Scott Fallon and Andrew Ford report for the North Jersey Record
Disease-carrying mosquitoes and ticks are an increased threat in New Jersey because they are living longer lives due to extended warm months and mild winters.
Some of the state’s largest and most popular lakes have been inundated by algae blooms this summer due to an exceptionally wet year and exceptionally warm July.
And fish that once swam in abundance off the coast of New Jersey have migrated north in search of cooler waters.
Climate change is no longer an abstract concept or future threat, scientists say. Its effects are being felt all over New Jersey, from Shore towns facing increased coastal flooding to Meadowlands communities that were ravaged by Superstorm Sandy and inland communities dealing with increased flash flooding from more intense rainfall.
“What we’re seeing lately is unprecedented in the magnitude of the changes and the speed at which they are occurring,” said David Robinson, a Rutgers University professor and the state climatologist, who has been analyzing New Jersey’s climate for decades. “It’s a global issue that has local ramifications, and in New Jersey that’s manifesting itself in rising temperatures and more abundant rainfall.”
Annual temperatures in New Jersey have increased approximately 3 degrees since the beginning of the 20th century. Climate models show two possible futures: one in which greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase (in red) and another in which greenhouse gas emissions increase at a slower rate (in green). (Photo: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration)
The overwhelming majority of scientists, peer-reviewed studies, and government agencies have shown that the planet is warming due in large part to human activity, such as burning fossil fuels like coal, natural gas and gasoline, which has increased the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, preventing heat from escaping into space.
New Jersey is fast becoming ground zero for climate change. Sea level rise is happening so fast in the state that it’s double the global average, thanks in part to melting glaciers and the expansion of warmer water along with a gradually sinking coastal landmass.
Donald Sanderson says people in Woodbury, N.J., call him the “father of recycling” after he and other City Council members in 1980 passed what they say was the first mandatory curbside recycling program in the United States. Rebecca Davis/NPR
When curbside recycling caught on in the 1970s, it was mostly about cans, glass, cardboard and paper. That’s how Donald Sanderson remembers it.
Sanderson is 90 years old, an earnest man with a ready smile. Every Thursday in Woodbury, N.J., where he lives, he hauls a big blue recycling bin out to the curb. Recycling is close to his heart. “I guess you could say I’m the father of recycling,” he says. “I don’t know if that’s good or bad.”
In the late 1970s, most trash just went to the local landfill, which cost Woodbury a lot of money in fees. And the landfill was filling up. Sanderson, who was on the City Council at the time, came up with an idea: There was a market for some of that trash — there were companies that would buy and reuse it.
So Sanderson suggested people should have to sort their waste and put glass, metal and paper out on the curb for pickup.
Many residents thought Sanderson was nuts. They worried their taxes would go up. Newspaper editorials tore the plan apart, and some people let Sanderson know firsthand how they felt.
Sanderson holds a 1981 announcement of the new mandatory curbside recycling program in Woodbury, N.J. Rebecca Davis/NPR
“They dumped trash on my lawn,” he recalls with a laugh. “I would open the door — and they would dump it the night before — and when I’d come out in the morning, I’d see what was there.” But, he says, “it didn’t really bother me. It made me more determined to make the program a success.”
When the council took up the proposed recycling ordinance, the vote was close, but Sanderson won. It was 1980, and Woodbury became a pioneer in recycling. The city claims to be the first in the United States to adopt a mandatory curbside recycling program.
Woodbury even started making money by selling its trash to companies that would recycle it.
That was nearly 40 years ago. More and more, that scenario has flipped: Communities are now having to pay to get rid of their rubbish. It’s happening in Woodbury and in places all over the country.
But back when recycling began to catch on, it was a godsend to local communities. As Americans bought more goods, there was ever more stuff to throw away — cardboard, glass, metal and, increasingly, plastic. Scrap was valuable. A global market grew around it, especially in China.
To encourage people to recycle more, communities in the 1990s started having residents put all their trash into one bin. It was called single-stream recycling.
“Good concept in theory, if it had worked the way it was supposed to,” says Monica Gismondi, the recycling coordinator in Gloucester County, where Woodbury is located. She says single stream has been a disaster for the facilities that accept and sort household trash destined for recycling — people started putting everything into their recycling bins. “They were getting the rubber hoses in there and literally the kitchen sink and the bathroom toilets and the bowling balls,” she says.
