NJ won’t reach its 2050 climate goals without changes


New report says state lacks coherent, comprehensive strategy to significantly reduce carbon footprint by midcentury

Tom Johnson reports for NJ Spotlight:

smog

The state is going to require much steeper reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions to reach a goal to lower carbon pollution to 1990 levels by 2050, according to a new report by researchers at the Rutgers Climate Institute.
A decade after New Jersey enacted the Global Warming Response Act, the report found the state lacks a detailed and comprehensive strategy to achieve its goal and warned its emissions trajectory under current policies is inconsistent with the mid-century target.
The 179-page report is likely to provide a blueprint to the next administration on what steps may be needed to curb GHG emissions by 80 percent, which will require a 76 percent reduction from today’s pollution levels.


Smaller carbon footprint

But it stops short of making specific recommendations while examining a range of policies that other states are trying in an effort to reduce their carbon footprints, as well as many strategies frequently debated among New Jersey policymakers.
“The good news in New Jersey is that there’s a lot of existing authority and programs to advance the sort of climate action we need to meet the 2050 limits,’’ said Jeanne Herb, associate director of the Environmental Analysis and Communications Group at Rutgers-New Brunswick’s Bloustein School and one of the report’s authors.
The bad news is some of those policies have been talked about and lobbied at length without ever happening. Among the actions that could be taken with existing authority are steps to develop offshore wind capacity along the Jersey coast; mandates to achieve targeted reductions in energy use; and rejoining the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a multistate effort to curb global warming pollution from power plants.


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Cities Cracking Down on Climate Law-Breakers

BY COURTNEY HUMPHRIES, INSIDECLIMATE NEWS

New York's Hearst Tower was built to use 26 percent less energy than required by code. Credit: Spencer Platt/Getty Images
New York’s Hearst Tower was built to use 26 percent less energy than required by code, with an emphasis on natural lighting and temperature controls and sensors to reduce waste. The mayor’s proposed energy code updates aim to reduce energy use in more buildings. Credit: Spencer Platt/Getty
To mitigate climate change, cities need to target buildings—the “mother lode” of greenhouse gas emissions, as New York Mayor Bill De Blasio called them last week.
At a news conference, he announced a pathbreaking proposal to set stricter energy efficiency standards in the city’s aging buildings—and to fine building owners who don’t comply with the codes.
Other cities may need to crack down, too, if they are to meet their climate goals. Across the U.S., cities have pledged to reduce emissions, with some (like New York) aiming ambitiously for 80 percent reductions by 2050.
“If you’re a city that’s concerned about climate change, you have to focus on buildings, because that’s where the carbon is,” says Cliff Majersik, executive director of the Institute for Market Transformation, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit focused on climate and energy.
Building energy codes—and the ability to strengthen them—are among the most powerful tools cities have to improve energy efficiency, Majersik says. But even as municipal leaders tout energy efficiency, many aren’t doing enough to ensure that their existing energy codes are followed. Cities may need to adopt stronger tactics to translate climate goals into real energy savings and ensure builders aren’t gaming the system.
In New York, a quarter of the city’s emissions come from 14,500 buildings over 25,000 square feet in size. The city earmarked $2.7 billion in its capital budget to retrofit its own buildings, and more than 1,600 municipal and public housing buildings have been upgraded. Now, the mayor wants to force privately owned buildings to meet the same strict standards with new boilers, windows and insulation. In the long term, such measures save money through lower utility bills, but getting to that point can be a battle.
The city has already had to adopt tougher tactics to make new buildings and renovations comply with its existing codes.
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If your power stays on this winter, thank a zoo giraffe

The Philadelphia Zoo has partnered with PECO to share removed branches for gorillas, giraffes and other herbivores.


Peak Johnson reports for BillyPenn:

                                                                                                                    Photo: Sydney Schaefer/BillyPenn


The zoo has seven gorillas who eat more than 1,800 kilograms of food — that’s more than 4,000 pounds — per year. This August, the zoo and PECO formed a new collaboration called the Philadelphia Zoo Browse Program, through which PECO provides the zoo with weekly deliveries of leaves, twigs and branches, called browse. Asplundh, the tree company contracted with PECO to facilitate the tree cutting and removal, delivers the browse to the zoo.

There are 40 species of animals that have browse put into their diet. Besides primates like the gorillas, other animals — giraffes, gazelles, kangaroos and tortoises — all benefit from browse.
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NYC mayor fueling up on electric car recharging stations


Michael Gartland writes for the New York Post:

Mayor de Blasio on Wednesday rolled out a $10 million plan to install as many as 1,000 new electric-car charging stations throughout the city by 2020.
The plan, which aims to have one new charging hub in each borough by 2018, is part of a larger effort to have one-fifth of all city vehicles be electric by 2035.
Each new hub will include 20 “fast-charging” stations, which can power up vehicles in 30 minutes, instead of the eight hours it can take on lower-level chargers.
“The easier we make it for electric vehicles, the more manufacturers will build and the more prices will go down,” de Blasio said. “The future is electric.”
The city is also setting aside at least 100 parking spots for slow-charging electric vehicles and is looking to bring in 50 more charging stations exclusively for cabs and other for-hire cars to encourage a switch from gasoline.
There are currently 307 charge sites in the city with 526 low-level chargers and just 16 fast chargers.
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House moves to cut millions from Chesapeake Bay funding

Jeremy Cox reports for Delmarvanow:

Since 2010, millions of federal dollars have streamed into the eastern shores of Maryland and Virginia under a revamped effort to restore the Chesapeake Bay, America’s largest estuary.

But that flow of money could slow under House of Representatives legislation that calls for cutting about $1 for every $6 currently allotted to the program.

What’s more, an amendment to that bill, sponsored by Virginia Republican Rep. Bob Goodlatte, would block the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency from enforcing the plan’s cleanup targets.

“Through its implementation, the EPA has basically given every state in the watershed an ultimatum: either the state does exactly what the EPA says, or it faces the threat of an EPA takeover of its water quality programs,” Goodlatte told the House last Thursday.

His amendment, he added, “ensures states’ rights remain intact and not usurped by the EPA.”

More: Harris amendment aims to stop Chesapeake sturgeon effort

The measure passed largely along party lines. But 13 of Goodlatte’s fellow Republicans voted against the bill, including Maryland’s Andy Harris and Virginia’s Robert Wittman, Scott Taylor and Barbara Comstock.



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Puerto Rico entirely without power as Hurricane Maria hammers island with force not seen in ‘modern history’

Samantha Schmidt and Sandhya Somashekhar report for The Washington Post:



SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — Hurricane Maria raked across Puerto Rico Wednesday as the most powerful storm to strike the island in more than 80 years, ripping roofs off buildings and filling homes with water, and knocking out power to the entire population.
“Definitely Puerto Rico — when we can get outside — we will find our island destroyed,” Puerto Rico’s emergency management director, Abner Gomez, said at a midday press conference, adding that 100 percent of the island is without electricity. “The information we have received is not encouraging. It’s a system that has destroyed everything it has had in its path.”
The storm first slammed the coast near Yabucoa at 6:15 a.m. as a Category 4 hurricane with 155 mph winds — the first Category 4 storm to directly strike the island since 1932. By midmorning, Maria had fully engulfed the 100-mile-long island as winds snapped palm trees, peeled off rooftops, sent debris skidding across beaches and roads. By afternoon, the intense gusts had become less frequent and the lashing rains eased, giving residents their first glimpse of the storm’s wake.
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