NJ Democrats strike a deal: $15 minimum wage by ‘24



Samantha Marcus and Brent Johnson report for NJ.com


New Jersey’s Democratic governor and legislative leaders have reached a highly anticipated agreement to raise the state’s minimum wage to $15 an hour for most workers by 2024.

Under the deal, many workers would see their wages rise gradually to a $15 an hour, though some, including those employed by small businesses with five or fewer employees, will have to wait longer.
The deal had been held up by a disagreement over which workers should receive $15 an hour and when.
Gov. Phil Murphy called for $15 for all, while his fellow Democrats who lead the state Legislature — Senate President Stephen Sweeney and Assembly Speaker Craig Coughlin — said there must be exceptions made for some employers, including small businesses and farmers. This tension had stalled progress on one of the Democrats’ top priorities.
“I’m sorry it took as long as it did, but I think we came up with a really good compromise,” Sweeney, D-Gloucester, told NJ Advance Media. “It took forever, but we got it done.”
The breakthrough announced Thursday is a plan to raise the standard minimum wage to $10 an hour on July 1, $11 an hour in 2020, $12 an hour in 2021, $13 in 2022, $14 in 2023 and $15 in 2024.
“This is a big, big step forward for New Jersey. And particularly, it’s responsible,” Murphy said during a virtual town hall. “We are changing the lives of a million workers in this state. I can’t stress that enough.”

The impact of the deal is far-reaching. New Jersey Policy Perspective, a liberal Trenton think tank, estimated more than 1 million workers will benefit from the wage hike. But about 10 percent of those employees will be put on a slower path.
Seasonal workers and small business employees won’t reach $15 an hour until 2026. Farm workers will hit $12.50 in 2024, after which it would be left up to state officials in the executive branch whether to keep going to $15 an hour by 2027.
Read the full story
Like this? Click to receive free updates

NJ Democrats strike a deal: $15 minimum wage by ‘24 Read More »

#1 Question in NJ inquiry: Who hired the alleged rapist?


Katie Brennan testifies before the Legislative Select Oversight Committee on Dec. 4, 2018. Chris Pedota, NorthJersey

Charles Stile reports for NorthJersey.com:


Lawmakers investigating why a Murphy administration official was able to hang on to a plum job despite a rape allegation have been unable to answer this basic question: Who hired Al Alvarez for the $140,000-a-year job in the first place?


Murphy’s former chief of staff Peter Cammarano testified that he didn’t know who offered Alvarez the job as chief of staff at the School Development Authority. Neither did the executive director of Gov. Phil Murphy’s transition, Jose Lozano. Alvarez’s old boss at the SDA, Charlie McKenna had no answer.


And Matthew Platkin, Murphy’s chief counsel, who is one of Murphy’s most trusted advisers and finds himself at the nerve center of the scandal, offered more of the same Friday.

Gov. Phil Murphy’s chief counsel, Matt Platkin, before testifying Friday, Jan. 18, 2019 (Photo: Dustin Racioppi/NorthJersey.com)

“I am not personally aware of who hired Al Alvarez,” Platkin told lawmakers.


At one point, Assemblywoman Elinor Pintor Marin, D-Essex, asked if Murphy offered Alvarez the job.


“The governor is not typically involved in the hiring process for authorities,” Platkin said.


Who hired Alvarez, a campaign aide who oversaw outreach to Latino and Muslim voters, has become, what Senate Majority leader Loretta Weinberg, D-Bergen, is calling the “sixty-four thousand dollar question.”


The scandal that has sidelined the Murphy administration and threatens to tarnish its progressive, pro-woman brand is fraught with vexing questions that perhaps the person who offered Alvarez the job is best positioned to answer.


Read the full story


Like this? Click to receive free updates

#1 Question in NJ inquiry: Who hired the alleged rapist? Read More »

Shutdown leaves towns near toxic Superfund sites on edge

West Lake Landfill. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

West Lake Landfill. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)
item.bylineText  

DINO GRANDONI reports for the Washington Post
with Paulina Firozi



About a week after the start of the partial government shutdown last month, Dawn Chapman and Karen Nickel emailed Environmental Protection Agency officials about what the lapse in funding meant for them and other residents of Bridgeton, Mo. who live near a nuclear waste dump.

The pair of activists said they were told they would no longer be able to reach officials they normally spoke with at the EPA’s regional office near Kansas City. They worried about what would happen if there were an accident at the nearby landfill contaminated with radioactive waste dating back to the World War II-era Manhattan Project. Just as recently as November, a surface fire broke out near the nuclear dump.

Steven Cook, a top-level Trump official at the EPA’s Office of Land and Emergency Response, assured them that the agency’s emergency spill line would still be manned throughout the shutdown. But, he added in an email Chapman provided to The Post, “Please be mindful that we may be limited in our ability to provide a substantive response depending on the issue involved.”

Communities living near toxic Superfund sites like West Lake in Missouri feel on edge and in the dark during the shutdown that has paralyzed normal functions at agencies like the EPA.

The shutdown is cramping efforts by Trump officials to revitalize the nearly 40-year-old Superfund program — designed to clean up more than 1,300 hazardous sites around the country — and put many residents waiting years for a federal response at ease.

