The most expensive part of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie's sweetheart deal with Exxon -- which will resolve $9 billion dollars in pollution claims at the far lower value of approximately $250 million (less than 3 percent of what the state said it was owed) -- are the costs of the lost opportunity to force the oil giant to pay billions to restore the region's coastal wetlands.

The cost is especially great when you consider this: These wetlands and marshes are needed to protect both New York and New Jersey from sea level rise and the next Sandy like event.

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(Since the first leaked reports of the proposed Exxon deal went public, we have learned that, in addition to resolving issues related to the destruction of 1,500 acres of wetlands, and Exxon’s legacy of toxic contamination at its sites in Bayonne and Linden, N.J, the agreement also covers 16 other hazardous sites and resolves potential environmental claims against several hundred of the company’s retail gas stations.)

Multiple government reports and scientific studies have linked the loss of wetlands and marshes to the increasing vulnerability of coastal communities. Ironically, these at risk communities were often expanded by filling the very same wetlands and marshes that we now know provide resiliency from fluctuations in the sea level and extreme weather events. As a result, industrial waterfront operators like Exxon caught a financial windfall during this period of human ignorance about the actual value of the wetlands and marshes.

But now, post-Sandy, the true bill needs to come due.

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Our grasp of the inherent value of marshes and wetlands as both a bulwark against nature’s extremes, and as an essential incubator for marine and bird life, is relatively new when tracked along the number line of Western Civilization. There’s been a long litany of ‘stupid human tricks’ along the way. Throughout the 19th, and well into the 20th century, it was stated public policy to “improve” these “worthless wastelands” by draining and filling them. Along the coasts and the interiors of both New York and New Jersey, wetlands- and marsh-filling created valuable "water view" real estate. As a result, according to the EPA, New Jersey lost close to 40 percent of its wetlands and New York state about 60 percent.

For decades this gross crime against the region’s environment was an especially aggravated one as governments of both states promoted the dumping of household garbage and commercial waste generated by several generations into New Jersey’s Meadowlands and the massive Fresh Kills landfill on New York City’s Staten Island. With the passage in 1974 of the U.S. Clean Water Act, it began to dawn on folks that this dumping in wetlands had been a really bad idea. But just as we are seeing with the debate over climate change, there were entrenched economic interests at work that slowed down our ecological evolution.

Now in the 21st century we have learned how these “worthless wastelands” can mean the difference between life and death for humans and longterm viability for our estuaries. Yet the legacy of past bad land use decisions continues to have painful consequences today.

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In October of 2012, Hurricane Sandy’s massive storm surge was a fast moving wall of water that came in with such velocity that 45 percent of the 117 US deaths recorded, mostly in New Jersey and New York, were attributed by the Center for Disease Control to people who drowned in their homes.

More than 650,000 homes in the two states were either damaged or destroyed. More than $70 billion dollars in damages were documented by both states. Twelve-foot storm surges inundated petrochemical plants and the cargo handling facilities of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Nine thousand new cars worth $400 million were lost, as were 15,000 cargo containers.

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The Passaic Valley Sewerage Authority saw its massive sewer plant, which treats human waste for 3 million northern New Jersey residents, knocked out. As a consequence, billions of gallons of untreated human waste were flushed directly into the estuary the two states share.

Sandy’s impacts lingered for weeks, as millions of households had to deal with prolonged power outages and gasoline rationing. The very same Bayway complex that Exxon had sold off in the '90s was itself taken out of commission by the storm.

What Sandy’s destruction and other storms like it should have driven home was how generations of wetland and coastal salt water marsh destruction have left much of our coastline unprotected, and put vital and hazardous human activity on right on the firing line.

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* * *

We must kick up our post-Sandy response a couple of notches, and soon. Earlier this year, in the natural science journal Nature Communication, climate scientists reported that from 2009 to 2010 there was a four-inch sea-level rise from Newfoundland to the Port of New York, which the report called “an extreme sea level rise” and a one-in-850-year event. The lead author of the study, Paul Goddard, a doctoral candidate at the University of Arizona, told the Newark Star Ledger that such a fluctuation was “unprecedented during the past century.”

