The new year opened with major environmental news developments in Raleigh and Washington. This week in CIB:

• Executive Watch: Expected Bad News for the Coast; Puzzler at Transportation
• Washington Watch: Cliff Notes on Clean Energy
• Legislative Watch: State Green Energy Mandate at Risk

Executive Watch: Expected Bad News for the Coast; Puzzler at Transportation

New Governor Pat McCrory made environmental policy news on two fronts last week.

Expected Bad News for the Coast: In a speech to the N.C. Bankers Association last week, McCrory emphasized his commitment to immediately pursue drilling for oil and gas off the fragile North Carolina coast. Anyone who followed the gubernatorial debates or ads of the 2012 campaign knew this was coming; candidate McCrory made this a major point of his plans. In his speech, he pointed to his plans to work with governors from Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia in an effort to pressure the federal government to open up more areas for offshore drilling.

From an environmental and economic standpoint for our state, this is still extremely bad news, as conservationists will continue to point out. The campaign to launch an offshore drilling industry in North Carolina’s high-energy Atlantic coastal environment risks both sure, steady damage to our barrier islands and estuaries from the necessary supportive infrastructure, and the potential for catastrophic damage to our fisheries and tourism economy from major disasters. We will fight this backward campaign to increase our reliance on high-risk fossil fuel development.

Puzzler at Transportation: CIB was clinging to some hope for positive news from the McCrory cabinet pick for Transportation–some indication that Mayor McCrory, champion of urban rail, hadn’t been totally taken over by Candidate McCrory, disciple of anti-government railings by Art Pope. We didn’t get it. Instead we got a puzzler: appointment of a former local school system superintendent, retired Army general Tony Tata, to the critical Secretary of Transportation post.

So far as we can determine, Tata has no particular experience in the area of transportation that would suggest him as a logical choice for this spot, one of the most important roles in the new administration. (The Department of Transportation has one of the largest budgets and greatest economic and environmental influence of any of the state agencies.) McCrory’s news release touting Tata cited his military experience in implementing operations involving complex transportation needs. We’d agree that moving military personnel and supplies in the operational field is a real challenge and a skill, but is it remotely comparable in kind to managing a large, increasingly urban, state’s daily transportation system and long-term development needs? That’s a stretch, Governor.

In his most recent relevant civilian employment, Tata served as superintendent of the Wake County school system. It was a brief and controversial tenure, marked by a change in majority on the governing school board, and that board’s corresponding changes in educational philosophy. Hired by the old board, Tata’s service under the new board ended–ironically–in a controversy over the school transportation system. In an effort to cut costs, Tata and his staff cut 52 buses from the school fleet. Unfortunately, this turned out to leave children standing on street corners for hours waiting for their buses to arrive from lengthened routes. The cuts were reversed, but Tata was fired soon after. We can only hope that these cuts were a one-time error in judgment, and not reflective of a tendency to favor excessive cost savings over quality of public service.

For now, reaction is largely muted to the Tata appointment. Supporters of rail and other ‘greener’ transportation options know little about Tata’s attitudes on that topic. As a result, we shall have to wait and learn from experience.

Washington Watch: Cliff Notes on Clean Energy

The much-feared “fiscal cliff” came and went the way of the Mayan Apocalypse in Washington last week. In moves that would leave Wile E. Coyote breathless with envy, Congress first skidded over the ‘cliff’s’ edge, turned in mid-air, and danced back with the passage of compromise legislation on tax policies after the new year began, but before the stock markets opened to react with alarm. As entertaining as all this was to pundits and political junkies, we will spare our readers from further in-joke analogies at this point and get to the green stuff–of which there were some items of real significance in the final bill approved.

Most notably, among its tax provisions the bill renewed the wind energy production credit for another year. On its Facebook page, the League of Conservation Voters cheered that result, noting that it will “sav[e] an estimated 37,000 wind jobs and giv[e] this clean energy industry the support it needs to keep growing!”

Tim Profeta in The Climate Post elaborated: “[The credit’s] pending expiration had resulted in layoffs at United States turbine parts manufacturing plants as developers placed new projects on hold, though wind-turbine installations are predicted to exceed natural gas fueled power plants in the U.S. this year.”

We are hopeful that the credit’s renewal will reverse that hesitation. As Profeta further noted, “The tax credit has been expanded to cover wind projects that begin construction in 2013–not only plants that are up and running.”

Other environment-friendly energy provisions in the cliff bill include extended credits for residential energy efficiency improvements, energy-efficient new home construction, plug-in electric vehicles, and biofuel manufacturing; equal tax exemption for employer-provided transit assistance as for vehicle benefits; and a provision encouraging maintenance of rail lines.

Legislative Watch: State Green Energy Mandate at Risk

Sadly, the news on green energy is not similarly positive at the state legislative level in North Carolina. The incoming majority whip for the N.C. House told reporters last week that he believes he has the votes in that chamber to freeze North Carolina’s green energy mandate.

Rep. Mike Hager (R-Rutherford) is the Republican whip (a senior leadership post responsible for getting members of his party caucus to fall in line on major votes) and the chair of the House Public Utilities Committee. Hager wants to stop the utilities mandate to generate a percentage of their electricity from renewable energy sources from rising higher than its present 3 per cent. (Current law, passed in 2007, provides for the mandate to ultimately rise to 12.5 per cent.)

Hager is a former Duke Energy engineer and is philosophically opposed to such public mandates. The fact that this one is creating energy and private sector jobs in North Carolina, and doing so at a fraction of its authorized cost, doesn’t persuade him.

According to the N.C. Sustainable Energy Association, the utility mandate is key to the fact that the green-energy industry is growing in our state, and now provides over 15,000 jobs with 1,100 companies earning a total of $3.7 billion a year. (Information for this story was taken from a McClatchy-Tribune news service story published 1/2/13.)

Conservationists will fight in this year’s General Assembly to protect this spur to growth in clean energy and clean energy jobs in our state.

That’s our report for this week.