Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J., could be affected if another Trump golf club in the state loses its liquor license, as N.J. is seeking. (Julio Cortez/AP)
David A. Fahrenthold reports for the Washington Post Oct. 24, 2019, at 3:09 p.m. EDT
The state of New Jersey is seeking to revoke the liquor license for one of President Trump’s golf clubs — a rare and potentially damaging punishment, triggered by a 2015 case in which state officials said the Trump club overserved alcohol to a man who then caused a fatal wreck.
That proposed punishment was laid out in an Oct. 21 letter to the Trump golf course in Colts Neck, N.J. The Washington Post obtained the letter through a public records request.
The office of New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal, which sent the letter, declined to comment about the letter. Grewal was appointed in 2018 by Gov. Phil Murphy (D).
The letter gives few details about the alleged misconduct by Trump’s course. The man who the club is accused of overserving — Andrew G. Halder — caused a wreck that killed his own father and last year pleaded guilty to vehicular homicide.
Trump’s company was given 30 days to challenge the planned revocation. If the state’s Division of Alcoholic Beverage Control does decide to revoke the license, Trump can challenge that decision in court or try to get it reinstated in two years.
The Trump Organization did not respond to a request for comment on Thursday.
If the club’s liquor license is revoked, that would be a blow for the Colts Neck course, near the Jersey Shore. The club could lose significant revenue from the two restaurants and a bar it operates for members, and find it hard to attract banquets or golf tournaments from outsiders.
But for Trump, the potential damage is greater than that.
Under New Jersey law, anyone who has one liquor license revoked must also give up all their other liquor licenses for two years. Trump has two other New Jersey golf clubs, including one in Bedminster that he uses as a summer White House.
A fast-moving wildfire, spurred by powerful winds, burned through Northern California on Thursday and forced thousands of people to evacuate parts of Sonoma County — the rural wine country 75 miles north of San Francisco that is still recovering from a deadly 2017 blaze.
Pacific Gas & Electric, the state’s largest utility, told state regulators on Thursday that a jumper on one of its transmission towers broke close to where officials say the fire started, near Geyserville.
Although PG&E cut power in the area on Wednesday afternoon amid dangerous weather conditions, stretches of the company’s high voltage power transmission lines — which were responsible for the state’s deadliest wildfire ever — were still operating in the area when the fire broke out, the utility said in a statement.
In the report it filed with the California Public Utilities Commission, PG&E said it became aware of the transmission tower malfunction at 9:20 local time Wednesday. The fire began at 9:27 p.m., according to California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
After it sparked late Wednesday night, the fire spread rapidly. More than 10,000 acres were charred through Thursday afternoon. It was growing at a rate of 30 football fields per minute. Authorities struggled against the strong winds on Thursday, and the fire remained wholly uncontained as of Thursday afternoon, state authorities said. No injuries have been reported, but several structures have been damaged or destroyed.
The Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office ordered mandatory evacuations, including for the entire community of Geyserville, and shut down several major roads.
“This is not the time to stay,” Sonoma Sheriff Mark Essick said at a news conference. “This is the time to go.”
As the wildfire torched Sonoma, and others began to spread in San Bernadino, Los Angeles County and elsewhere, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) railed against all three of the state’s investor-owned power companies, including PG&E.
“I must confess, it is infuriating beyond words,” Newsom said, accusing the utilities of neglecting their infrastructure and leaving the state vulnerable to fires sparked by outmoded power lines.
His statements echoed those he made two weeks earlier, when PG&E intentionally shut off power to nearly a million customers in a desperate hedge against wildfire risk.
“It’s more than just climate change, and it is climate change, but it’s more than that,” Newsom said. “As it relates to PG&E, it’s about dog-eat-dog capitalism meeting climate change, it’s about corporate greed meeting climate change, it’s about decades of mismanagement.”
Newsom sent a letter Thursday to the CEOs of San Diego Gas & Electric Company, Edison International and PG&E demanding better communication about when the utilities would implement precautionary power shutoffs.
“The only consistency has been inconsistency,” he wrote.
Weather forecasts in Northern and Southern California for the next several days have been ominous, portending more blackouts and, perhaps, more fires. The National Weather service said “pockets of critical fire weather” were likely.
NWS had already issued red flag warnings on Thursday for much of the San Francisco Bay area, including the region where the Kincade Fire is burning, as blustering offshore winds met dry air and created tinderbox conditions.
Even though wind speeds were expected to lessen on Thursday, weather conditions through the weekend may bring new challenges to containing the fire. The offshore gusts, known as “El Diablo” winds, bring extremely dry air, with relative humidity plummeting to the single digits in some cases, making fire fighting particularly difficult. Forecasters expect a second round of those winds to blow across much of California in the coming days.
Meanwhile, in Southern California, “extremely critical” fire risk was forecast, with strong offshore winds, known there as Santa Ana winds, gusting up to 65 mph in parts of Ventura and Los Angeles counties through Friday.
