Green Jersey

As republicans face off, Corzine points to environmental successes

Today, Republicans across New Jersey choose their guy for governor, and Jon Corzine kicks off his campaign to stay in office. No Republican has won statewide here in 12 years, but this is no ordinary year — and recent polls have shown that if Corzine and frontrunner Chris Christie faced off now, Christie would likely win.

The environment was hardly central to either of the republican frontrunners’ campaigns. Christie has talked of slashing funding to an already pared-down DEP, which, he has said, is “killing business” with permit delays and fines. (Lonegan, his biggest threat, has said he would also make cuts to the department or cut it outright and believes global warming is a sham.) But on his website, Christie addresses the environment, touting his record against “corporate polluters who dumped in the Delaware River and Atlantic Ocean” as U.S. Attorney and saying he would gut the state Council on Affordable Housing, “which would bulldoze our last acres of open space.”

Corzine, on the other hand, made the environment a big part of his campaign kick-off message in an essay posted to Blue Jersey yesterday. He highlighted the Global Warming Response Act as one of three examples of how he tried to do the right thing for the state, and mentioned Lisa Jackson:

• Our state is a leader in the fight against climate change. While Bush administration political appointees were censoring NASA scientists’ findings about the reality of man’s impact on the climate, we signed the Global Warming Response Act to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, and further reduce them by 80% of 2006 levels by the year 2050. I’m very proud of the remarkable progress achieved by my former Department of Environmental Protection commissioner Lisa Jackson, and I think she’ll serve the entire nation well in her new role as head of the Environmental Protection Agency in the Obama administration.

Veep Joe Biden is expected to attend a rally in West Orange tonight that will officially kick off the governor’s campaign.