EnviroPolitics Blog

Advocates call for NJ Transit to electrify its bus fleet by 2040

Doug O’Malley and other advocates want NJ Transit to increase the number of electric buses

By Brenda Flanagan, NJTV News Senior Correspondent

NJ Transit’s board of directors awarded more than $50 million in contracts Thursday to help implement a rail-safety system, as environmental advocates pressed them for a commitment to totally transform the agency’s bus fleet to electric power.

“It is loud, it is dirty, and it is unhealthy,” said Doug O’Malley, director of Environment NJ, of the agency’s existing fleet of buses, mostly powered by diesel engines. “And the reason we are joined here today is cause we are calling on NJ Transit to join the rest of the country to make a commitment to electrify its full bus fleet by 2040. This is a goal more than 60 other transit agencies have started to take.”

Buses roared past as the critics stood on the corner next to agency’s headquarters at Penn Plaza for a press conference before heading inside for the public portion of the meeting. They noted vehicles are responsible for nearly half of greenhouse-gas pollution in New Jersey, and that Newark is a city where a federal study showed one in four kids suffers from asthma.

“And it’s quite unfortunate that NJ Transit does not understand the importance of ensuring that they electrify their buses,” said Kim Gaddy of Clean Water Action. “We need immediate action now. This is an environmental justice health crisis.”

NJ Transit is buying eight electric buses for a Camden pilot program in 2021, the agency says, noting that electric vehicles costs roughly $700,000 more than a diesel bus. Advocates say the state would reap savings in maintenance and health-care costs.

NJ Transit’s current capital budget includes $100 million to buy several hundred buses, as it updates its fleet of 1,200 vehicles.

CEO Kevin Corbett says he supports going electric in concept, but he’s unsure about charging an entire fleet.

“It’s one thing if it’s in your garage — it’s when you’re talking up to 500 buses at a depot that’s an incredible electric load, [when] you look at the charging times, etc,” he said.

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State Sen. Loretta Weinberg said she supports the call for an all-electric bus fleet, and said NJ Transit should be able to complete the changeover by 2040. But she said the agency had to make an increased commitment to buy electric buses in the near future. She also noted that mass-transit agencies elsewhere in the country have a shorter timeline.

The contracts awarded by the board Thursday were for its Positive Train Control safety system, which must be in place by a 2020 deadline set by the federal government. NJ Transit has spent $302 million on the system thus far.

Transit advocates demanded more transparency about the process.

“What are we getting? What’s been done?” said Steve Thorpe. “Since the new administration has taken over, it has become more and more opaque here. So opaque here that I feel like my cataract surgery never helped me. It’s really bad.”

Others made note of the approaching federal deadline to get the safety system up and running.

“But the clock is ticking,” said Randy Glucksman, a member of the Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee of New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority. “You have only 15 and a half months to get the job completely done or else the agency will face the potential of massive fines.”

Riders also complained to board members about trains still out of service — mainly due to a chronic lack of engineers. NJ Transit has recruited about 100 new engineers and has seven training classes running concurrently. Experts say the courses are extremely difficult, and the drop-out rate usually runs high.

“You’re talking about probably 1,000 pages that [have] to be digested, in some cases memorized and clearly understood by every locomotive engineer in order to operate safely,” said Michael Weinman, managing director of PTSI Transportation.

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Critics have accused NJ Transit of letting struggling students stay in the program despite multiple test failures, because of the dire need for more engineers.

Corbett says that’s not the case.

“We’re taking, what I view as, a more progressive approach — without any way lowering the standards,” he said. “That once we get them in, we screen them, we want to see.”

Corbett maintained that the testing for an engineer is more complicated than that for an airline pilot, and that the agency is helping the trainees meet the standards.

“So we anticipate a certain amount of fallout from a class,” he said. “But in no ways are we cutting, compromising the standards. We do want to help those who are as they go along, to get the coaching that they need to make sure they do pass.”