“The fuels and vegetation are critically dry. The expected weather will create an environment ripe for large and dangerous fire growth, especially Thursday and Friday,” the NWS forecast office in Los Angeles wrote.
The Kincade Fire comes two years after the deadly Tubbs Fire devastated nearby Santa Rosa. At least 22 people died, and more than 5,600 homes and buildings were destroyed.
Hundreds of California residents have been forced to evacuate after a wind-driven wildfire spread overnight as 500,000 people are left without power in the Golden State’s second planned blackout in two weeks.
The National Weather Service (NWS) says winds around the highest areas of Sonoma County have been blowing at speeds up to 70mph, and elsewhere in the region there are winds between 30mph and 50mph.
According to dispatch reports, the Kincade fire spread to about 1,000 acres by 11 pm Wednesday night.
As of Thursday morning, Cal Fire, the state firefighting agency, says the blaze near Geyserville has grown to 10,000 acres and has no containment.
The Sonoma County sheriff’s office confirmed that residents had to flee their homes overnight due to the blaze.
Hundreds of California residents have been forced to evacuate after a wind-driven wildfire spread overnight. Embers fly from a tree as the Kincade Fire burns near Geyserville, California, on Thursday
Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.). (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Dino Grandoni reports for The Lightbulb in the Washington Post
The GOP-controlled Senate voted Thursday to keep a Trump administration regulation on coal-fired power plants that environmentalists and congressional Democrats alike repeatedly have decried as too weak.
So why did Senate Democrats force the vote in the first place?
Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) did so to make some Senate Republicans squirm — and to make sure he remains Democratic leader as his party seeks to regain control of the chamber next year.
“We would like to win. Make no mistake about it,” Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), who sponsored the resolution with Schumer, told reporters Thursday. “But if we don’t challenge the other side to put their votes on the board, they could always hide behind the fact that, gee, there was no opportunity.”
In a 53-to-41 vote largely along party lines, the Senate rejected a measure to throw out the rule on climate-warming emissions from power plants finalized earlier this year by Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency. The agency’s Affordable Clean Energy rule cuts carbon emissions from the electricity sector by less than half of what experts say is needed to avoid catastrophic global warming. And it replaced the Obama administration’s 2015 Clean Power Plan, which sought more aggressive limits on carbon emissions in a way that would have forced companies to switch from coal to lower-carbon energy sources.
With the ink is still drying on the final version of the EPA rule, Schumer turned to a little-used legislative tool to force a vote to repeal the regulation. The Congressional Review Act gives lawmakers 60 legislative days to review, and potentially reject, new rulemaking from federal agencies.
But it was always unlikely that Schumer, with only 47 Democratic senators, had the votes to win. Only GOP Sen. Susan Collins, who is up for election in 2020 in Maine, decided to join Democrats and vote for repeal. Meanwhile, three Democrats — Doug Jones (Ala.), Joe Manchin III (W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.) — all switched sides and voted with Republicans.
But by pushing for the vote, even a losing one, Schumer showed he is willing to go on offense on climate change — an issue of increasing importance both for fellow Senate Democrats and, according to recent polling, the party’s voting base.
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As BPU officials finalize a new energy master plan, stakeholders debate how big of a role nuclear energy will play
Oyster Creek nuclear power plant
TOM JOHNSON reports for NJ Spotlight Oct. 18, 2019
One of the big unanswered policy questions as state officials finalize a new energy master plan (EMP) is how big a factor nuclear power will play in meeting New Jersey’s future energy needs.
It is an issue that sparked widely varying views in written comments to the state Board of Public Utilities, stoking much interest among stakeholders based on the BPU consultant’s projections that New Jersey’s three nuclear plants may continue operating beyond their current permits, which begin to expire in 2036.
The plants, operated by PSEG Nuclear, a subsidiary of Public Service Enterprise Group, now provide about 90% of the carbon-free electricity in the state. Beginning this past April, utility customers began paying roughly $300 million in annual subsidies to avert the units’ closing. Its owner claimed the units are no longer economically competitive in a market flooded by cheap natural gas.
The consultant, the Rocky Mountain Institute, has been tasked with doing extensive modeling that projects the least-cost options for achieving a 100% clean energy future by 2050. Nuclear energy provides plenty of carbon-free power without any greenhouse gas emissions, but some environmentalists hardly view it as “clean energy.’’
Radioactive waste
“As producers of large quantities of radioactive waste, these plants do not meet the definition of zero-pollution energy sources,’’ the Sierra Club argued in comments submitted to the BPU. ‘’There is nothing in this plan to address the phase-out of existing nuclear plants in New Jersey,’’ the club said.
The Unitarian Universalist FaithAction NJ agreed. It said the new EMP should assume that all of PSE&’s nuclear plants should shut down no later than when their current licenses from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission expire (in 2036, 2040 and 2046), and plan accordingly.