The New Jersey-Exxon deal is to settle natural resource damage claims against the energy giant for degrading and destroying resources like these wetlands and marshes, which are held in trust by the State of New Jersey on behalf of the public. The concept itself -- of something held in the public trust -- has its roots in the Justinian code, for the Byzantine Emperor of the same name (482 AD to 565 AD). Under the Justinian public trust concept, re-enforced by the Magna Carta, and re-affirmed by several land mark U.S. Supreme Court cases, no private party such as Exxon could claim as their own natural resources like coastal wetlands, marine life, wildlife or the air in our atmosphere.

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So when a private entity like Exxon profits by degrading and destroying any of these resources, they have to compensate the public for their loss, above and beyond whatever Exxon needs to spend in order to meet state environmental standards on the sites where they operated. But, in calculating the compensation to the public, do we assign wetlands the historical 19th-century valuation (when they were deemed “worthless” ) or do we assign them the more precious value they hold in an era of sea-level rise and global warming?

In its defense, the Christie Administration correctly points out that the proposed Exxon settlement, if approved, will be the largest such natural resource damage claim ever paid out in state history. As the The New York Times has reported, in April 2012, Exxon’s lawyers argued that the oil giant should pay less than $100 million dollars to settle the claims, which would amount to “roughly all of the state’s natural resource damages claims” dating back from 2004. In the past, such national resource damage claims came in on average at $6.3 million per case, per the Times.

But the 21st century reality is that the "spot price" for wetlands and coastal marshlands -- if the Port of New York is going to be sustainable long term --needs to go up, way up. Certainly Exxon understands better than most just how arbitrary the "free market" can be when scarcity and need intersect. They could set a new standard for corporate citizenship and global stewardship by voluntarily funding such a restoration because it was the right thing to do.

If we are going to anticipate the next Sandy, and combat the sea level rise already upon us, we can’t have a discussion about Exxon in an historical vacuum based only on averaging past damage awards. This is a tough one for folks rooted in the law, a discipline so anchored in precedent. But the law also has to be informed by equity and there was quite a consequence from the historic decline and degradation of coastal wetlands, some of which experts say can be directly attributable to Exxon.

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This Earth Day falls in the midst of a 60-day public comment period that started earlier this month on the proposed Exxon deal. New Jersey’s Department of Environmental Protection will review those comments, comments that really need to come from not just the region but the world. The NJ DEP will ultimately issue a report to the judge overseeing the settlement. If the judge approves Christie's deal, as proposed, opponents have recourse in the state’s courts.

The debate over the Exxon deal comes as, later this month, Pope Francis’s Pontifical Academy of Sciences will convene an inter-disciplinary conference of over 60 of the planet’s top scientists and thinkers, under the banner: “Protect the Earth, Dignify Humanity. the Moral Dimensions of Climate Change and Sustainable Humanity.”

The global confab will help lay the groundwork for the release later this year by Pope Francis of a papal encyclical calling on the world’s one billion Catholics to take action to deal with global warming and climate change on moral and scientific grounds.

The open letter from the conference participants on the Pontifical Academy of Sciences website links the trend of growing global income inequality and the planet’s continued reliance on fossil fuels, predicting that if current trends continue, we will see “unprecedented climate changes and ecosystem destruction that will severely impact us all.”

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“Problems have been exacerbated by the fact that economic activity is currently measured solely in terms of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and therefore does not record the degradation of Earth that accompanies it nor the abject inequities between countries and within each country.”

The statement notes currently 55 percent of the world’s available energy is accessed by just 1 billion of the world’s 7.2 billion people. “Yet the negative impacts on the environment are being felt by three billion who have no access to energy,” the statement asserts.

It is the ability of companies like Exxon to treat the degradation and destruction of wetlands in places like Newark Bay as so-called “cost externalities” that’s the the most expensive corporate subsidy of all. This dominion of free-market profit over everything else, if left unchecked, will continue to come at the expense of the viability of our planet and the natural systems that support all life forms on it.

At this global moment there are no provincial environmental battles. They are all intertwined.

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If Exxon gets away with 3 cents on the dollar for degrading and destroying natural resources in New Jersey, what do you think the going rate will be for other global corporate giants operating in South America, Africa and Asia?