PSEG to close its last two N.J. coal-powered plants


Big victory for clean air in New Jersey


James M. O’Neill reports today in The (Bergen) Record:

PSEG Power said it will be closing its coal-burning power plant along the Hackensack River in Jersey City on June 1 next year, as well as its other remaining coal-powered plant, in Mercer County.

That would leave New Jersey with just one coal-powered plant in the state, the B.L. England facility in Cape May County.

The decision should help improve New Jersey’s chronically poor air quality, since coal-burning plants produce far more air pollution than those that burn natural gas. About half of New Jersey’s electricity is generated by nuclear plants, which produce no air emissions. PSEG Power’s large power plants in Ridgefield and Linden use natural gas.

New power grid rules to increase facility reliability would have required PSEG Power to make more costly upgrades to the two coal-burning plants. And the company has been relying more to its natural gas powered plants anyway in recent years because the cost of natural gas has dropped so low, especially since production ramped up from the Marcellus Shale region of neighboring Pennsylvania.

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“The sustained low prices of natural gas have put economic pressure on these plants for some time,” said Bill Levis, president and chief operating officer of PSEG Power. “In that context, we could not justify the significant investment required to upgrade these plants to meet the new reliability standards.”

He said the two coal-burning plants have not been used much in recent years.

The company said in a statement that it is evaluating options for future use of the sites, and is “committed to treating the approximately 200 employees at Hudson and Mercer fairly during the process of retiring the existing units.”

“These plants have played a critical role in powering the growth and economic expansion of New Jersey and PSEG is grateful to our employees who have played a part in building and running them for the past 50 years,” said Levis. “We will work with our union and PSEG leadership to ensure that the plants continue to operate safely through their retirement dates and to place as many employees as possible within PSEG’s family of companies.”

PSEG Power is building a new $600 million gas-fired plant in Sewaren, in Middlesex County, as well as new plants in Connecticut and Maryland.

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Occidental chips in $165M toward Passaic River cleanup

The Passaic River is one of the most contaminated waterways in the United States

One of the nation’s largest chemical companies will pay $165 million toward the cleanup of the lower Passaic River under an agreement reached with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, officials announced this morning.

Scott Fallon reports for The (Bergen) Record today:

The settlement with Occidental Chemical Corp., of Houston, is a fraction of the $1.38 billion needed to complete a plan to dredge and cap the river that EPA announced in March. But agency leaders said the $165 million is important because it will fund engineering work to design the cleanup while EPA pursues agreements with more than 100 other companies to fund the dredging.

It will take four years to design the project and another six years to carry it out.

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“We’re dealing with a century of pollution,” said EPA regional Administrator Judith Enck. “We need a decade to get it cleaned up.”

About 3.5 million cubic yards of sediment laced with cancer-causing dioxin, PCBs, mercury and other industrial pollution will be scooped up within an eight mile boundary from Newark Bay to Belleville. The first 2½-feet of polluted sediment will be removed in most of the river and up to 15 feet to accommodate a navigation channel. Contaminated sediment would be taken to an out of state landfill

The plan is 800,000 cubic yards or 20 percent less than a $1.7 billion plan proposed by EPA two years ago. The change is due to EPA shortening by about half a mile the length of a navigational channel it plans to dredge, agency officials said.

When the work is done, more than half of the pollution in the river — about 6 million cubic yards of contamination ¬— will remain in the Passaic, covered with sand and other materials.
The Passaic River is one of the most contaminated waterways in the United States, with pollution dating back more than 200 years.

It worsened in the 20th century with chemical manufacturers and other industry lining the riverfront, including the Diamond Alkali plant in Newark, which dumped dioxin into the river while making the infamous Vietnam-era defoliant Agent Orange.

Occidental purchased the stock of the former Diamond Alkali and inherited its environmental liability.

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Wildstein: Cuomo joined Christie in Bridgegate cover-up


Matt Katz and Andrea Bernstein report for WNYC:
The governors of New York and New Jersey were involved in covering up Bridgegate early on, star witness David Wildstein said in federal court in Newark Tuesday.
Wildstein testified last week that he and defendant Bill Baroni bragged to New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie about the lane closures while they were going on.
In federal court Tuesday, Wildstein fingered New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo as well, saying it was his “understanding that Gov. Christie and Gov. Cuomo discussed” putting together a false report as early as October 2013, shortly after the lane closures, saying “that the New Jersey side accepted responsibility.”  

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The idea was that the New York appointees of the Port Authority would sign off on the cover story as a “traffic study” gone awry, and that would be that.

By that point in time, senior officials on both sides of the Hudson River knew there had been no “traffic study.” High-ranking Christie and Cuomo staffers were in communication about the lane closures, Wildstein testified. Wildstein said he understood that Cuomo instructed his top appointee, Pat Foye, to “lay off” Christie.
According to Wildstein, this report became the basis for Bridgegate defendant Bill Baroni’s subsequent false testimony to the legislature. The report was not otherwise released. The timing is key: the alleged collusion between the governors came months before Cuomo said he only knew “basically what has been in the newspapers.”