NJ Transit says it hopes to graduate the new engineering classes within the next four months, which will be the key to lowering the number of train cancellations.

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Trump Administration Rolls Back Clean Water Protections

An oil rig docked in Sabine Pass, Tex. The repeal means industrial pollution will be able to flow more freely into waterways.CreditCreditBrandon Thibodeaux for The New York Times

By Coral Davenport and Lisa Friedman for the New York Times

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration today announced the repeal of a major Obama-era clean water regulation that had placed limits on polluting chemicals that could be used near streams, wetlands and other bodies of water.

The rollback of the 2015 measure, known as the Waters of the United States rule, adds to a lengthy list of environmental rules that the administration has worked to weaken or undo over the past two and a half years. Those efforts have focused heavily on eliminating restrictions on fossil fuel pollution, including coal-fired power plants, automobile tailpipes, and oil and gas leaks, but have also touched on asbestos and pesticides.

The repeal of the water rule, which is expected to take effect in a matter of weeks, has implications far beyond the pollution that will now be allowed to flow freely into streams and wetlands from farms, mines, and factories. With Thursday’s announcement, the Environmental Protection Agency is aiming to establish a stricter legal definition of “waters of the United States” under the Clean Water Act, a precedent that could make it difficult for future administrations to take actions to protect waterways.

Patrick Parenteau, a professor of environmental law at the University of Vermont, said that, for conservative states and leaders who hold the view that the Clean Water Act has been burdensome for farmers and industry, “this is an opportunity to really drive a stake through the heart of federal water protection.”

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Weakening the rule had been a central campaign pledge for President Trump, who characterized it as federal overreach that impinged on the rights of farmers, rural landowners, and real estate developers to use their properties as they see fit. Mr. Trump signed an executive order in the early days of his administration directing federal agencies to begin the work of repealing and replacing it.

“Today’s final rule puts an end to an egregious power-grab,” Andrew Wheeler, the administrator of the E.P.A., said Thursday in a news conference to announce the repeal.

Mr. Wheeler said the rollback would mean “farmers, property owners and businesses will spend less time and money determining whether they need a federal permit and more time building infrastructure.”

Agricultural groups, an important political constituency for Mr. Trump, praised the repeal. Zippy Duvall, president of the American Farm Bureau Federation, said the water rule had sparked outrage from thousands of farmers and ranchers across the country and led to the largest effort to kill a regulation in his organization’s history.

“When you take private property rights from a man who’s worked all his life,” Mr. Duvall said, “that is very intrusive to him and it’s something he just can’t stand for.”

But environmentalists assailed the move. “With many of our cities and towns living with unsafe drinking water, now is not the time to cut back on clean water enforcement,” said Laura Rubin, director of the Healing Our Waters-Great Lakes Coalition.

The Obama rule, developed under the authority of the 1972 Clean Water Act, was designed to limit pollution in about 60 percent of the nation’s bodies of water, protecting sources of drinking water for about one-third of the United States. It extended existing federal authority to limit pollution in large bodies of water, like the Chesapeake Bay and Puget Sound, to smaller bodies that drain into them, such as tributaries, streams, and wetlands.

Under the rule, farmers using land near streams and wetlands were restricted from doing certain kinds of plowing and from planting certain crops and would have been required to obtain E.P.A. permits in order to use chemical pesticides and fertilizers that could have run off into those bodies of water. Those restrictions will now be lifted.

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The Environmental Protection Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers, which had worked together to write the original Obama rule, are expected to issue a new, looser replacement rule by the end of this year. It is expected that the new rule, still being developed, will retain federal protections for larger bodies of water, the rivers that drain into them and wetlands that are directly adjacent to those bodies of water.

But it will quite likely strip away protections of so-called ephemeral streams, in which water runs only during or after rainfalls, and of wetlands that are not adjacent to major bodies of water or connected to such bodies of water by a surface channel of water. Those changes would represent a victory for farmers and rural landowners who lobbied the Trump administration aggressively to make them.

