new york

- by Fredric U. Dicker, March 2, 2015, New York Post

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"406","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","style":"width: 300px; height: 200px; margin: 3px 10px; float: left;","title":"Photo: Gabriella Bass"}}]]With a bitter-cold winter and skyrocketing heating oil use, the GOP’s timing couldn’t be worse.

Senate Republicans, under pressure from maverick supermarket billionaire John Catsimatidis, are trying to slip a “green biofuels” mandate into Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s new budget that could add $150 million a year to heating costs in New York, business sources have told The Post.

Catsimatidis, a Republican mayoral hopeful in 2013 and a heavy campaign contributor to Senate Republicans as well as Cuomo, is well known in the city for owning the Gristedes supermarket chain.

But he’s also the owner of United Metro Energy Corp., a large company that is putting the finishing touches on a massive Brooklyn biofuel-processing plant that will be the largest in the Northeast when it opens this fall.

- by Richard Piersol, March 1, 2015, Lincoln Journal Star

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"399","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","style":"width: 222px; height: 125px; margin: 3px 10px; float: left;","title":"Photo: New York Times"}}]]About a thousand tons of contaminated soil from the notorious Love Canal environmental disaster in New York is being shipped by rail to Kimball for incineration because the company that is disposing of it ran into objections from Canadians, who didn't want it.

Love Canal, a neighborhood in Niagara Falls, New York, became a symbol for environmental abuse in the late 1970s when it was discovered that 22,000 tons of toxic waste had been buried there by Hooker Chemical Co. and then ignored for decades by local authorities.

Property development, weather and the removal of a heavy clay cap released the toxic waste and allowed it to leach under the town, leading to widespread and severe health consequences, vast litigation and finally, the federal Superfund law. 

- by Brian Nearing, December 12, 2014, Times Union

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"348","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","style":"width: 333px; height: 118px; margin: 3px 10px; float: left;"}}]]An oil terminal operator at the Port of Albany has been hit with a $181,000 penalty by the state Department of Environmental Conservation for air pollution violations that lasted nearly a year.

Buckeye Partners failed to properly control vapor emissions from ethanol — a corn-based biofuel used as a gasoline additive — from trucks being loaded at the port, according to a DEC news release issued late Friday. The violations "did not result in any material air quality impacts," according to the release.

As part of a consent order reached last month, the penalty includes a $145,000 "community benefit project" that Buckeye will pay for in the neighborhood around the port. DEC will work with the community to identify the project.

- by Pete Creedon, October 6, 2014, Watertown Daily Times

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"276","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","style":"line-height: 20.6719989776611px; width: 255px; height: 253px; margin: 3px 10px; float: left;"}}]]Always nice to see a company come in an offer jobs and other things that will benefit the area it serves (“ReEnergy wins huge contract at Drum,” Sept. 30).

The question is, at what cost? The people this will affect in a negative way are a small group of people who for the most part will not receive any of the benefits of this biomass plant.

These people are the ones who heat their homes with wood. For the last couple of years as this plant has been coming online, it has become harder to find firewood and at a price that has not been inflated.

There was an article in the paper last year, I believe, how the firewood producers were saying that they have not cut back on firewood production in favor of wood chip production for this biomass plant. That is hard to believe. The company I get my firewood from, I know for a fact, supplies this plant.

Last year, it was difficult to find the wood I needed for last winter. The price was almost double what I spent the year before.