The Senate Judiciary Committee will meet on Thursday, May 30, 2019, at 11:00 AM in Committee Room 4, 1st Floor, State House Annex, Trenton, NJ.
The following nominations will be considered:
TO BE A MEMBER OF THE NEW JERSEY BOARD OF PUBLIC UTILITIES: Honorable Joseph L. Fiordaliso, of Livingston, to succeed himself, for the term prescribed by law.
TO BE A MEMBER OF THE PASSAIC VALLEY SEWERAGE COMMISSION: Hector C. Lora, of Passaic, to replace Kenneth John Lucianin, resigned, for the term prescribed by law.
TO BE A MEMBER OF THE PASSAIC VALLEY SEWERAGE COMMISSION: Brendan Murphy, of Totowa, to replace Scott M. Heck, for the term prescribed by law.
Cruz has studiously avoided confronting Trump. But when it came to helping oil refiners (including one in Philadelphia) get a bigger share of the EPA’s deregulatory spoils, the senator was more than willing to play hostage politics.
Ted Cruz JUSTIN MILLER
Justin Miller reports for the Texas Observer
Ted Cruz has finally found the courage to call out the Trump administration. He’s demanding that the president and his bureaucrats stop providing cover for the ethanol industry and stand up for fossil fuel rights.
Oil companies have long complained that the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), which requires refineries to blend ethanol into their gasoline, is killing their bottom line. Refiners that don’t have the capacity to blend ethanol are required to buy regulatory credits known as RINs from those that do. The industry wants the EPA to make it easier to wiggle out of compliance, which would save refiners hundreds of millions of dollars.
In February, Cruz and four other senators threatened in a letter to derail the confirmation of the EPA’s then-Acting Administrator Andrew Wheeler if he didn’t acquiesce to their demands. Cruz has studiously avoided confronting Trump. Yet there he was playing hostage politics with his friends in the White House, acting as a tool of Big Oil in a high-stakes battle with King Cornover how Trump’s EPA should divvy up the spoils.
Ted Cruz speaking at CPAC 2015 in Washington, DC. FLICKR/GAGE SKIDMORE
Cruz’s commitment to the cause is so deep that he’s joined forces with some unlikely allies.
A year before he sent the Wheeler letter, Cruz stood in front of hundreds of union workers at the Philadelphia Energy Solutions refinery and promised to save their jobs. The independent refinery had just filed for bankruptcy, and its owners blamed the cost of compliance with the RFS. Cruz claimed that powerful Wall Street firms were getting rich by shorting the RIN market and forcing plants to shutter. “The ones that would be put out of business are the speculators, who can go and speculate on something else,” Cruz declared.
In reality, a private equity giant had swooped in a few years back, stripped the refinery’s assets and left it saddled with hundreds of millions of dollars in debt. No matter. The ethanol mandate was a convenient scapegoat, and Cruz had a prepackaged message to deploy.
The Valero refinery in Three Rivers. JEN REEL
For years, Valero Energy, a mega-refiner and one of Cruz’s staunchest political supporters, has led an astroturf lobbying campaign that uses sympathetic figures — mom-and-pop gas station owners and union refinery workers — to build support for overhauling the ethanol mandate. The tactic has worked: Last March, the EPA bailed out the Philadelphia refinery by forgiving much of its RIN debt, saving 1,100 jobs (though the company is on the brink of failure once again).
Cruz’s office insists his cause is noble and motivated purely by “jobs and economic freedom.”
“He doesn’t believe the government should be creating winners and losers,” a spokesperson said.
But it’s giants such as Valero, which spent nearly $1 billion in 2017 to comply with the RFS, that stand to gain the most. Even though Wheeler was ultimately confirmed, Cruz’s pressure campaign has worked. Wheeler’s EPA is handing out refinery exemptions like candy, and every time Cruz or another senator makes a threat, RIN investors get spooked, the cost of regulatory credits plummets and refiners save on compliance costs. Valero reported earlier this year that it saved $400 million in 2018 from lower RIN costs, and revenue from its refinery operations jumped 25 percent to $5 billion. Apparently standing up to Trump does pay.
Democrats are asking Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) head Andrew Wheeler to turn over documents tied to the agency’s proposal to roll back emissions standards for vehicles, suggesting he made misleading statements on the topic.
House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.) and Sen. Tom Carper (Del.), the top Democrat on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said the request was “in light of numerous comments from Administrator Wheeler, including statements made to Congress, that plainly contradict data presented to him by EPA’s own experts.”
“Despite the fact that you were briefed on these concerns before the rule was proposed, you have continued to make assertions about the proposal that you must know do not reflect the views of EPA’s expert staff,” the lawmakers wrote.
The EPA’s controversial proposal would freeze emissions standards set by the Obama administration in 2020 rather than have them tighten into 2026. Vehicle manufacturers oppose the plan, and the proposal has sparked a lawsuit with California, with the state threatening to enact other tough measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
An EPA spokesperson told The Hill when asked to comment on the letter that the agency “will respond through the proper channels.”
In a letter to the agency, the Democrats homed in on one particular comment Wheeler made to Congress in April.
