Climate change and energy to-do list for NJ’s next governor

More than two dozen state leaders have prepared a plan to help next administration get right to work cleaning up New Jersey’s environment

Tom Johnson reports for NJ Spotlight:

Polluting smokestack

Within his or her first 100 days, New Jersey’s next governor should undertake bold new steps to address climate change and significantly reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, a diverse group of state leaders urged yesterday.
The actions include incorporating climate-change impacts into state planning and rulemaking — a difference that would for the first time monetize the social cost of carbon. It is a tool clean-energy advocates and health experts have long argued is needed to more accurately assess the cost of fossil fuels and benefits from carbon-free energy.
The far-reaching recommendations, embracing many of the steps detailed in a recent report, range from much-debated policies like rejoining the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative to factoring climate-change impacts into state funding decisions.
Significantly, the list of leaders reaching a consensus on the suggested policies include former Govs. James Florio, a Democrat, and Thomas Kean, a Republican; Kathleen Ellis, a former gubernatorial advisor; and Dennis Bone, the former CEO of Verizon New Jersey. They are among two dozen dignitaries who signed a letter. Not all endorsed the actions suggested, but agreed the next governor should consider these steps.
“We are a group of individuals who share a similar commitment to advancing sound climate-change policy in New Jersey because we believe that doing so will contribute to global efforts to address changing climate conditions and will also bring public health, economic, environmental, community development and other benefits to the Garden State,’’ the letter said.

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A promising start to 2017 Monarch Butterfly migration



                                                                                                          Dale Gerhard, AC Press Photo


Michelle Brunetti Post writes for the Atlantic City Press:

CAPE MAY POINT — Her friends aren’t surprised when Rebecca Zerlin suddenly calls out “Monarch!” when they are driving with her.
She’s trained to spot the migrating butterflies from far away in a moving car.
The 25-year-old Cape May Bird Observatory intern drove slowly around a set 5-mile route from Higbee Beach through Cape May Point, clicking a hand-held counter every time she saw one of the orange-and-black butterflies.
Her total was 38 in 20 minutes.
The 20 mph drive and count is repeated every day at 9 a.m., noon and 3 p.m. from early September to late October and provides data for a census of monarchs passing through Cape May on their fall migration to Mexico.
Rebecca Zerlin and to monarch butterflies – Dale Gerhard photo
“You are here on a good day,” said Zerlin, of New Orleans. A wind from the northwest and sunny skies had brought lots of the migrants to the tip of Cape May, where they will put on as much weight as possible sipping nectar from wild sources and garden flowers before making the 17-mile trip across Delaware Bay to Cape Henlopen in Delaware.
The data aren’t in yet, but early anecdotal reports predict a strong showing for the beautiful insects that travel thousands of miles to huddle together in trees on protected mountainous land in the Reserva de la Biosfera Mariposa Monarca, about 62 miles northwest of Mexico City.                           
The butterflies’ many fans are hoping for a big population rebound this year.                                      
“At the very least, we can say that in Atlantic and Cape May counties lots of people have seen a lot of monarchs in the last generation before migration, which means lots of caterpillars now, and more are going to be headed (south),” said Mark Garland, director of the Monarch Monitoring Project run by CMBO, a part of New Jersey Audubon. “I’m cautiously optimistic.”
The species has declined about 90 percent nationally in the last 20 years, with particularly rough years in 2004 and 2013. Bad weather and dwindling supplies of milkweed for the caterpillars to feed on are generally blamed for the crashing population.
The data collected here, however, have shown ups and downs but, overall, a more stable population, said Garland, probably because milkweed is more plentiful along the East coast than in the Midwest, where changing farming practices have wiped it out.
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Yet another giant Iceberg breaks free of Antarctica



USA Today reports:


A massive iceberg broke off Antarctica on Saturday, the latest piece of ice to leave the continent.

The U.S. National Ice Center measured the iceberg at 71.5 square miles, about three times the size of Manhattan. Previous media reports had the iceberg at over 100 square miles.

The iceberg is now in the Amundsen Sea but will eventually drift into Pine Island Bay, notes the Ice Center. The iceberg shows signs of fracturing, meaning smaller pieces of ice may break off. The Ice Center said it’s not expected to cause any shipping hazards.

Chris Shuman of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center said the break is part of a natural process, but the frequency of the breaks is concerning. Forces such as wind, tides, currents and even collisions with other icebergs can create rifts in the ice. Warm water moving underneath the glaciers causes the ice to thin and perhaps accelerates the rifts.

“The fact that the calving events have gotten a little more frequent is not a good sign,” Shuman said. He adds there is no sign the trend is reversing.

The continuation, he said, means further ice losses to Antarctica and possible rising sea levels as a result.

The glacier, reports the Washington Postis a part of West Antarctica that already loses 45 billion tons of ice annually, contributing to sea level rises. Pine Island Glacier, Gizmodo reports, is the “fastest-melting glacier in Antarctica.”

The break comes two months after a 2,200 square-mile piece of ice detached from Antarctica in July. At nearly the size of Delaware, the iceberg was one of the largest ever recorded. In 2014, a 255-square-mile iceberg also calved from Antarctica.