Lawyers said the interim period between the completion of the legal repeal of the Obama rule and the implementation of the new Trump rule this year could be one of regulatory chaos for farmers and landowners, however.

“The Obama clean water rule had very clear lines defining which waters are protected by the Clean Water Act, versus which waters are not, while repealing the rule means replacing those lines with case-by-case calls,” said Blan Holman, an expert on water regulations with the Southern Environmental Law Center.

“This will be very unpredictable,” Mr. Holman said. “They are imposing a chaotic case-by-case program to replace clear, bright-line rules.”

For more news on climate and the environment, follow @NYTClimate on Twitter.

Coral Davenport covers energy and environmental policy, with a focus on climate change, from the Washington bureau. She joined The Times in 2013 and previously worked at Congressional Quarterly, Politico and National Journal. @CoralMDavenport • Facebook

Lisa Friedman reports on climate and environmental policy in Washington. A former editor at Climatewire, she has covered nine international climate talks. @LFFriedman

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Former Gov. Jim Florio sees a promising future for New Jersey’s environment and economy

We’re at the start of a new movement, and N.J. is leading it

By Former New Jersey Governor Jim Florio

To effectuate major public policy changes, it is helpful, if not essential, for a citizen movement to lead the cause. The civil rights movement, the women’s rights movement, and the gay rights movement are obvious examples. Movements of this sort entail mobilizing people — real average people — to become engaged in and informed about the substantive policy direction that needs to be taken.

“Engaged in” because that’s our political system: participatory democracy. The system doesn’t work by itself, as the time it took to win those battles and others proves we have to work at making it work. Becoming informed about the policy is especially necessary today because the issues are becoming more complex and the policy alternatives so numerous. You can’t fix the problem if you don’t understand the problem.

I was pleased as a young state legislator in the late 1960s to be part of such a movement. One that sought to lift the level of public awareness to the problems associated with almost a century of industrialization that was unmindful of environmental considerations. The results were a host of abnormalities: rivers caught on fire, polluted communities had to be abandoned, hazardous water and air disasters occurred.

New Jersey at the center of the chemical and petro-chemical industries until the 1950s, suffered more than its share from polluters’ ignorance or blatant disregard for public health or safety. We had, and still have, more Superfund hazardous waste sites than any other state.

In her groundbreaking book, “Silent Spring” (1962), Rachel Carson wrote about pesticides causing wildlife deaths and challenged the nation to become engaged and informed. Arguably, that was the birth of the environmental movement as we know it today.

Policies changed, thoughtful people stopped debating whether or not we wanted a strong economy or a healthy environment because they came to see that we need and can have both.

I sense we are at the start of a reawakening – a new movement – that will build around a cluster of environmental issues that will revolve around climate change. A key component will involve being around safe, clean and affordable energy sources in general and offshore wind power in particular.

We are at the beginning of an era of clean offshore wind power generation that is totally new for the United States and New Jersey, but proven and established in Europe for over 20 years with installation of over 4,000 wind turbines and employment of over 80,000 people.

New Jersey is in the process of becoming the leader – if not already the leader – in bringing this industry to the U.S. More work has been done in less than two years under Governor Murphy than in the previous eight years. Ørsted, a Danish company, and the global leader in offshore wind, is planning an 1100 megawatt “Wind Farm” 15 miles off the coast of Atlantic City that will be the third such largest facility in the world!

The new clean energy environmentalism will yield benefits for public health and in the effort to cope with climate change. I believe that many people cannot yet fully appreciate the extent of the economic benefits that will come from what amounts to a whole new business sector – not just the turbines and the resulting union labor jobs, but a whole business chain that includes: offshore wind port development, marine activities/services, fabrication and manufacturing, research technical and workforce development and training. We should all be missionaries for this cause. Those who lead this movement will look back years from now and be proud they were there at the beginning. Let us begin…

James J. Florio, Esq. is founding partner at the law firm of Florio Perrucci Steinhardt & Cappelli, LLC and the 49th governor of the state of New Jersey, serving from 1990-1994.