In its comments, PSE&G argued the state should acknowledge the important role nuclear will play in achieving the climate reduction goals advanced by the EMP. “Nuclear will be the largest source of carbon-free electricity production for New Jersey for many years,’’ the company said.
While supporting the state’s goals to increase reliance on solar and offshore wind capacity, PSE&G claimed “the continued operation of New Jersey’s nuclear capacity, as long as the plants are capable of operating is required if the state is to achieve its clean energy goals and obligations.’’
Bill Cobau, retired college professor, lives in Charleston, South Carolina’s Harleston’s Village which has seen multiples floods in the past five years due to ocean encroachment. One ruined his floor yet a neighbor’s home recently sold for $1million.
Patrik Jonsson reports for the Christian Science Monitory
As she recalls the flood waters rising once again last month around her Charleston, South Carolina, home, Elizabeth Cooper says she can still hear her mom’s voice on the phone from Iowa.
The home here in Harleston Village – a kind of Colonial-era suburb of mansions and leaning freedmen’s shacks – has seen a slow-motion catastrophe unfold, with six floods in as many years from rain events and hurricanes.
“My mom told me on the phone, ‘Come back to Iowa, we’ll have a beach here soon!’ Ha-ha, right?” says Ms. Cooper, who gave no thoughts to flooding when she bought her house 35 years ago.
To be sure, she says, property values are holding steady for the moment, given the charm of the neighborhood and magnetic pull of the ocean lapping against the city’s world-class waterfront.
But because comedy hints at truth, mom’s joke hit a nerve.
In some ways, the roughly one-foot rise of the Charleston high tide over the past century symbolizes a slow-rolling, real estate emergency that extends far beyond South Carolina.
Yet land-use practices aren’t catching up. Here and in other communities along America’s southeastern coast, the dominant pattern remains coastal development and the rebuilding of damaged dwellings, not an orderly retreat from rising sea levels.
The trend is fueled by age-old human affinity for “blue spaces,” and by government policies that experts say amount to subsidies for risky residences.
“Coastal … real estate development is continuing to be faster than inland, which means we are continuing to put ourselves at risk,” says Susan Wachter, a real estate professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.
About 49 million U.S. homes are within a few hundred feet of a rising coastline. Many houses near the beach are still appreciating faster than ones further inland, despite the prospect of wetter, slower-moving storms and higher water levels, which climate scientists associate with warming oceans. Places like Hilton Head Island could lose nearly half of its livable land in the next 80 years.
“There is over $1 trillion worth of infrastructure within 700 feet of the coast,” says A.R. Siders, a Harvard University social scientist who studies relocation as a solution to climate change. “Even if one-tenth of those people needed to relocate, we are talking about orders of magnitude we have never [seen] before.”
Fast-growing coastal communities
Myrtle Beach, Charleston, Beaufort, and Hilton Head are some of the fastest-growing cities in the region – and also the most vulnerable. The Lowcountry Hazards Center at the College of Charleston says that in 50 years the city will see 15% of properties affected by flooding each year, compared to 1% today.
Yet Charleston County allowed the building of 761 new homes in vulnerable areas over the past decade. A push to annex low-lying marsh islands like Paradise Island and Cat Island may further add to the region’s development – and tax base.
“In terms of price in South Carolina, the economy is doing very well – so is Georgia and North Carolina – and you have a lot of retirees moving into that area,” says Michael Ferlez, an analyst with Moody’s Analytics. “There’s a limited housing stock, construction hasn’t kept pace with it, and it’s also more affordable than a lot of major sort of retiree havens in Florida and the Gulf area. There may not be a lot of room – right now they are building on tiny little bits of land.”
Some signs already point to economic challenges ahead. Plenty of properties are declining in value. In fact, South Carolina is the only state on the Atlantic Seaboard to not show some recent contraction in coastal real estate values. In the 17 coastal states between Maine and Texas, nearly $16 billion has been shaved off land-value appreciation since 2005 by floods and looming sea level rise, according to estimates by First Street Foundation in New York.
Even here in Charleston County, which stretches from the 18th-century downtown to sleepy marsh islands and beach towns, homeowners have lost $266 million in potential value gains.
A question for government
This presents an increasingly urgent conundrum for some 130 million Americans – up 10 million from 2010 – who live in coastal counties, off the beach, behind a levee, or up a creek.
Buyers are becoming more finicky. Just a few miles from Charleston’s hot real estate market, Seabrook Island has seen anemic, 1% year-over-year appreciation. Call it climate gentrification: Better protected – or higher elevation – homes are gaining value while flood-prone homes are selling at discounts that can reach 15% or more.
“The majority of people’s retirement savings is the equity in their house, and if you think about the timeline of [sea level rise] and people’s savings, those things are converging,” says Ryan Lewis, a finance professor at the University of Colorado and co-author of a 2019 study, “Disaster on the Horizon: The price effect of sea-level rise.”
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