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Bipartisan bill could enable U.S. offshore wind to take off

Recently introduced legislation would create a 30% investment tax credit for the first 3 GW of offshore wind projects deployed in the U.S.

Justin Gerdes reports for GreenTechMedia:

When the U.S. was ready to ramp up its solar industry, developers benefited from investments made in Germany, Spain and elsewhere in Europe that had funded gigawatt-scale annual deployments and pushed down costs. The same could happen with offshore wind.


By the end of 2016, 14.4 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity had been installed globally, with nearly 90 percent of the total deployed in European waters. Prices for projects coming on-line from 2020 have fallen to $50 per megawatt-hour in Denmark, the Netherlands and Germany. The United States, meanwhile, has so far managed to bring on-line just one modest commercial project, the 30-megawatt Block Island Wind Farm off of Rhode Island.
A bill introduced this summer by a bipartisan group of senators aims to help the U.S. catch up with Europe. On August 1, 2017, Senators Tom Carper (D-Del.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) introduced the Incentivizing Offshore Wind Power Act with 10 co-sponsors.
In a clever twist, the legislation trades a calendar deadline — typical for federal clean energy tax incentives — for a deployment target. The bill would create a 30 percent Investment Tax Credit (ITC) redeemable for the first 3 gigawatts of offshore wind projects placed into service in both coastal waters and inland navigable waters like the Great Lakes.
“Offshore wind energy has the potential to power every home, school and business from Florida to Maine with clean, renewable energy,” said Carper, in a statement. “I’m proud to partner with Senator Collins to provide this growing industry the certainty it needs to draw private sector investments in new offshore wind facilities across the country.”

Why the deployment target instead of deadline year? In short, project developers need more time to get more steel in the water. To take advantage of the existing federal tax incentive — developers can opt for either an ITC or a Production Tax Credit (PTC) — projects must commence construction before December 31, 2019.


Developer interest in the sector is strong. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management has conducted seven competitive lease sales for wind energy development in federal waters since July 2013. In December 2016, a 33-round bidding war ended with a $42.5 million winning bid by Statoil Wind U.S. LLC to develop 79,350 acres off the shore of New York. But it is unlikely many of the offshore projects in the pipeline will be able to claim the federal ITC/PTC before the 2019 expiration.

Sens. Carper and Collins cite the long development time required to build offshore wind as part of the justification for the legislation. “The ideal offshore winds are often found in federal waters — requiring federal permits and other logistical complications that can add years to the construction timeline,” they said in a statement.

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This is Trump’s chance to tank the solar industry


Rebecca Leber reports for Grist:

If President Trump were honest about which industries are the biggest job-creation powerhouses, it wouldn’t be the sluggish coal industry. It’s solar. More than twice the size of the wind industry and roughly five times bigger than the coal industry, solar accounted for one in every 50 jobs created in 2016, according to an annual census by the Solar Foundation.


But Trump will soon have the chance to cut off U.S. solar from the cheap foreign panels that have led to the industry’s booming success the past few years.


The U.S. International Trade Commission on
Friday decided 4-0 that foreign imports of solar panels and cells have damaged
the business of two domestic solar manufactures, Suniva and SolarWorld.
Now that the ITC has found injury, it will
likely suggest a price floor or tariffs. The decision on whether to regulate
these imports will ultimately fall to Trump, and evidence suggests he’s likely
to do it.
“I would place the odds of the president
agreeing to some type of remedy at 90 percent,” an anonymous Trump administration
official told the news site Axios. Suniva has already proposed a
price floor of 78 cents per watt and a tariff that would more than double the
current panel costs.
Solar Energy Industries Association President
Abigail Ross Hopper’s statement Friday warned that such a proposal could hobble
the industry.


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Rutgers team wins $1 million ‘Nobel Prize for students’

Avalon R. Zoppo writes for Philly.com:

For recent Rutgers graduate Hasan Usmani, the sight of the vast Karachi slum was a shock, despite his family connections and previous visits to Pakistan.

The 8,000-acre Orangi Town, home to 2.5 million people, many of them refugees from Afghanistan and Bangladesh, is barely livable, the 23-year-old said. Lacking adequate sewer lines, its streets are awash in wastewater when it rains. One resident told Usmani her children shower only once a week so the family can afford food.

“I was surprised to see people living in these conditions and surviving,” Usmani said.

He and three other fellow business school students at Rutgers University in New Brunswick — Hanaa Lakhani, Gia Farooqi, and Moneed Mian — had gone there in May with a project in mind to help the slum residents: solar-powered rickshaws. It was a concept that had won a regional competition earlier. When they got to Pakistan, an even better idea emerged: a ride-share program to better connect impoverished residents of the shantytown to rickshaws, an Uber of sorts.

This month, their pilot program, Roshni Rides, snagged first place and $1 million in start-up capital in the prestigious Hult Prize competition, founded by Swedish businessman Bertil Hult and funded by his family. The award has been dubbed the Nobel Prize for students.
Among the runners-up? A team from Harvard.


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