Legal marijuana bills advance as NJ Senate hearing draws large crowd of interests seeking to testify for and against

In all, almost 100 witnesses were scheduled to testify and scores of others submitted statements for and against. But Monday was a rare opportunity to see an actual, sometimes strident, debate on the merits of the bills. 

 Click small arrow at center of video to view David Cruz’ report for NJTV News


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Chemical leak at this plant stopped holiday traffic cold

Joseph N. DiStefano reports for the Philadelphia Inquirer:


The Croda chemical plant at Atlas Point on the Delaware River, which was recently expanded by its British owners to produce two tons of hazardous ethylene oxide per hour so the material didn’t have to be shipped from Texas by rail, was shut down due to a leak on Sunday afternoon, stopping holiday traffic on I-295 over the Delaware Memorial Bridge and jamming drivers on the direct routes between New York and Washington, D.C.

Hazardous materials crews converged on the plant as traffic was diverted off both spans of the bridge just north of the 140-acre complex, causing extensive traffic jams along I-95, I-495, the New Jersey Turnpike, and feeder routes in Delaware, New Jersey, and Delaware County, Pa. The Delaware River and Bay Authority, which maintains the bridge, and New Castle County police, who cover the area including the plant, had no immediate reports of injuries. The bridge reopened to motorists around 11:30 p.m.

In a statement after the bridge reopened, Croda marketing officer Cara Eaton said the gas was contained, added that local emergency responders had left the site, acknowledged the “significant inconvenience,” and promised an investigation in hopes of not doing it again.


The plant, which employs 250 after its recent expansion to make surfactants for a long list of industrial customers, had been faced with a possible shutdown after Sunoco’s ethylene plant, 12 miles north on the Pennsylvania-Delaware state line, caught fire and burned in 2009. Sunoco decided that plant wasn’t worth fixing. Its successors converted the adjacent oil refinery into a gasworks, though they continued to use the ethylene site to burn waste fuels, for which they were fined $750,000 by Delaware last year.

Sunoco’s shutdown cut off the key raw material Croda used to help Atlas Point’s clients make antifreeze, DuPont crop-seed coatings, and the mixing and separating agents used in processed foods, natural-gas fracking, and other industries, among other ethylene-derived materials.

Instead of closing, the company invested $170 million — with $2.5 million from Delaware taxpayers, plus tax abatements — to make ethylene from ethanol, the same simple alcohol that makes you drunk. The job employed 250 temporary contractor workers during its two-year construction and added 35 permanent workers represented by the United Steelworkers to the 215 working there before the expansion.

Useful as it is, ethylene is explosive, a carcinogen, and poisonous — a base for pesticides and the lethal mustard gas outlawed after World War I. DuPont made ethylene at its sprawling Chambers Works across the river from Atlas Point, but that plant (now operated mostly by spin-off Chemours) has reduced operations. After Sunoco shut its ethylene works, the closest U.S. suppliers were in the Houston-area petrochemical complex.


When Sunoco put Croda on notice, “the ethylene world was in flux,” Bob Stewart, who managed Atlas Point at that time, said in an interview before Sunday’s leak. Stewart is now Croda’s managing director of operations, overseeing Atlas Point and other works in places including Mill Hall, Pa., near Lock Haven, and the research lab in Edison, N.J.

“Suppliers didn’t want the risk of sending railcars north” with the danger of leaks, he told me. They urged Croda to shut the Delaware River plant and build a new facility near the Gulf Coast.

“We looked at relocation,” Stewart said. But Croda had already invested $100 million in Atlas Point since taking over the site in 2006. Among other “sustainable” processes meeting a company mandate to reduce its carbon footprint, Croda updated a pipeline to burn waste gas from Wilmington’s nearby Cherry Island landfill, installed LED lighting, and added a solar panel electric field (which it’s now expanding).

Most important, Stewart said, his specialized, reliable workforce — the plant claimed over a million work-hours since its last time-lost injury — was unwilling to move all the way to the Gulf Coast: “That wasn’t the life they were used to.”

So, instead of writing it down as a loss, Croda bought an ethylene production process using silver as a catalyst to make the chemical from common ethanol. Refined from grain or farm waste, ethanol is flammable — usually added to U.S. automotive fuel — but much safer than ethylene to ship by rail. The process was already in use at plants in China and India, but Atlas Point was its first U.S. installation, Stewart said. Croda hired Rockwell Automation to build a digital-process control and monitoring system for the 120,000-square-foot plant expansion.

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Federal report on climate change has grim warnings for NE

Bass River
Atlantic white cedars dying near the banks of the Bass River in New Jersey show wetland encroachment on forested areas. Credit: Ted Blanco/Climate Central.

There’s no sugarcoating the conclusions of this major document. It underlines threats to health and well-being in the Northeast

Tom Johnson reports for NJ Spotlight:

Heat waves, coastal flooding, warmer oceans, and rising sea levels threaten the Northeast region’s environmental and economic systems, jeopardizing the health and safety of its residents, according to the latest climate report by the federal government.
The grim report of more than 1,600 pages, concludes those events are already happening and likely will intensify in the future. The Fourth National Climate Assessment, produced by 13 federal agencies, was released this past Friday and for the first time detailed how climate change will affect specific regions around the country.

