One Ear to the Earth
On January 13th, Governor Phil Murphy delayed a vote to install a backup power plant at a waste management factory in Newark. The decision came after much uproar from environmentalists and progressives who believed the governor was putting Newark’s lower-income communities in jeopardy.
Credit: Aristide Economopoulos
The prospective $180 million plant was to be built along the Passaic River in Newark near the Ironbound Community. The construction of the plant placed immense health risks on the people of Newark, emitting great volumes of greenhouse gases and potentially worsening the effects of regional storms. After Hurricane Sandy, the old sewage plant lost power and spewed 840 million gallons of sewage into the Newark Bay, polluting the drinking water and putting working class homes in danger.
Dense in factories, and also the location an international airport, the Ironbound Community hosts some of the worst levels of air quality in New Jersey. Three natural gas facilities already exist in the area and, adjacent to a predominantly Black and brown neighborhood, the plant would seem to indicate an act of environmental racism. In 2020, Murphy signed an act championing environmental justice. However, when activists initially wrote to Murphy about denying the power plant proposition, his office declined to respond.
A coalition of doctors and activists wrote to Murphy, urging him to seize passage of the project. They emphasized their concern for “resiliency in the face of climate change,” noting that such a prospect would only be possible in “transitioning to truly clean renewable energy sources, not false solutions.”
Last year, the Passaic Valley Sewage Commission announced plans to convert the facility to renewable, alternative sources of energy, but the location and capacity of the plant suggests that this is unlikely to happen.
Make No Mistake
The planned location of the fracking gas plant was assuredly intentional. Politicians often provide odious platitudes, promising that their gas-guzzling power plants, waste-managing facilities, and factories will be constructed “far from civilization.” But this really translates to “far from wealthy civilization.” Far from the business executives, far from the hedge fund managers, far from the affluent white-collar world. Every landfill that suffocates the soil and chokes the ocean; every smokestack that vomits sulfur and smoke; every condominium and shopping mall that bulldozes forests, laying sterile asphalt where once grew moss and trees; they are all hazards to life on earth. These projects only prove convenient to crooked contractors who could care less that their get-rich-quick ventures poison the air we breathe and the land on which we walk. They intentionally squeeze these projects into low-income neighborhoods, where hasty construction often begets disastrous fires and sewage disasters.
How much longer can we go on drinking poison and breathing lead? How much longer can we allow industry to seize the land and suffocate life? We have a moral obligation to fight against bleak and wasteful sources of energy. Most of all, we cannot back down for one minute in the fight against industrial hell.
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