In his no-nonsense style, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has taken on two of the most sacred cows in American politics: the public employee unions and now the environmental lobby, which never met an economy-strangling regulation it didn’t like. Not only is the new Republican governor saving overtaxed New Jersey taxpayers money by cutting the state’s bloated budget, he’s also trying to prevent the future looting of their wallets.
A month after a monster storm broke daily snowfall records in New Jersey going back as far as 1899, Christie audaciously proposed cutbacks to the Garden State’s global warming spending.
To help close an $11 billion budget gap, the Republican governor wants to divert $300 million from the state’s Clean Energy Fund and close down its duplicative Office of Climate Change and Energy. In January, he allowed a proposed rule requiring the monitoring and reporting of greenhouse gas emissions to expire.
Environmentalists are predictably aghast, claiming that Christie is using “a wrecking ball” to dismantle New Jersey’s environmental infrastructure. Which is actually a pretty accurate description.
But this is what Christie’s wrecking ball is taking down:
New Jersey – part of a regional ten-state cooperative that bills itself as “the first mandatory market-based program to reduce carbon emissions in the U.S.” – requires power plants to reduce carbon dioxide emissions 10 percent by 2019. The state Board of Public Utilities also mandates that utilities generate 20 percent of their electricity using renewable energy sources by 2020. Both will drive up energy costs substantially.
Christie issued an executive order putting a moratorium on any new regulations that will raise energy prices even more.
A New Jersey law passed under former Gov. Jon Corzine imposes more restrictions than the Environmental Protection Agency.
Christie wants to roll them back to federal standards.
New Jersey’s Global Warming Response Act mandates the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels over the next ten years – a 20 percent reduction equivalent to the job-wrecking law passed in California, which not coincidentally is also facing bankruptcy. The New Jersey law requires even further reductions by 2050.
Christie wants a cost-benefit analysis done before any new regulations go into effect.
New Jersey companies that don’t meet the state’s already stringent environmental targets already face massive fines. For example, Connectiv Energy was forced to pay $2 million in penalties, $1 million of which was used to fund an “urban reforestation project” so New Jerseyites who can no longer afford electricity can scavenge downed tree branches to keep warm.
Environmentalists can scream all they want about Christie, but their regulatory wrecking ball has been destroying New Jersey’s economy.