“I have been told by my staff that the CO2 reductions, the impact of the CO2 reductions are pretty similar to what the Obama administration proposal would have received under their — would have gotten under their proposal. Because the Obama proposal had a number of exemptions and off-ramps. And the car, automobile manufacturers aren’t complying with the Obama standards today,” Wheeler told the House Energy and Commerce Committee then.
The legislators said that was demonstrably false.
“These and other statements like it are remarkable since analysis in the proposed rule clearly demonstrates that carbon pollution will increase by 8 billion tons during this century if the Trump Administration proposal is finalized,” they wrote in the letter.
The Democrats argued that the only discernible purpose for the proposed rollback is to increase the profits of the oil industry and said the request for documents was to shed light on how outside groups may have influenced the agency.
Until very recently, Philadelphia burned its recyclable plastic at an incinerator in Chester, one of Pennsylvania’s poorest communities. The city still sends about 30% of its trash to what are known as waste-to-energy facilities, including the one in Chester.
More than 4 million people in the United States live next to such incinerators, which emit lead, particulate matter, mercury, and other pollutants that can cause several diseases, according to a report published this week by The New School in New York City. Eight out of 10 such facilities are located within low-income neighborhoods, among communities of color.
“We wanted to show the reality of how these dirty incinerators are largely concentrated in environmental-justice communities, which is what community residents and activists on the ground have suspected all along,” said Adrienne Perovich, assistant director at the Tishman Environment and Design Center at The New School and one of the authors of the study.
“And it turns out that 79 percent of the incinerators in the country right now are located in environmental-justice communities.”
Two of the country’s most polluting incinerators are in poor cities near Philadelphia, the study says. The Delaware Valley Resource Recovery Facility in Chester emits more particulate matter than any other such facility in the country, the study says, releasing in 2014 over 200,000 pounds of PM2.5 — very fine particles that are less than 2.5 microns in width. The Covanta Camden Energy Recovery Facility is the second largest emitter of lead among incinerators nationwide, at 380 pounds in 2014, the study says.
Zulene Mayfield chairs Chester Residents Concerned for Quality Living, a group fighting against the city’s incinerator. In an interview Thursday, she said the city’s rate of child hospitalization due to asthma is more than three times the state average.
“It’s literally killing people,” said Mayfield. “The City of Brotherly Love chooses not to incinerate their trash within their border, they don’t mind poisoning our children.”
Animal welfare activists are asking New Jersey officials to block an aquarium from coming to the state.
SeaQuest, which runs “interactive” aquariums in five other states, will open a site at Woodbridge Center Mall this fall, it announced last month. However, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is calling foul on the company, saying it has a track record of putting animals at risk — an allegation the company refutes.
“SeaQuest is losing permits left and right, and it should be chased out of any town where it tries to set up shop,” PETA Foundation Director of Captive Animal Law Enforcement Brittany Peet said. “PETA is urging New Jersey officials to take a close look at the risks to animals and to the public that this sleazy petting zoo would bring to the Garden State.”
PETA sent a letter to the NJ Department of Fish and Wildlife on Wednesday, urging it to consult with wildlife officials in other states about the aquarium.
“SeaQuest is not ‘losing permits left and right.’ In fact, we are successfully operating six facilities from the west coast to the midwest and continue to provide an incredible, educational and safe guest experience,” company spokesperson Elsa MacDonald said. She added the company is working closely with state officials to provide a safe experience for animals and humans alike.
NJ Department of Fish and Wildlife officials did not immediately return requests for comment from NJ Advance Media.
Gov. Phil Murphy all but said Thursday he won’t sign another state budget unless it includes a tax hike on those who earn more than $1 million a year in New Jersey.
Murphy declared he’s done “stumbling” from one budget agreement to another each year as he put his foot down for a tax increase on the state’s top earners to help pump more money into education, transportation public-worker pensions and property taxes.
If he sticks to his position, the Democratic governor sets the stage for a state government shutdown if the top leaders of the Democratic-controlled state Legislature continue to oppose the millionaires tax by the July 1 budget deadline.
“We’ve got to get to a higher and better place in this state and manage ourselves with a fiscal discipline and responsibility that we have not done in the past couple of decades,” Murphy said.
Asked if that meant a millionaires tax is “a line in the sand” and that he’d refused to sign a budget by the end of next month without one, Murphy responded: “The line in the sand is without question: Enough of the old stumbling ways of putting Band-Aids on our fiscal house, so there is a line in the sand for that.”
Murphy then pointed out how Democrats sent former Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican, a millionaires tax five times in the eight years he served as governor prior to his tenure. Christie vetoed them each time.
“The only thing that has changed is the governor,” Murphy said. “If it was a good idea then it’s hard for me to see why it’s not a good idea now.”
His comments come after both state Senate President Stephen Sweeney, D-Gloucester, and state Assembly Speaker Craig Coughlin, D-Middlesex, condemned a new marketing push by a pro-Murphy group meant to rally support for the governor’s insistence the next budget include a millionaires tax.
Both men still oppose Murphy’s push for the hike.
The state narrowly avoided a shutdown over the issue last year after the leaders struck a deal to increase taxes on people who earn more than $5 million a year, as well as on corporations.
