摘要: |
After months of headlines about dead whales and offshore wind projects, New Jersey politicians are staking out positions with an eye to 2023 state Senate elections and the 2024 Congressional races. New Jersey Republican congressmen Reps. Jeff Van Drew and Chris Smith convened a public meeting in March to demand a suspension of offshore wind projects, drawing an overflow crowd of hundreds to a seaside auditorium in Van Drew's congressional district. In April New Jersey Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy's administration announced nearly $2 million in funding for new environmental studies, including a whale detection buoy off Atlantic City. State officials had been getting pounded in the news media since December, when groups opposed to wind projects began claiming that whale strandings were linked to geotechnical survey vessels working offshore. On April 11 Republican state Sens. Declan O'Scanlon and Ed Durr introduced a resolution "urging the state and federal governments to place an immediate moratorium on all sonar testing and wind turbine mapping in response to the surge of unexplained marine wildlife deaths along the coast of New Jersey." |