Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. MIDDLETOWN — Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. doesn’t want to scare anyone: but the environment is in danger.
“Environmental protection is under very severe attack,” the 6th District Democratic congressman said on April 23.
“If things don’t change dramatically, in terms of who and why people vote and what the message is, many of the environmental protections we take for granted … could easily disappear.”
At a joint meeting of the local Sierra Club chapter and New Jersey Friends of Clearwater at Brookdale Community College, Pallone painted a bleak picture of the political climate in Washington, D.C., surrounding federal environmental legislation.
“I’m not sure everyone realizes how things have deteriorated,” Pallone said.
For example, he noted calls by the tea party, a grassroots populist movement, to completely abolish the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and presumptive Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s calls for EPA administrator Lisa Jackson’s resignation.
That sentiment has seeped into the Legislature, Pallone said.
“At every level, particularly in the House of Representatives, I think that … the whole tea party movement is essentially organized to eliminate or really cut back on environmental protection,” Pallone said.
“Many Republicans who were traditionally pro-environment or at least sympathetic don’t feel that they can be anymore.”
Pallone was quick to note the effect on his own party, as well.
“Many Democrats who were very proenvironment are a little more cautious now about how they vote, or maybe don’t want to be perceived as so pro-environment anymore,” he added.
“They think the electorate has moved to the right on this issue.”
Pallone said the sentiment is a complete 180-degree change since his initial election to Congress in 1988.
“[Environmental awareness] was at a crescendo in terms of concerns and people voting. People elected me to Congress because they wanted to send someone to Congress who was going to protect the ocean,” Pallone said on April 23.
That year, most Monmouth County beaches experienced a surge in garbage and waste washing up on the shore, a blow to the season’s tourism industry.
“There was a huge heightened awareness of the environment. People went to the polls to vote for the congressman they thought was going to protect the environment,”
Pallone said.
Now a different sentiment is heard loud and clear on Capitol Hill: that people don’t care about the environment anymore.
“The only reason this effort to tear down environmental protections and de-fund the programs is succeeding, at least in the House, is because of … the biggest myth that people don’t vote based on a clean environment, that they care a little bit but are not going to vote no,” Pallone said.
He pointed to the ongoing energy crisis facing the country and the solutions that have been introduced in the House of Representatives.
“The Republican leadership in the House of Representatives has basically taken a position on the energy crisis that we need to drill for more oil and natural gas domestically,” Pallone said.
He said efforts to drill offshore in theAtlantic Ocean have disregarded the lessons learned from the BP oil spill in 2010.
“Of course it will occur again. All the things that were suggested to change in order to prevent it from happening again were never adopted,” Pallone warned.
Instead of drilling for oil, Pallone suggested that more of an effort be put into alternative energy and renewables.
But those kinds of projects would be stalled without federal tax credits, all of which have expired or will expire at the end of the year.
“We’re rapidly moving to a situation where there’s nothing happening at the federal level that would encourage the use of renewable resources,” Pallone said.
This just advances another myth — that the economy will surely falter if emphasis is placed on environmental protection, he said.
“There’s this theme that you constantly hear from those who are passing and advocating these laws be changed, that you cannot have a good environment and a good economy, that they’re mutually exclusive,” Pallone said.
“It’s a myth. It’s simply not true. There’s no reason why you can’t have a clean environment, create more jobs and have a good economy.”
Renewable energy provides the perfect example, Pallone said.
“What country is moving the fastest toward manufacturing and trying to highlight job creation in the renewable sector? China,” he explained.
“It’s very possible that China’s going to corner the market on wind turbines and solar panels. And why? Because there’s a lot of money to be made and there are a lot of jobs that are going to be created as a result.“ If we actually became the leader on manufacturing wind turbines and solar panels, we would create thousands of jobs,” Pallone continued.
He said that most of prototypical environmental issues were rendered moot in an economic recession because of the effect those issues could have on the individual, let alone the economy.
“The environment should be perceived as a health and safety issue,” Pallone said.
“When we talk about a healthy environment, we’re talking about healthy people and healthy kids. They don’t want to breathe dirty air and they don’t want to swim in dirty water.
“Having unhealthy people is not good for the economy because then they get sick and they have to be cared for, and there’s a tremendous burden on both the public and private sectors. … That’s going to be a negative to the economy,” he continued.
Here, Pallone pointed again to the voting booth.
Without federal support, environmental protections could continue to be viewed as nothing more than a ledger line item.
And to Pallone, that view is not something people should be afraid of happening, because it already is.
“I don’t want to depress people, I just want you to understand that it doesn’t matter whether it’s clean air, clean water, cleaning up toxic waste sites, trying to move toward renewable resources or getting away from fossil fuels,” he said. “Every one of these things is under attack.”