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Wildstein: Cuomo joined Christie in Bridgegate cover-up


Matt Katz and Andrea Bernstein report for WNYC:
The governors of New York and New Jersey were involved in covering up Bridgegate early on, star witness David Wildstein said in federal court in Newark Tuesday.
Wildstein testified last week that he and defendant Bill Baroni bragged to New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie about the lane closures while they were going on.
In federal court Tuesday, Wildstein fingered New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo as well, saying it was his “understanding that Gov. Christie and Gov. Cuomo discussed” putting together a false report as early as October 2013, shortly after the lane closures, saying “that the New Jersey side accepted responsibility.”  

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The idea was that the New York appointees of the Port Authority would sign off on the cover story as a “traffic study” gone awry, and that would be that.
By that point in time, senior officials on both sides of the Hudson River knew there had been no “traffic study.” High-ranking Christie and Cuomo staffers were in communication about the lane closures, Wildstein testified. Wildstein said he understood that Cuomo instructed his top appointee, Pat Foye, to “lay off” Christie.
According to Wildstein, this report became the basis for Bridgegate defendant Bill Baroni’s subsequent false testimony to the legislature. The report was not otherwise released. The timing is key: the alleged collusion between the governors came months before Cuomo said he only knew “basically what has been in the newspapers.”

Read the full story here
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Great Adventure holds off on tree clearing for solar farm


Tom Johnson reports today for NJ Spotlight:

Great Adventure will not be cutting down any trees to build a huge solar farm — at least not anytime soon.
Six Flags, the parent company of the amusement park, agreed to hold off clearing 66 acres of woodland where it has won approval to build one of the state’s largest solar facilities until a court case contesting the plan is decided.
The decision marks a small victory for an array of state environmental organizations, which had sought to block the project put forward by the amusement park and solar developer KDC Solar. If allowed to go forward, as many as 16,000 trees would be cut down, according to foes.
The move is in response to an injunction filed with the court by opponents of the project, who include the New Jersey Conservation Foundation, New Jersey Sierra Club, Clean Water Action, Environment New Jersey, Save Barnegat Bay, and others.
The proposal would allow the park to build a 21.9-megawatt solar facility — enough to power about 3,000 homes — on forested land located between two major wildlife refuges. The project won approval from Jackson Township in March 2015.
In their initial lawsuit, the environmental groups argued the project violates Jackson Township’s master plan and a local tree-removal ordinance, which sets explicit regulations for tree preservation and removal.
The opponents also contended that the project is at odds with the state’s Energy Master Plan, which recommends that large solar projects avoid being located on existing open space and farmland and instead targeted to brownfields and closed garbage dumps.
Great Adventure should have heeded recommendations to relocate the project above the park’s parking lot, an option considered but largely rejected by the company. The project ultimately moved a small portion of the solar arrays to the parking facility.
Jeff Tittel, director of the New Jersey Sierra Club, one of the groups challenging the approval, argued that the township ignored its own planning regulations. “This area is clearly environmentally sensitive, contains threatened and endangered species, and protects water quality,’’ he said.
The court is not expected to render a decision in the case until the end of the year.
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The Arctic is being utterly transformed

    A collage of melting sea ice in the Kane Basin between Greenland and Canada’s Ellesmere
Island in August of 2016. (Chris Mooney for the Washington Post.

It’s the fastest-warming part of the planet — and the impacts will be felt far, far afield. Among many other assorted impacts, the rapidly melting Arctic is expected to flood shorelines as Greenland loses ice more and more rapidly (it contains some 20 feet of potential sea level rise), further pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere as permafrost thaws, and become a global heat sink as a once ice-covered ocean exposes more and more dark water.


Chris Mooney reports for The Washington Post:

No wonder, perhaps, that on Wednesday, the outgoing Obama administration convened top science policymakers from 25 other Arctic and non-Arctic nations, as well as representatives of Arctic indigenous peoples, in a first-ever Arctic Science Ministerial to coordinate study of what the consequences will be as the Arctic heats up much more rapidly than the more temperate latitudes or the equator.
“The temperature is increasing between 2 and 5 times as fast, depending on where in the Arctic you are,” said physicist John Holdren, who heads the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy and is Obama’s science adviser, and is chairing the meeting.
We know this in broad outline, Holdren said, but our knowledge comes up short in many areas when it comes to more precisely observing what is happening in the remote and at times dangerous Arctic region, and being able to run simulations, or computer models, to chart the consequences.
“Basically, the whole Arctic is under-instrumented,” said Holdren. “The observation networks are too sparse in geographic extent, they’re too discontinuous in time, they’re not measuring everywhere all the things they should be measuring. We can’t say, for example, how much CO2 and methane emissions from the Arctic are actually going up. We know they are going up but we don’t really have a good handle on how fast and from precisely where.”
In conjunction with the ministerial, the White House announced the release of a new satellite-based dataset that maps elevations across the Arctic at a resolution of 8 meters, with an expected further improvement to 2 meters next year. This is highly scientifically valuable because it will mean that researchers will be able to remotely detect the slumping of glaciers and permafrost and the vulnerability of different locations to rising seas.
[These gorgeous new Alaska maps could transform our understanding of the Arctic]
Also on Wednesday, global ministers announced a number of science projects including a new Integrated Arctic Observing System to be put in place by the European Union and a U.S. National Science Foundation project, called “Eyes North,” to record and evaluate the large volume of environmental changes being observed by the Arctic’s indigenous peoples in and around their communities.
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