And a lot more plastic was showing up, everything from soda and water bottles to plastic grocery bags and shampoo bottles and food wrap. A lot of it couldn’t — and still can’t — be recycled. “That seems to be the biggest change over the last, say, 20 years,” Gismondi says. “How everything is going into a plastic container.” (See our interactive to learn more about what can and can’t go in the bin.)
A pile of debris including all kinds of plastics grows hourly at Omni Recycling, a materials recovery facility in Pitman, N.J. Plastic bags are especially problematic because they can get caught in the conveyor belts and equipment and gum up the recycling process. Rebecca Davis/NPR
Now plastic has become the biggest thorn in the side of the recycling industry and one for which taxpayers are more often footing the bill.
At Omni Recycling, a materials recovery facility in Pitman, N.J., one can see firsthand the mess that plastic has become for recyclers.
Recycling trucks from Woodbury and other towns stream in and out. Front-end loaders shovel mounds of trash onto the floor and then onto conveyor belts. It’s very, very loud. Piles of trash roll by on the belts. Optical sorters use laser beams to identify what objects are made of. Blasts of air separate them.
Like any other materials recovery facility, Omni is trying to separate the material it can sell, like plastic bottles (known by their plastic IDs as “1s” and “2s”), from what it can’t, like plastic bags.
Kevin Carducci is part owner and plant manager of Omni Recycling. He says it costs the business $1 million a year to get rid of the plastics that can’t be recycled. Rebecca Davis/NPR
Kevin Carducci, who is part owner and plant manager of Omni, points to an enormous pile of plastic bags. “That came off the system in the last four hours,” he says. “The screens get cleaned three times a day to remove all those plastic bags.” And that’s just the bags. Then there are the other nonrecyclables: pouches, film wrap, chip bags, Styrofoam, some tubs and clamshells, PVC pipes, plastic toys.
Those items should never have gone into a recycling bin, Carducci says. He can’t sell it, it’s not easily made into other products and it costs him money to deal with it.
“It cost over a million dollars last year to remove all this residue and bags,” he says.
To recoup those costs, Carducci bills the towns he serves to process and dispose of their trash. So the days when Woodbury got paid for its recyclables are gone. Like many communities in the U.S., Woodbury now has to pay materials recovery facilities to take its waste.
Materials recovery facilities in the U.S. used to sell a lot of plastic waste to China, which was willing to sort through it. But the nonrecyclables ended up making a huge mess both on land and in the ocean. So last year, China stopped buying most of it, and now materials recovery facilities in the U.S. are left holding the bag, literally.
Carducci says his profit margin is paper=thin. Most of his revenue comes from recycling bottles, but it’s harder to make money on bottles because they keep getting thinner. “It takes six times the amount of bottles, countwise, to get the same pound [of recyclable plastic] as you did years ago,” he says.
According to the recycling industry, only about 9% of plastic waste in the U.S. gets recycled every year (and probably less now, since China is no longer importing as much of it).
Meanwhile, it’s nearly as cheap for towns like Woodbury just to dump plastic waste into landfills as it is to send plastic waste off for recycling.
Carducci says the situation won’t change unless the companies that make all that plastic packaging start making more of it recyclable.
Carli Lloyd kicks 55-yard field goal at Eagles-Ravens practice
David Weinberg reports for the Atlantic City Press
PHILADELPHIA — Carli Lloyd’s soccer skills served her pretty well on the football field Tuesday.
Lloyd, who has won two Women’s World Cups and two Olympic gold medals with the U.S. Women’s National Team, booted a 55-yard field goal after the Philadelphia Eagles’ joint practice with Baltimore at the NovaCare Complex.
Lloyd, who grew up an Eagles fan in nearby Delran, got some tips from Eagles place-kicker Jake Elliott and Ravens kicker Justin Tucker and special- teams coach Randy Brown, the former mayor of Evesham Township, Camden County.
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Finding a buyer for Philadelphia Energy Solutions’ oil refinery has grown urgent as the bankrupt company’s funds dwindle and no signs emerge that it is winning a fight for insurance payouts after a June blaze at the plant, according to court documents and bankruptcy experts.
Without access to the more than $1 billion in insurance coverage, selling the refinery has become one of the company’s only options to raise cash before being forced to liquidate.
At least three parties have potential proposals to buy the shut Philadelphia refinery, each with plans to reopen the 1,300-acre (5.3-square km) site with a mix of oil refining and alternative energy production, sources familiar with the plans said.
Initial meetings are scheduled between the prospective buyers and a collection of vetters over the next several weeks, but it is unclear how long it would take for any official bid to come together, the sources said.
PES was not available for comment on whether it had reviewed any of the proposals or how viable it considered them to be.
