EnviroPolitics Blog

Toomey holds first town hall in months; Some call it fake

BETHLEHEM, Pa. – Providing aid to victims of Hurricane Harvey, tax reform, and overhauling the Affordable Care Act will likely be top priorities when the Senate returns to session next week, Republican Sen. Pat Toomey said Thursday night during a long-awaited town-hall meeting that some critics described as “fake.”

Constituents had been asking for months that the senator hold a public, in-person meeting – something he recently had been doing only over the phone or, occasionally, with protesters who gathered outside his office.

Summer town halls, once considered friendly forums for many legislators, have been rough for many Republicans this year.

Toomey’s meeting, held inside a PBS39 studio and broadcast live, was not terribly dramatic; by many standards, it was tame. Only one person was removed, after he asked a question that could not be heard by everyone in the room.

But some critics also called it fake because of its comparatively small crowd size and structured format.

Toomey told the crowd he expected aid for victims of Hurricane Harvey to pass Congress in the next week or two, possibly with other measures wrapped into it to fund the federal government.

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Development, not climate change, to blame for flooding

AP photo by David J. Phillips

By the Inquirer Editorial Board:

You can blame God for a lot of things, but not all the flooding occurring in Houston is a result of divine intervention. Mankind played a big role, and not just by burning fossil fuels, which contribute to climate change and increase the frequency of historic storms like Hurricane Harvey.

Houston has been dealing with flooding since at least 1937, when local officials complained the city was “at the mercy of the relentless water.” But over the years, the need to control flooding was overwhelmed by another burning desire — to develop into what is now the fourth-largest city in the United States.

Houston’s sprawl into a nearly 600-square-mile metropolis has required paving over acres of wetlands and prairies that once absorbed huge amounts of storm water, but nothing like the cascades that for a week raced down highways into people’s homes, forcing them to evacuate or wait out the torrential rains.

Houston’s flooding provides a lesson for New Jersey’s Shore and river communities and other towns across America, where billions have been spent to protect homes and businesses threatened by rising water in low-lying areas that are ill equipped to manage tremendous volumes of storm water.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built the Addicks and Barker reservoirs in the 1940s to protect Houston from flooding. But long ago, the two massive detention basins proved inadequate to keep up with the pace of development.

In 2001, Tropical Storm Allison rained 40 inches of water on Houston, flooded 73,000 residences, and left 22 people dead. But the sprawl continued. On Memorial Day in 2015, floods killed 16 people in the Houston area and caused more than $1 billion in damage.

Other steps taken over the years to mitigate flooding weren’t enough to overcome the paving of Houston that left it at the mercy of Harvey’s more than 50 inches of rain.

The Texas Tribune and ProPublica reported on Houston’s precarious floodingsituation last year, noting that Harris County, which includes Houston, lost 30 percent of its wetlands to development between 1992 and 2010. Meanwhile, from 1996 to 2011, the amount of impervious surface in the county increased by 25 percent. That’s a lot of pavement.

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NJ Assemblywoman will not seek re-election in November

NJ Assemblywoman Maria Rodriguez-Gregg not seeking re-election

David Levinsky reports for the Burlington County Times:

New Jersey Assemblywoman Maria Rodriguez-Gregg announced Wednesday that she will not seek re-election to her 8th Legislative District seat in November.

Rodriguez-Gregg, of Evesham, has served for two terms and was the first Hispanic woman to represent the largely Burlington County district.

But her standing as a lawmaker fell under scrutiny last spring after she was charged with driving under the influence and obstruction after her vehicle was rear-ended on Route 73 at Fellowship Road in Mount Laurel.

The minor accident occurred at 3 a.m. on April 28, and an officer said he smelled marijuana in Rodriguez-Gregg’s vehicle. She indicated that she had smoked cigars earlier that evening.

The assemblywoman was fighting the charges in court. A status conference was held last week, but a trial is still pending, according to a Superior Court spokeswoman.

In a statement Wednesday, Rodriguez-Gregg said she decided not to seek re-election after “some reflection on what’s most important in my life right now.”

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Report: EPA cuts could hobble Delaware River’s cleanup

Frank Kummer reports for Philly.com:

Colonists started polluting the Delaware River as far back as the late 1700s when they emptied sewers, slaughterhouses and tanneries into it. By the 1950s, it was one of the most polluted waterways in the world.

But the massive cleanup that that started in the 1970s with the Clean Water Act is now threatened by a proposal to slash the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget, says a report by the nonprofit advocacy organizations PennEnvironment and Frontier Group. The river is a source of drinking water for 15 million people.

“We’ve made real progress to clean up and restore the Delaware River with the support and guidance of the U.S. EPA,” said Stephanie Wein, the clean water advocate for PennEnvironment, “but this budget proposal would put all of that in jeopardy.”

