Chris Christie is no moderate on the environment

[gollygee]

http://grist.org/politics/chris-christie-is-no-moderate-on-the-environment/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=tweet&utm_campaign=socialflow

Meet the other Chris Christie, right-wing reactionary. This Chris Christie has eviscerated protections for clean water, taken rule-making authority away from nonpartisan civil servants and handed it to his political appointees, and refused to link Sandy to climate change.

“Christie on a lot of environment issues will step right in line with the Tea Party and the Koch brothers,” says Jeff Tittel, director of the New Jersey Sierra Club.

Like all movement fiscal conservatives, Christie has a zeal for deregulation of polluting industries. Upon entering office, he used executive orders to freeze and then reject environmental regulations that the state bureaucracy was in the process of making, such as a limit on the amount of chlorine in drinking water. Christie has gone on to further deregulate the chemical industry. And he vetoed a bill passed by the state legislature that would have banned dumping of fracking waste fluids in the state.

In August, he vetoed a bill to allow logging on New Jersey’s public lands — but only because he said it did not go far enough in giving the state Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) authority to permit logging.