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Its release, a couple of months after other recent studies on global warming, occurs at a time when states like New Jersey are moving aggressively to deal with climate change at the same time as the Trump administration is rolling back initiatives to reduce emissions from power plants and vehicles that contribute to global warming.
“This report makes it clear that climate change is not some problem in the distant future,’’ said Brenda Ekwurzel, director of climate science at the Union of Concerned Scientists and one of the authors of the report.
“It’s happening right now in every part of the country. When people see wildfires, hurricanes and heat waves they’re experiencing unlike anything they’ve seen before, there’s a reason for that, and it’s called climate change,’’ she said.
Look out: weather, air, water


For the Northeast, including New
Jersey, changing climate threatens the health and well-being of people through
more extreme weather, warmer temperatures and degradation of air and water
quality, the report said.

“These environmental changes are expected to lead to health-related impacts and costs, including additional deaths, emergency room visits and hospitalizations, and a lower quality of life,’’ according to the assessment. The effects likely will particularly impact the most disadvantaged populations in the Northeast.
The more densely populated and developed urban areas already tend to have higher temperatures than surrounding regions due to the urban heat-island effect. Projected increases in temperatures in the Northeast may result in approximately 650 additional premature deaths per year from extreme heat, the report said.
Climate change also threatens to reverse gains made in recent decades in air quality, particularly for ground-level ozone, or smog, according to the assessment. New Jersey has reduced ozone levels dramatically in recent years but has yet to achieve the national health quality standard for the pollutant, which increases respiratory ailments for the young and elderly.
Air quality also could suffer from more frequent and severe wildfires due to climate change. That is of particular concern in the Pinelands in southern New Jersey, a 1.1 million acre preserve considered one of the most combustible forests in the country.
Economic impacts at the coast
Warmer ocean temperatures and sea-level rise also could adversely affect the region’s coastal and oceanic economies — impacting recreation, fishing, and tourism by changes in marine ecosystems and the ability of coastal communities to adapt as climate risks increase, the report said. Some fish species already are moving northward because of higher ocean temperatures.
Rising sea levels and storm surge could result in up to $30 billion in property losses for coastal New Jersey and Delaware by 2100, according to some projections in the report. Many coastal communities will be transformed by the end of the century — even under the lowest scenarios of climate-change risk.
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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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Pennsylvania planning to crank up its solar energy efforts

solar energy - NY Times photoTim Sylvia reports for pc magazine:Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection has announced a new RPS initiative aimed at increasing the state’s amount of deployed solar and job creation.The plan, dubbed “Pennsylvania’s Solar Future” is a strong starting point for a state that currently generates less than 1 percent of its electricity from solar resources.The plan itself is not one coherent guideline, but rather an aggregate of 15 recommended strategies. These strategies vary in the means by which solar would be developed, but disappointingly more than half of the strategies eye increasing development in either utility-scale or distributed systems, rather than both.The plan itself is not one coherent guideline, but rather an aggregate of 15 recommended strategies. These strategies vary in the means by which solar would be developed, but disappointingly more than half of the strategies eye increasing development in either utility-scale or distributed systems, rather than both.While the bright side remains that the plan may choose to use a strategy that utilizes both distributed and utility-scale solar, strategies that use both make up less than half of the total strategies contained in the plan. This type of potential one-or-the-other development is eerily similar to what has happened in Arizona, where utilities are more than happy to develop solar through massive projects, yet kick, scream and fight against the expansion of distributed solar in their service areas.Read the full storyLike this? Click to receive free updates

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Dead sperm whale in Indonesia ingested 115 plastic cups

A stranded whale with plastic in its belly is seen in Wakatobi, south-east Sulawesi, Indonesia,19 November 2018 in this picture obtained from social mediaImage copyrightImage captionItems found inside the whale included drinking cups, plastic bottles, plastic bags and flip-flops

A dead sperm whale that washed ashore in a national park in Indonesia had nearly 6kg (13 lbs) of plastic waste in its stomach,
park officials say.
BBC News reports:
Items found included 115 drinking cups, four plastic bottles, 25 plastic bags and two flip-flops.
The carcass of the 9.5m (31ft) mammal was found in waters near Kapota Island in the Wakatobi National Park late on Monday.
The discovery has caused consternation among environmentalists.
“Although we have not been able to deduce the cause of death, the facts that we see are truly awful,” Dwi Suprapti, a marine species conservation co-ordinator at WWF Indonesia, was quoted as saying by the Associated Press.
It was not possible to say whether the plastic had caused the whale’s death because of its advanced state of decay, she added.
In a tweet, WWF Indonesia gave the breakdown of what was found inside the animal:
“Hard plastic (19 pieces, 140g), plastic bottles (4 pieces, 150g), plastic bags (25 pieces, 260g), flip-flops (2 pieces, 270g), pieces of string (3.26kg) & plastic cups (115 pieces, 750g).”

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