Wein released the 25-page report outlining what the Trump administration plan could mean for the region during a press conference Tuesday at the Philadelphia Water Works Building overlooking the Schuylkill River and Boathouse Row. The Schuylkill is the largest tributary emptying into the Delaware River and is a key part of its watershed.

The administration has proposed a 31 percent budget cut for the EPA in the fiscal year that starts Oct. 1, which would cut the agency’s current $8 billion spending plan by about $2.6 billion.

The House Appropriations Committee has approved a bill that would cut the EPA budget to about $7.5 billion — about $500 million less than Trump. But the agency’s Region 3 office in Philadelphia will potentially be among the biggest hit by buyouts.

PennEnvironment says region, covering Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware and New York, stands to lose collectively an estimated $20 million in grants for water pollution, drinking water protection, and non-point-source control and enforcement. Much of that is for Delaware watershed programs, Wein said.

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Opinion: States dare to think big on climate change

From the Opinion Page of The New York Times:

The one bright spot amid the generally gloomy news about climate change, and the Trump administration’s resistance to doing anything about it, is the determination of a number of state governments to take action on their own.

California, as usual, has commanded the headlines on this score, having just strengthened its commitment to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Now the nine Northeastern states that form the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative have done much the same, in a further rebuke to the know-littles and do-nothings like Scott Pruitt, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, who are now calling the shots on climate policy in Washington.

The nine states, including Connecticut, Massachusetts and New York, last week agreed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from power plants an additional 30 percent by 2030, on top of the 40 percent cut they have already achieved since the program began in 2009. R.G.G.I., as the initiative is known, was the nation’s first multistate greenhouse gas initiative. From the beginning (and despite the defection of New Jersey’s Gov. Chris Christie), it has had the backing of governors from both parties. More important, it has quietly achieved substantial emissions reductions at little cost to the states’ economies or to their consumers.

What do you think? In addition to–or instead of– additional states joining RGGI, what are the most effective actions that state lawmakers and governors can do to bolster environmental protection in the face of its systematic erosion by the Trump administration? Share your thoughts in the response block below or on our Facebook page

The nine states require power plants to buy permits to pollute. Over time, these permits decline in quantity. The idea of such cap-and-trade systems is to put a price on emissions, giving utilities an incentive to figure out ways to reduce emissions. Utilities can trade permits with one another. Since it began, the initiative has raised $2.7 billion, which the states have invested in energy efficiency, in helping low-income people pay electricity bills and in renewable sources of power like wind and solar. (The other R.G.G.I. states are Delaware, Maine, Maryland, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont.)

Even as emissions have come down, electricity rates have fallen by an average of 3.4 percent in the nine states, according to the Acadia Center, an energy research and advocacy organization. And the economies of the nine states have grown faster than the economy of the rest of the country. The program has had the added benefit of reducing ground-level pollution that causes respiratory illnesses and other diseases, providing nearly $6 billion in public health benefits, according to Abt Associates, a research company.

All this serves to chastise Mr. Christie, who pulled New Jersey out of the program in 2011, complaining about its costs and saying it had “no discernible or measurable impact upon our environment.” Mr. Christie’s tenure will soon be history, and the Republican and Democratic candidates to replace him say they want New Jersey to rejoin the initiative. Virginia may also decide to participate if the Democratic candidate for governor wins this November.

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Harvey: Worst rainstorm in U.S. history and it’s still raining

Reuters / Richard Carson

Eric Holthaus reports for Grist:

The pictures are heartbreaking, the statistics are mind-boggling. And, incredibly, it’s still getting worse.

Since Hurricane Harvey made landfall in Texas late Friday night, more than 40 inches of rain have fallen in parts of the Houston metro area, producing the worst flood in the city’s modern history. The latest forecasts show another 15-25 inches on the way before Harvey clears out of the area on Wednesday. Harvey is sure to rank as the worst rainstorm in U.S. history, according to an initial analysis from the Texas state climatologist.

“Of course I’m surprised,” Houston meteorologist Tim Heller told Grist. “We tell people to prepare for the worst, but this is worse than the worst! This isn’t isolated flooding, this isn’t neighborhood flooding, this is area flooding, regional flooding. The warnings were there for 15-25 [inches] of rain, then 30, then 40. I quit giving out storm totals because I’m not sure what we’ll end up with now.”

The amount of rain so far brings new meaning to the word “unprecedented.” In just three days, Houston doubled the previous record rainfall for a full month — 19.21 inches set in June 2001 during Tropical Storm Allison (which caused the city’s previously worst flood).

So much rain has fallen that the National Weather Service had to add additional colors to its maps, in order to show rainfall totals this huge. During the peak of the rainfall on Saturday night, the local NWS office in Houston ad-libbed a dire warning and issued a “Flash Flood Emergency for Life-Threatening Catastrophic Flooding” — the first time the already-dire “Flash Flood Emergency” was considered insufficient to describe the impending risk.

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