discovering a glut of cheap recycled material in the U.S.

“Right now, plastic waste is everywhere after China stopped taking it,” said Song Lin, a longtime broker of plastic scrap in the U.S. who is preparing to open a factory in Georgia that will turn discarded plastic into pellets for export to China.

The moves are a boost to the U.S. scrap industry, which collapsed in recent months amid sharply lower exports to China. For now, investors are mostly subsidiaries of Chinese plastic and paper producers, or firms supplying large clients in China, and have experience navigating the logistical and regulatory challenges of exporting to the country.

ND Paper LLC, a unit of China’s Nine Dragons Paper (Holdings) Ltd. , in recent months acquired paper mills in Biron, Wis., and Rumford, Maine, for $175 million from British Columbia-based Catalyst Paper Corp. The firm also bought a pulp mill in Fairmont, W.Va., for $55 million and a pulp mill in Old Town, Maine, this month from OTM Holdings. That mill had been idle since 2015, and ND Paper expects to restart operations early next year.  
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STEM Center opens at Palmyra Cove Nature Park

Danielle DeSisto reports for Bucks County Courier Times:

The interactive Environmental STEM Center offers exclusive exhibits for the public to learn about science and technology, from climate change to space exploration.
PALMYRA — Where can a person experience the vastness of space, the depth of the oceans, and the beauty of the world’s tallest mountains?
The answer is simple: Palmyra Cove Nature Park’s Environmental STEM Center.
The interactive 2,000-square-foot space offers exclusive exhibits for the public to learn about science and technology, from climate change to space exploration.
The upgraded center, which previously was home to the Environmental Discovery Center, opens to the public Monday. When officials realized exhibits had not been updated for 15 years, they determined it was time to bring new advancements in science and technology to Palmyra Cove.
“It’ll be a great learning experience for all students in Burlington County. I’m looking for this to become a destination,” said Burlington County Freeholder Director Kate Gibbs.
At the science, technology, engineering and mathematics center, visitors can now have a far more interactive learning experience than ever before available at Palmyra Cove. At the Magic Planet exhibit, for example, guests can view hundreds of digitally projected presentations on a variety of scientific topics on a huge spinning globe; get their hands dirty in the colorful TopoBox mechanical sandbox while learning about topography, geography, watershed and natural sciences; and take a virtual reality trip to the bottom of the ocean and swim with a friendly whale, to name a few.
“Students see this new center as fun, but there’s so much more; direct access to data from NASA and NOAA (National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration), the ability to compare their own observations to that taken from spacecraft hovering above Earth,” said John Moore, executive director of Palmyra Cove/Institute for Earth Observations. “And teachers appreciate authentic STEM education that addresses National Science Standards.”

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Diesel buses stink. Are electric buses the solution for NJ ?

A soot-covered NJ Transit diesel bus travels north on the New Jersey Turnpike. Environmentalists want diesels replaced with electric buses to reduce pollution. (Larry Higgs | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com)
A soot-covered NJ Transit diesel bus travels north on the New Jersey Turnpike. Environmentalists want diesels replaced with electric buses to reduce pollution.
(Larry Higgs | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com)
Larry Higgs reports for NJ.com:
Diesel buses stink.
Drivers instinctively roll up the windows when they’re driving behind one and pedestrians hold their breath when a diesel bus passes by.
So why hasn’t NJ Transit made the switch to electric buses?
Environmentalists, who seek to clean the air to reduce respiratory diseases like asthma, want electric buses seriously considered as NJ Transit drafts a new plan to replace aging urban buses, starting in 2022.
Currently, NJ Transit has doesn’t have any electric buses in its fleet. New York’s MTA is testing 10 electric buses in Manhattan and Brooklyn and Queens.
“People who depend on transit to get around are exposed to diesel exhaust that’s causing respiratory problems,” said Amy Goldsmith, Clean Water Action state director. “New Jersey needs to institute a financial plan to replace dirty diesels.”
Environmentalists want electric buses used in cities such as Newark, Camden and Jersey City which they said have high rates of respiratory diseases caused by exhaust and particulate from diesel vehicles.
Northeastern states such as New Jersey can reduce pollution by cutting emissions from transportation, said a Natural Resources Defense Council report issued last month. Part of that strategy calls on transit agencies to replace diesel buses with electrics, especially in cities. Other ideas call for more transit use and replacing gas-powered cars with electrics.
Would electric buses really make a difference?
A 2016 Columbia University study of electric bus use by New York City’s MTA said air pollution generated by buses would be significantly reduced.
Electrics could prevent the generation of 486,068 metric tons of carbon dioxide that now spew out of MTA diesel bus tailpipes. Even when factoring in the 91,222 metric tons of CO2 produced by power plants that generate electricity to charge the buses, that’s still a big drop, the study said.
The nagging question is how to pay for them.
Electric buses cost about $300,000 more than the $450,000 to $750,000 price for a diesel, according to the Columbia study. Some of the cost can be recouped from money saved in fuel and reduced maintenance costs for electrics.
NJ Transit received a $500,000 federal grant for electric buses, said Nancy Snyder, an NJ Transit spokeswoman. But it’s not enough to buy one bus.
“NJ Transit has been investigating electric bus opportunities for a couple of years,” she said. “The agency has applied for funding grants to support an electric bus program, but was not awarded grants which would be sufficiently sized to begin a program.”

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