For the second time in less than two years, PES filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on July 21, exactly a month after fire and blasts destroyed an alkylation unit at the 335,000-barrel-per-day refinery.
PES shut its final crude unit in late July, and more than 600 workers are in the process of being laid off without severance pay or the option for continued health insurance.
The company has no prepackaged arrangement to restructure the business or income from running the refinery, the largest in the U.S. Northeast, raising the likelihood it will be forced to liquidate.
“They’re playing a game against the clock,” said Christina Simeone, a senior fellow at the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy at the University of Pennsylvania, who wrote a report last year predicting the refinery would close by 2022 due to poor economics.
To emerge from bankruptcy, PES needs to tap into $1.25 billion in property damage and loss of business insurance coverage, according to court filings. So far, PES has been denied requests for payment, and at least one creditor has surfaced to fight for any future insurance proceeds. Seven others are objecting to PES’ bankruptcy plan.
It is unclear how much is left of the initial $65 million bankruptcy loan PES secured at the start of the process, which is needed to pay for attorneys, wind down the massive refinery complex, utility bills and salaries.
PES recently asked the court to retain law firm Kirkland and Ellis for $4.6 million and another firm for $1 million, according to court documents.
On Friday, the U.S. Trustee appointed to the bankruptcy case objected to Kirkland and Ellis, saying the firm has represented PES’s largest equity holders in unrelated matters, creating a potential conflict of interest, court documents show.
“Given the incident which precipitated the filing of this Chapter 11 proceeding, there is a strong likelihood that the assets of the debtor will be liquidated rather than reorganized,” the trustee wrote in court documents.
PES hired investment bank PJT Partners about two weeks ago to market the site. PJT declined to comment on its efforts to find a buyer.
Companies in Chapter 11 bankruptcies generally face two scenarios when attempting to sell assets, said Eric Snyder, a bankruptcy expert and partner at New York-based law firm Wilk Auslander, who is not working on PES’ case.
With the luxury of time, companies can enter into an agreement with a single bidder to be decided on by a bankruptcy court judge. Or, they can hold a bare auction, opening up the sale to all qualified bidders for a set period of time.
If no deal comes together before the company runs out of money, it could be forced to start Chapter 7 liquidation, Snyder said. Chapter 11 is a generally better outcome for creditors, as assets tend to fall in value during liquidation, which would leave them with less chance to collect on what they are owed.
“It’s in the creditors’ best interest to try to make it through Chapter 11, but for people interested in the PES site for future uses, it’s far better for it to go to Chapter 7,” the Kleinman Center’s Simeone said.
Reporting by Laila Kearney; Editing by Marguerita Choy and Tom Brown
The Trump administration’s proposal would significantly weaken former President Barack Obama’s auto-emissions standards. CreditCreditJustin Sullivan/Getty Images
Toyota, Fiat Chrysler and General Motors were all summoned by a senior Trump adviser to a White House meeting last month where he pressed them to stand by the president’s own initiative, according to four people familiar with the talks.
But even as the White House was working to do this, it was losing ground. Yet another company, Mercedes-Benz, is preparing to join the California agreement, according to two people familiar with the German company’s plans.
Mr. Trump, described by three people as “enraged” by California’s deal, has also demanded that his staffers step up the pace to complete his plan. His proposal, however, is directly at odds with the wishes of many automakers, which fear that the aggressive rollbacks will spark a legal battle between California and the federal government that could split the United States car markets.
The administration’s efforts to weaken the Obama-era pollution rules could be rendered irrelevant if too many automakers join California in opposition before the Trump plan can be put into effect. That could imperil one of Mr. Trump’s most far-reaching rollbacks of climate-change policies.
In addition to Mercedes-Benz, a sixth prominent automaker — one of the three summoned last month to the White House — intends to disregard the Trump proposal and stick to the current, stricter federal emissions standards for at least the next four years, according to executives at the company.
Together, the six manufacturers who so far plan not to adhere to the new Trump rules account for more than 40 percent of all cars sold in the United States.
“You get to a point where, if enough companies are with California, then what the Trump administration is doing is moot,” said Alan Krupnick, an economist with Resources for the Future, a nonpartisan energy and environment research organization.
A senior administration official said the California pact was an effort to force Americans to buy expensive vehicles that they don’t want or need. Speaking on condition of anonymity, he called the pact top-down policymaking with California trying to impose its standard on 49 other states.
