Does Draeger support Murphy plan to use farmland for solar?
/By Rubashov
Fred Snowflack of InsiderNJ calls farming “a cherished, pastime in New Jersey”. Is “pastime” the correct word? Makes it sound like a hobby. In fact, farming is a business and an important business – that is, if you like to eat fresh food close to the source of where it is produced.
Snowflack recently covered a Republican attempt to define Democrat Assembly candidate Darcy Draeger as a “fake farmer” – a rich Wall Streeter “who is using the state’s farmland assessment laws to avoid paying thousands of dollars in property taxes.” And while it is certainly true that candidate Draeger has a corporate pedigree, her Chester farm does produce (so Snowflack reports) at least $1,000 in farm products from raising sheep and selling honey. This qualifies her for a farmland assessment that reduces her annual property tax bill on 9 acres of farmland to $26.
Draeger’s farm is small. We can safely assume that the $1,000 or so she gets from farming doesn’t cover her bills in a community with an average income of $133,586. Draeger probably doesn’t have to worry about Tammy Murphy and the plans her husband, the Governor, and his fellow Democrats have for “real” farmers – i.e. farmers who depend on farming as their principal source of income.
Fresh from forcing the State Board of Education to mandate a consumer sales-based curriculum that programs children to the favor the taxpayer-subsidized energy alternatives promoted by such Wall Street giants as Goldman-Sachs, Tammy Murphy has embarked on a public relations tour to sell the Murphy vision of what the future of farming will look like. Instead of sheep and honey… think solar panels.
And thanks to Murphy – both of them – and their party, the solar industry is taking a page out of big tobacco’s marketing plan and getting their consumers young. Get them young and you’ll maybe get 70 years out of them. That’s a lot of profits!
Tammy Murphy was recently in rural Sussex County, making nice to all those folks her husband refused to provide COVID-19 funding to for six months. Sussex County was the site of the solar scam that ripped-off taxpayers to the tune of $26 million. Of course, the Wall Street investors who stood to make a profit if it succeeded, lost nothing when it failed. Although Sussex was hit the worst by the solar scam, taxpayers in Morris, Somerset, and Mercer Counties were also affected.
The solar scam and its aftermath consumed headlines for much of 2015-2018. Now Murphy is targeting places with lots of farmland and lots of woodland… because the Murphys and their Wall Street friends have plans for it.
The Philadelphia Inquirer recently broke a story about a solar developer operating in Salem County who wants to buy up 800 acres of prime farmland to build a sprawling power plant of 400,000 solar panelsInstead of beautiful farmland, Dakota Power Partners (in North Jersey it was Mastec Power Partners) plans to construct a dystopian nightmare of 400,000 solar panels on stilts (so you can’t miss them) while underneath, 1,000 sheep will graze (making it a farm and earning it a farmland assessment). Dakota Power Partners just opened an office in New Jersey, so it looks like they are here to stay.
Under Governor Chris Christie, the state rolled back taxpayer-funded incentives, making big solar projects economically unfeasible. That’s right, without taxpayer money and these scams simply don’t work. But don’t worry, Governor Phil Murphy has made solar the centerpiece of his Energy Master Plan, so the taxpayer subsidies are back. Just listen to this solar sales pitch from Goldman-Sachs…
Leading the charge for Murphy’s Energy Master Plan is Democrat Bob Smith, Chairman of the State Senate’s Environment and Energy Committee. He has proposed legislation to direct the state Board of Public Utilities to establish a utility-scale size solar energy program with farmland as a component. The bill, introduced August 25, would reintroduce incentives to encourage solar to be built on farmland and forests to try to meet the state’s aggressive plan of generating 17 gigawatts of solar power by 2035. Murphy says he wants 100% of the state’s electrical power supplied by alternative energy by 2050.
Murphy and the Democrats are proposing to clear-cut the state’s forests and destroy farmland to achieve Goldman-Sachs’ investment strategy of promoting solar. Hey, that sales video wasn’t kidding when that fellow from Goldman-Sachs said that demand for solar was “policy-driven”.
According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, Murphy’s plans have pissed-off some environmentalists. The newspaper writes:
Michelle Byers, executive director of the New Jersey Conservation Foundation, said the bill would toss a law that currently steers solar arrays toward brownfields, landfills, rooftops and parking lots.
The proposed law would not only make it easier to build large, utility-scale solar arrays on the state’s best farmland, it would also allow forests to be clear-cut to make way for solar projects, which makes no sense,” Byers said in a statement. The New Jersey Sierra Club hopes the state looks for space other than farmland and forests.
“As the scale of solar projects increase, it is important that New Jersey properly finds land for it,” Jeff Tittel, the club’s president, said in a statement. “We should use existing developments or brownfields, create sound barriers on highways, use barges, rooftops, ponds and more as suitable sites for solar panels.”
Peter Furey, executive director of the New Jersey Farm Bureau, said the solar bill has the potential to change the landscape.
We don’t want energy interests coming in and dictating to local planning boards, Furey said. “We don’t want it on prime agricultural land.We think the debate is not finished.”
Tammy Murphy has rural New Jersey in her sights and when her husband and their Wall Street friends are through with it, it will look more like a scene out of Blade Runner than the bucolic farmland it is today. Don’t worry though, if the state gets too ugly, Tammy and Phil have homes in Italy and Germany to decamp to. They’re going to be okay… the rich always are.
“It’s definitely going to change the landscape,” David Dolbow, of Bil-Dow Farm, told the Philadelphia Inquirer, who wrote: “What he (Dolbow) fears most is the loss of thousands of acres of prime farmland to utility-scale solar systems.”
Maybe the only farms left will be those like Darcy Draeger’s. Disney sets, not working farms. Maybe Darcy and her running mate, Democrat Senate candidate Rupande Mehta, don’t care if every wood lot is clear cut and every farm turned into a dystopian nightmare of metal and glass.
Because… if Draeger and Mehta did care, they would stand up to Tammy and Phil Murphy and their Wall Street scammers.And if it all goes bust like the last solar scam did… well, after the grandkids of the current property taxpayers get done paying off the bill for the current solar scam, their grandkids can look forward to paying off the bill for the next solar scam. Yes, it’s nice to leave something for future generations… for the children.
“ I assumed solar panels would last forever. I didn’t know what went into the making of them (referring to raw materials, including quartz, and the fossil fuels needed to manufacture the panels)."
(Michael Moore, environmentalist and documentary film producer)