“It’s so crazy that a site can be listed like ours, and then overnight we lose contact with the federal agency responsible for overseeing it,” Chapman said in an interview. “It’s like they have officially just gone away.”

The shutdown threatens to fray already strained relations between affected communities and the federal government, which residents often see as too sluggish in its cleanup efforts.

“In the world of Superfund, the community relationships with the agency are always a big issue,” said Peter deFur, an environmental consultant working on Superfund issues.


Shutdown leaves towns near toxic Superfund sites on edge Read More »

Nestle phasing out plastic straws, sets recycling goals












reports for Waste Dive:

Nestlé has announced new plans to make 100% of its packaging recyclable or reusable by 2025 — a goal first set in 2018. “While we are committed to pursuing recycling options where feasible, we know that 100% recyclability is not enough to successfully tackle the plastics waste crisis,” said CEO Mark Schneider in a press release.

Starting next month, Nestlé will begin phasing out plastic straws from its products and replacing them with alternative materials, such as paper. The company will also move to paper packaging for a variety of products, including Nesquik, starting in the first quarter of this year.

Nestlé Waters will increase its use of recycled PET content in water bottles to 35% globally and 50% domestically by 2025. Through its own engineering team, along with outside partners such as PureCycle Technologies, Nestlé will also begin exploring new paper-based solutions, biodegradable/compostable plastic polymers that are also recyclable, marine-biodegradable and recyclable plastic bottles, and food-grade recycled polypropylene.



Nestle phasing out plastic straws, sets recycling goals Read More »

Shutdown delaying climate data, undercutting scientists

Locked doors this month at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association headquarters in Silver Spring, Md.CreditCreditMatt Roth for The New York Times

Kendra Pierre-Louis
Kendra Pierre-Louis reports for the New York Times

If you want official numbers on how 2018 ranks in the annals of recent record-breaking temperatures, you’ll have to wait.

One result of the government shutdown, now in its fourth week, is that NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are unable to issue their annual temperature analysis. And, because that data is so widely used, neither can some other governments.

For example, Britain’s national weather and climate monitoring service, the Met Office, publishes its own global temperature estimates that incorporate NOAA data but use a slightly different analytical method. That’s important because when many different analyses show the same trend — in this case, rising global temperatures — it helps give researchers confidence that their work is sound. But, the NOAA data that the Met Office needs is currently offline.

“Usually, we would have received it by now,” said John Kennedy, a scientist at the Met Office Hadley Centre, which specializes in climate research. “But this month, we haven’t.”

The global temperature numbers aren’t the only climate and environmental data we would have reported by now if not for the government shutdown.
Like this? Click to receive free updates


This time last year, for example, Americans knew that 2017 ranked as the most costly year on record for natural disasters, many of them — like Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria, and the drought that struck the Great Plains — linked to climate change.

NOAA has issued the disaster-cost estimate since 1980, but that information is not yet available for last year, which saw Hurricanes Michael and Florence, and a wildfire season that some call the deadliest and most destructive in California’s history.

Researchers say those data delays are mostly just a nuisance. It’s unlikely, for example, that when the temperature data is issued it will differ significantly from preliminary estimates that placed 2018 as the fourth-warmest year on record (The Japan Meteorological agency has issued its preliminary estimates saying as much).

They call the interruption of key scientific research, though, a much bigger problem that will have longer lasting repercussions.


Shutdown delaying climate data, undercutting scientists Read More »

Economic star lineup supports federal carbon tax

Greenspan to Yellen, economic brain trust backs carbon tax


Jennifer A. Dlouhy reports for Bloomberg:

An all-star lineup of economists, from Alan Greenspan to Paul Volcker, is endorsing a plan to combat climate change by slapping a tax on greenhouse gas emissions and then distributing the revenue to American households.
All living former Federal Reserve chairs, several Nobel Prize winners and previous leaders of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers have signed on to a statement asserting that a robust, gradually rising carbon tax is “the most cost-effective lever to reduce carbon emissions at the scale and speed that is necessary.”
“A carbon tax will send a powerful price signal that harnesses the invisible hand of the marketplace to steer economic actors towards a low-carbon future,” the 45 economists say in the opinion piece, published by the Wall Street Journal late Wednesday.
The missive is a rare case of the economic establishment speaking with a single voice on a pressing social issue, albeit one that faces political challenges from conservatives, Republicans and the current White House. The signers include economists who have served every president going back to Jimmy Carter.
“This is one of the few ideas of economic policy that commands broad, bipartisan support,” former Harvard University President and U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers said in an interview. “Nowadays on economic policy, we don’t see much of that.”
Other signers include former Fed Chairmen Janet Yellen and Ben Bernanke as well as former White House economic advisers Austan Goolsbee and Christina Romer.
The economists’ endorsement could deliver momentum to a carbon tax-and-dividend plan devised by two former secretaries of state — James Baker and George P. Shultz — that has already drawn financial support from Exxon Mobil Corp., ConocoPhillips and Exelon Corp.
Pressure is already mounting in Congress to take aim at climate change, following dire warnings about the growing consequences from a United Nations panel and the U.S. government. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat from California, has promised the chamber will take up climate legislation. And some Democrats, led by freshman Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, are advancing a so-called Green New Deal that calls for phasing out fossil fuels by 2030.

Economic star lineup supports federal carbon tax Read More »