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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Whitewater investigator Michael Chertoff backs Clinton

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, center, accompanied by former National Counterterrorism Center Director Matt Olson, right, and former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, left, attends a National Security working session in New York Sept. 9, 2016. (Photo: Andrew Harnik, AP)Add caption
Eliza Collins reports for USA TODAY:
Michael Chertoff, once the lead Republican counsel on the Senate committee investigating the Clintons’ Whitewater land deal, is now officially backing Hillary Clinton for president.
Chertoff, who went on to become the secretary of Homeland Security under George W. Bush, told Bloomberg View over the weekend that he made the decision because of the importance of national security.
“I realized we spent a huge amount of time in the ’90s on issues that were much less important than what was brewing in terms of terrorism,” he said.
Chertoff also said that while the Clintons have made some mistakes they dwarf in comparison to the need for national security.
“People can go back decades and perhaps criticize some of the judgments that were made [in the 90s],” Chertoff said. “That is very, very insignificant compared to the fundamental issue of how to protect the country.”
_____________________________________

Chertoff was born in Elizabeth, NJ and served as U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey from 1990 to 1994 – Editor_____________________________________
 Whitewater was a probe into a land deal the Clintons were involved in shortly before Bill Clinton was elected governor of Arkansas. The investigation didn’t turn up anything, but it spawned other investigations into the Clintons that wound up uncovering Bill’s affair with Monica Lewinsky, leading to his impeachment by the House.

In his interview over the weekend, Chertoff addressed Clinton’s use of a private server specifically, telling Bloomberg that it was a mistake, but “she did not intentionally endanger national security.”
Chertoff previously signed a letter warning of the consequences of Trump presidency to national security but his decision to publicly back Clinton came after last week’s debate.
“Trump’s sense of loyalties are misplaced,” he said. He added that the way Trump has handled the situation with former Miss Universe Alicia Machado — he has defended calling her “Miss Piggy” and “Miss Housekeeping” and went on a Twitter tirade in the wee hours of the morning last week — brings up concerns of impulse control.
“Not only did he seem at the debate to lose his temper, but to get up at 3:30 a.m. and reach for your smartphone is to me a hysterical reaction. If you’re president, the button you reach for is not the Twitter button; it’s the nuclear button,” he said.
Earlier this month Clinton met with Chertoff and a group of other bipartisan national security officials.
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Trump tax story: How NYT got it; Chris, Rudy play defense

The BIG weekend story is Donald Trump’s 1995 tax records that reportedly show a loss so massive from his failed casino, airline and hotel businesses that it would have permitted him to make no tax payments for years. Here’s the fascinating story from New York Times reporter Susanne Craig on how her newspaper got hold of the tax information and how they checked it out: 

The Time I Found Donald Trump’s Tax Records in My Mailbox 

 
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a top adviser to Mr. Trump,
and former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani shared the unenviable task of explaining on the Sunday morning talk shows how the Times story was ‘actually a good story’ for Trump.

Yes, Mr. Christie actually said that.  Roll tape:



Below is Mr. Giuliani’s spin on the tax story:


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Forget ISIS, here’s the immediate threat to NJ residents

In an era when politicians are out to promote themselves by scaring you about terrorism or illegal immigrants or street crime, there is a far more immediate–and still unaddressed–threat to your well being.


It’s far easier to fix your attention on the shadowy figure who may some day cause harm with a bomb or a gun than to get you to demand that your government deal with a problem that has every single New Jersey resident today on the hook for $15,000 each.

Underfunded public pensions. Good grief, how boring. Turn on an NFL game or reality show. Don’t talk to me about numbers. Somebody eventually will figure it out.


Hey, stupid, wake up. You’d better pay attention unless:

  • you like your already outrageous property taxes to keep climbing
  • you want to work a good part of the year just to pay for the pensions of government workers who have no intention of settling for less–and expect their unions to deliver more
  • your financial plan for the future hinges on getting out of Dodge and moving to Delaware or the Carolinas
  • you hope you can find a buyer for your home who is even more out of touch than you   

Do yourself a favor. During the next commercial break, take a look at the op-ed (and video) in today’s Star-Ledger.

N.J. residents owe $15K per person in pension debt. Compromise is the only fix 

You really need to start thinking about this and demanding that state leaders start dealing with it.
 
It won’t be easy for you–or for them–but what’s the alternative?

We can’t send this problem back to Mexico or give the police more military firepower to squelch it.

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Light rail getting back on track for NJ’s Bergen County?


Elected leaders in eastern Bergen County on Saturday cheered the news that the long-delayed extension of light rail service into Bergen may finally happen, thanks to the unexpected deal in Trenton to raise the gasoline tax by 23 cents a gallon to replenish the state’s Transportation Trust Fund.


The Record‘s Christopher Maag reports:

“It is a big deal, and it’s a great step forward,” state Sen. Loretta Weinberg, D-Teaneck, said of the plans, which would offer many of her constituents a direct rail ride to the PATH train lines that run to Manhattan.

“I’m very excited,” Englewood Mayor Frank Huttle said.

When complete, the line will allow light rail trains to travel 
from Hoboken northbound, past the current terminus at Tonnelle Avenue in North Bergen, and to Ridgefield, Palisades Park and Leonia. It will have three stops in Englewood, including at Route 4 and downtown, and terminate at Englewood Hospital and Medical Center.

The final legislation incorporating the trust fund deal — which softens the blow of the gas tax bump with limited relief in other areas, like the sales and estate taxes — may come up for a vote in the state Legislature as early as Wednesday, said state Sen. Paul Sarlo, D-Wood-Ridge. He was one of the original co-authors of a transportation funding plan introduced in June, aspects of which are included in the current proposal.

The package, however, includes no language specifically dedicating any of the new gas tax revenue to the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail extension, Sarlo said, or to a sister project to extend the River Line light rail along the Delaware River in South Jersey.

Instead, Sarlo said, the deal to fund the two light rail systems at opposite ends of the state is an informal one among Christie, Assembly Speaker Vincent Prieto, D-Secaucus, Senate President Stephen Sweeney, D-Gloucester.

“The Legislature has the power to appropriate money, and it’s up to the executive branch to decide how that money is spent,” Sarlo said. “There is an understanding between all stakeholders, North and South Jersey and the governor’s office, that when the plan is developed, those two projects will be funded.”

Even if the Legislature passes the funding measure and the governor signs it, construction on the light rail line will not start soon.

During the summer, officials with NJ Transit were working to complete a preliminary study of the project’s environmental effects, as required by federal law. That study was to have been completed in October, said Huttle.

Then the Transportation Trust Fund ran out of money, and Christie issued an executive order stopping most construction and planning projects paid for by the fund, including the light rail effort.

Now it’s unknown when the study will be done, Huttle said.
Whenever it’s finished, NJ Transit must wait 60 days to receive public comment, hold a public hearing, complete a final environmental review, and then create an engineering plan, all before construction can actually start, Huttle said.


Read the full story here

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