How one feels about climate change regulations has a great deal to do with how one views climate change. The Yale Program on Climate Change Communications has data that shows the majority of Americans believe climate change is happening and that it does affect the weather. Yet only one in five Americans believe it will harm them personally a great deal. Most see it as a future emergency.
What that means is that those leaders who, like our governor, are willing to pay almost any price, including societal and economic harm, have not done the job of convincing most citizens that the immediacy of drastic action is necessary. Without building the public support, the effort of a complete energy transition in a decade or two of effort will fail no matter how hard the top-down push.
Those who lead the current efforts in New Jersey to battle climate change see themselves as charged with saving the Earth at all costs. Nowhere is that tension more clearly seen than in the proposed Resilient Environments and Landscapes (REAL) regulations.
A look at the current status of the struggle is instructive.
The movement of energy generation away from fossil fuel power plants to green energy sources in New Jersey is stalled in its offshore wind initiative. The offshore wind industry, with significant foreign involvement, and the environmental groups that champion the cause have won most of the skirmishes in court or before regulatory agencies. Yet no one is actually building wind farms!
Orsted withdrew from its Ocean Wind I and II obligations last fall.
Atlantic Shores just received a federal government go-ahead while simultaneously requesting a delay in the Board of Public Utilities award while the wind farm company seeks a turbine supplier. Construction was to begin this year, and now the firm finds itself looking for a supplier for the most visible element in a wind farm, the turbines.
What is getting less exposure is the fact that Atlantic Shores rebid its project during the state’s fourth solicitation and is seeking new terms.
The state’s first solicitation for offshore wind was in 2018. Five years later, the state is still playing catch-up with overly aggressive goals set by Gov. Phil Murphy through executive orders.
What about electrification? The goal is the adoption of electricity as the primary source of energy in a variety of areas.
A major stumbling block early in the process is the soaring price of electricity and citizen backlash. The slower-than-expected development of renewable sources of energy is causing uneven capacity in electric supply just as government policy and the surprising appetite for power from new data center technologies is driving up auction prices for electricity.
They are being driven up at such speed that it is forcing the continued employment of fossil fuel plants, including ones that still use coal. It is also forcing a rethink of the too-long-neglected nuclear power sector, where aging plants have not been replaced with new ones. Microsoft is even seeking to revive Unit 1 of the old Three Mile Island plant to feed data center needs.
In a brilliant display of unintended consequences and failed management of electricity capacity, we have managed to create scarcity where it did not exist before. Even success in capacity development would face huge problems with a grid that is not prepared for the required lode.
The backlash has politicians responding with threats of hearings, normally sleepy electric utility companies finding themselves in the public spotlight, questions being asked of the true role of regulatory bodies like the BPU, and lawsuits being a constant threat.
Now we have the DEP’s attempt at climate-based land-use rules that could devastate coastal economies in New Jersey. No need here to rehash the new regulations. The media has been full of them.
Just a brief flyover will do.
REAL sets new elevation requirements that will force fundamental changes to zoning and put home ownership even further out of reach for many. The requirements would force local government to spend significant tax dollars raising roads to provide dry access while the state continues to ignore the fact that state evacuation routes out of Cape May County would not meet its new REAL regulations.
Why a 76-year planning horizon? Why reliance on a 2019 sea level rise projection that may no longer be the best science?
Why increase the cost of desperately needed housing stock, harm a thriving tourist economy, and in the end diminish the opportunity for building public support for an energy transition that officials argue must happen?
Could it be that passing this 1,000-page compendium of new regulations by mid-2025 has more to do with the imminent end to Murphy’s term as governor than it has with real immediate need to combat what might be the environmental challenges in 2100?
When environmental groups in the spring pushed Murphy to enact the rules that we now call REAL, they called on him to ensure these regulations were adopted before his term ends. This move is massive and very destructive overkill.
For the supporters of REAL regulations, this was an attempt to get as much cemented in place as possible before the issues of climate policy become entangled in the election of a new governor in November 2025.
NJ REAL is awful public policy and should not be adopted.
It was developed while keeping the public’s elected representatives in the Legislature at arm’s length. Public input was sought only where required by law, and that input has had negligible impact on the final product.
While most New Jerseyans feel that climate change is a serious problem that requires attention, the path forward involves grappling with the complex interactions of technology and science on the one hand and politics and societal factors on the other.
You cannot save a democracy from the threat of climate change by allowing the head of the executive branch of government to dictate the strategy. Winston Churchill said, “Democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others that have been tried.” It is time we act on those principles.
Quotes from the Bible
Speak truth each one with one another, for we are members of one another. Ephesians 4:25
