Sign the Petition to Rescue New Jersey from Cap-and-Trade!
Jonathan Schrag is paid to keep secrets as executive director of the nation’s first mandatory CO-2 cap-and-trade program.
Those secrets include the salaries Schrag and his subordinates receive from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a non-profit corporation funded by 10 states, including New Jersey. Schrag refused a records request from New Jersey Watchdog – and RGGI avoided disclosing employee compensation in its most recent public disclosure required by the Internal Revenue Service.
Meanwhile, Schrag and his wife, Kirstin, are enjoying the $2.2 million, full-floor loft in Manhattan they purchased in June. The 2,000 square-foot co-op apartment has three bedrooms, two baths and views of Bogardus Triangle Garden in Tribeca, just a five-block walk from RGGI’s office at 90 Church Street.
AFP Vice President for Policy Phil Kerpen published the following piece on FoxNews.com:
Cap-and-trade is stalled in Congress but it’s already up and running in 10 Northeastern states – and it isn’t pretty. With a drumbeat building in New Jersey for repeal of the state cap-and-trade legislation and attention in the global warming debate being increasingly focuses on the states, this could be a key turning point in the state-level fight over global warming taxes.
Mark Lagerkvist of New Jersey Watchdog has blown the lid off the secretive – and possibly corrupt – working of the so-called Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI, pronounced like the name Reggie), the nation’s only currently-operating cap-and-trade scheme for greenhouse gases and the model for a the proposed national program.
Secrecy and greed are polluting the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, the nation’s first mandatory cap-and-trade system. Under the RGGI scheme, the smell of profiteering is powerful. New Jersey and nine other Northeast states have sold $662 million in carbon dioxide permits since 2008.
For the past year and a half the left has been moving relentlessly to pass a Cap & Trade bill on the federal level. And the Obama administration has continued its push by circumventing the legislative process and imposing heavy-handed regulations through the EPA, led by former head of the DEP in New Jersey Lisa [...]
Over at MasterResource, they have a great post that clearly shows that RGGI has already begun to raise electricity rates in participating states and that the revenues from the tax are being redirected to reconcile state budget deficits instead of funding so-called “green energy” programs.
Last year, while Congress was debating the disastrous Waxman-Markey energy tax, countless think tanks and experts warned of the consequences of its passage. It was soon crystal clear consumers would bear the full brunt of the higher fees, higher utility rates, higher prices and higher taxes caused by bill’s cap-and-trade plan.
Long before Lisa Jackson was confirmed as President Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator in 2009, she earned mixed reviews for her work as New Jersey’s Department of Environmental Protection Commissioner. Known in many circles for her alarmist views on several environmental issues, then-Commissioner Jackson’s aggressive approach often times placed her at odds with even [...]