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Plastics, Fuels and Chemical Feedstocks From CO2? They’re Working on It

SUNCAT researchers discover a way to improve a key step in these conversions and explore what it would take to turn the climate-changing gas into valuable products on an industrial scale.

Researchers at Stanford and SLAC are working on ways to convert waste carbon dioxide (CO2) into chemical feedstocks and fuels, turning a potent greenhouse gas into valuable products. The process is called electrochemical conversion. When powered by renewable energy sources, it could reduce levels of carbon dioxide in the air and store energy from these intermittent sources in a form that can be used any time. — Researchers at Stanford and SLAC are working on ways to convert waste carbon dioxide (CO2) into chemical feedstocks and fuels, turning potent greenhouse gas into valuable products. The process is called electrochemical conversion. When powered by renewable energy sources, it could reduce levels of carbon dioxide in the air and store energy from these intermittent sources in a form that can be used any time. Credit: (Greg Stewart/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory)

The DOE Science News Source

One way to reduce the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which is now at its highest point in 800,000 years, would be to capture the potent greenhouse gas from the smokestacks of factories and power plants and use renewable energy to turn it into things we need, says Thomas Jaramillo.

As director of SUNCAT Center for Interface Science and Catalysis, a joint institute of Stanford University and the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, he’s in a position to help make that happen.

A major focus of SUNCAT research is finding ways to transform CO₂ into chemicals, fuels, and other products, from methanol to plastics, detergents and synthetic natural gas. The production of these chemicals and materials from fossil fuel ingredients now accounts for 10% of global carbon emissions; the production of gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel accounts for much, much more.

“We have already emitted too much CO₂, and we’re on track to continue emitting it for years, since 80% of the energy consumed worldwide today comes from fossil fuels,” says Stephanie Nitopi, whose SUNCAT research is the basis of her newly acquired Stanford PhD.

“You could capture CO₂ from smokestacks and store it underground,” she says. “That’s one technology currently in play. An alternative is to use it as a feedstock to make fuels, plastics, and specialty chemicals, which shifts the financial paradigm. Waste CO₂ emissions now become something you can recycle into valuable products, providing a new incentive to reduce the amount of CO₂ released into the atmosphere. That’s a win-win.”

We asked Nitopi, Jaramillo, SUNCAT staff scientist Christopher Hahn and postdoctoral researcher Lei Wang to tell us what they’re working on and why it matters.

First the basics: How do you convert CO₂into these other products?

Tom: It’s essentially a form of artificial photosynthesis, which is why DOE’s Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis funds our work. Plants use solar energy to convert CO₂from the air into carbon in their tissues. Similarly, we want to develop technologies that use renewable energy, like solar or wind, to convert CO₂from industrial emissions into carbon-based products.

Chris: One way to do this is called electrochemical CO₂ reduction, where you bubble CO₂ gas up through water and it reacts with the water on the surface of a copper-based electrode. The copper acts as a catalyst, bringing the chemical ingredients together in a way that encourages them to react. Put very simply, the initial reaction strips an oxygen atom from CO₂ to form carbon monoxide, or CO, which is an important industrial chemical in its own right. Then other electrochemical reactions turn CO into important molecules such as alcohols, fuels and other things.

Today this process requires a copper-based catalyst. It’s the only one known to do the job. But these reactions can produce numerous products, and separating out the one you want is costly, so we need to identify new catalysts that are able to guide the reaction toward making only the desired product.

How so?

Lei: When it comes to improving a catalyst’s performance, one of the key things we look at is how to make them more selective, so they generate just one product and nothing else. About 90 percent of fuel and chemical manufacturing depends on catalysts, and getting rid of unwanted byproducts is a big part of the cost.

We also look at how to make catalysts more efficient by increasing their surface area, so there are a lot more places in a given volume of material where reactions can occur simultaneously. This increases the production rate.