The Trump administration’s proposal would significantly weaken the 2012 vehicle pollution standards put in place by President Barack Obama, which remain the single largest policy enacted by the United States to reduce planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions. The Obama-era rules require automakers to nearly double the average fuel economy of new cars and trucks to 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025, cutting carbon dioxide pollution by about six billion tons over the lifetime of all the cars affected by the regulations, about the same amount the United States produces in a year.
Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere traps the sun’s heat and is a major contributor to climate change.
Mr. Trump has billed his plan, which would freeze the standards at about 37 miles per gallon, as a deregulatory win for automakers that will keep down car prices for American consumers. Mr. Trump’s plan would also revoke the legal authority of California and other states to impose their own emissions standards.
In an extraordinary move, automakers have balked at Mr. Trump’s proposal, mainly because California and 13 other states plan to continue enforcing their current, stricter rules, and to sue the Trump administration. That could lead to a nightmare situation for automakers: Years of regulatory uncertainty and a United States auto market that effectively split in two.
Last week, California officials said that they expected more automakers to join their pact, which commits carmakers to build vehicles to a standard nearly as strict as the Obama-era rules that the president would like to weaken. “Many companies have told us — more than one or two — that they would sign up the agreement as soon as they felt free to do so,” said Mary Nichols, the top clean air official in California.
Mary Nichols of the California Air Resources Board in 2018.CreditDavid Paul Morris/Bloomberg
Officials from Mercedes-Benz declined to comment.
Executives from the three auto companies summoned to the White House declined to comment publicly on their interactions with the Trump administration. But at a recent media event, Mike Manley, Fiat Chrysler’s chief executive, said of the California pact: “We are absolutely going to have a look at it and see what it means.”
In the Trump administration, three senior political officials working on the rollback, a complex legal and scientific process, have all left the administration recently. A senior career official with years of experience on vehicle pollution policy was transferred to another office.
Atlantic City | Aug 19, 2019 — Over 240 offshore wind energy supporters attended Time for Turbines III at the Stockton University Atlantic City campus on Friday.
“We have the resources and capacity to be the national frontrunner in the offshore wind industry,” state Senate President Steve Sweeney (D-West Deptford) said at the event. “As the renewable energy sector of the economy grows, we have an obligation not only to our environment but to New Jersey workers to make it a priority.”
Jersey Renews, a coalition of labor, community and environmental organizations, and Maryland-based nonprofit the Business Network for Offshore Wind partnered for the event and what they called a day full of information-sharing and networking to support the development of a just and sustainable offshore wind industry in the state.
“Given the impacts and urgency of climate change that we are facing on the shoreline, it is inspiring to see all of the ways that state government and the offshore wind industry are working together to bring utility-scale clean energy to ratepayers as soon as possible,” said Liz Burdock, executive director, Business Network for Offshore Wind.
Gov. Phil Murphy announced his signing of Executive Order No. 79 establishing the New Jersey WIND Institute from a video recording at the event before offshore wind developers, state officials, labor leaders and environmentalists delivered presentations on the industry’s progress in the last year and future developments.
“The broad coalition of stakeholders here today from New Jersey’s business, labor and environmental communities underscores the importance of the offshore wind industry to our state,” U.S. Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) said.
State Board of Public Utilities President Joseph Fiordaliso spoke about the BPU’s Energy Master Plan and Offshore Wind Strategic Plan as ongoing projects.
“As the serious impacts of the climate crisis are arriving much more quickly than anticipated, it is imperative to do all we can to mitigate those effects,” he said.
“New Jersey is poised to become the nation’s leader in offshore wind generation,” BPU Commissioner Bob Gordon said. “Not only will the state reap the benefits of clean, reliable and renewable power, but we will create a whole new industry that will produce thousands of high-skilled jobs, rebuild our manufacturing sector and revitalize our ports.”
Another top panel at the event consisted of the offshore wind developers, including Denmark-based Ørsted, Atlantic City-based offshore wind firm Atlantic Shores Offshore Wind and Norway-based energy company Equinor.
“The economic benefits and supply chain opportunities that come as part of this new industry will have long-lasting effects throughout the region and the country,” said Lauren Burm, head of public affairs and communications, Ørsted North America.
A green transportation panel in the afternoon, chaired by Doug O’Malley, director of Environment New Jersey, talked again about the state’s potential in the offshore wind industry.
“New Jersey has a clean energy gold mine of offshore wind right off the Jersey Shore, and we are on the cusp of tapping this renewable energy to power our state and region,” O’Malley said.
The event also received major organizational support from Environment New Jersey, the New Jersey Work Environment Council, Stockton University and the Energy Foundation.