Recently we discovered something surprising: When we increased the surface area of a copper-based catalyst by forming it into a flaky “nanoflower” shape, it made the reaction both more efficient and more selective. In fact, it produced virtually no byproduct hydrogen gas that we could measure. So this could offer a way to tune reactions to make them more selective and cost-competitive.

Stephanie: This was so surprising that we decided to revisit all the research we could find on catalyzing electrochemical CO₂ conversion with copper, and the many ways people have tried to understand and fine-tune the process, using both theory and experiments, going back four decades. There’s been an explosion of research on this – about 60 papers had been published as of 2006, versus more than 430 out there today – and analyzing all the studies with our collaborators at the Technical University of Denmark took two years.

We were trying to figure out what makes copper special, why it’s the only catalyst that can make some of these interesting products, and how we can make it even more efficient and selective – what techniques have actually pushed the needle forward? We also offered our perspectives on promising research directions.

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Unfurling The Waste Problem Caused By Wind Energy

By CHRISTINA STELLA
Heard on All Things Considered – September 10, 20194:37 PM ET

Rob Van Vleet secures a wind turbine blade on to an oversize truck at the Kimball Wind Farm in southwest Nebraska. *Christina Stella/Harvest Public Media*

While most of a turbine can be recycled or find a second life on another wind farm, researchers estimate the U.S. will have more than 720,000 tons of blade material to dispose of over the next 20 years, a figure that doesn’t include newer, taller higher-capacity versions.

There aren’t many options to recycle or trash turbine blades, and what options do exist are expensive, partly because the U.S. wind industry is so young. It’s a waste problem that runs counter to what the industry is held up to be: a perfect solution for environmentalists looking to combat climate change, an attractive investment for companies such as Budweiser and Hormel Foods, and a job creator across the Midwest and Great Plains.

At the end of a long gravel road on the southwest Nebraska prairie, the state’s first wind farm, Kimball Wind Project, is caught in the breeze. But the turbine scrap area looks more like a sci-fi drama set. Rob Van Vleet climbed atop a 127-foot-long turbine blade, and walked the length like a plank.

“These towers may be supporting as much as 150,000 pounds, 250 feet in the air,” Van Vleet said. “The stands are an inch and a half thick steel … so they’re very strong.”

Ninety percent of a turbine’s parts can be recycled or sold, according to Van Vleet, but the blades, made of a tough but pliable mix of resin and fiberglass — similar to what spaceship parts are made from — are a different story.

“The blades are kind of a dud because they have no value,” he said.

Decommissioned blades are also notoriously difficult and expensive to transport. They can be anywhere from 100 to 300 feet long and need to be cut up on site before getting trucked away on specialized equipment — which costs money — to the landfill.

Once there, Van Vleet said, the size of the blades can put landfills in a tough spot.

“If you’re small utility or municipality and all of a sudden hundreds of blades start coming to your landfill, you don’t want to use up your capacity for your local municipal trash for wind turbine blades,” he said, adding that permits for more landfill space add another layer of expenses.

These old wind turbine hubs will be scrapped. *Christina Stella/Harvest Public Media*

Cindy Langstrom manages the turbine blade disposal project for the municipal landfill in Casper, Wyo. Though her landfill is one of the only ones in the state — not to mention the entire U.S. — with enough space to take wind farm waste, she said the blades’ durability initially posed a financial hurdle.

“Our crushing equipment is not big enough to crush them,” she said.

Langstrom’s team eventually settled on cutting up the blades into three pieces and stuffing the two smaller sections into the third, which was cheaper than renting stronger crushing machines that are usually made for mining.

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Proposals sought for Economic Stability Plan for New Jersey’s Highlands Region

The Highlands Water Protection and Planning Council is soliciting proposals to develop an Economic Sustainability Plan for the Highlands Region of New Jersey. Proposals must be submitted no later than 5:00 p.m. Monday, November 4, 2019.

Complete details are available in the RFP: https://www.nj.gov/njhighlands/news/rfps/esplan/esplan_rfp.pdf

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