TRENTON — The Statehouse was abuzz moments after Gov. Chris Christie said he would roll back clean energy goals and reporters gathered around the New Jersey Environmental Federation’s David Pringle. Suddenly, Jeff Tittel of the Sierra Club, the other big name in the Garden State’s green movement, interrupted. "This is all your fault," Tittel blurted, letting slip months of...
Jeff Tittel, of the Sierra Club, top and David Pringle, with the NJ Environmental Federation.
TRENTON — The Statehouse was abuzz moments after Gov. Chris Christie said he would roll back clean energy goals and reporters gathered around the New Jersey Environmental Federation’s David Pringle.
Suddenly, Jeff Tittel of the Sierra Club, the other big name in the Garden State’s green movement, interrupted.
"This is all your fault," Tittel blurted, letting slip months of pent-up anger at Pringle for endorsing Christie in the 2009 governor’s race. Pringle paused before firing back.
"Yeah, it’s all my fault," he said sarcastically.
The skirmish was the latest in an unfolding war between New Jersey’s green giants.
Once best friends, Tittel and Pringle now act like bitter enemies, and their spat threatens to divide the environmental movement at a critical time.
Christie, a rising national GOP star, shows no signs of stopping his push to cut red tape and loosen regulations, and environmental advocates say they need to unite in opposition or risk a stinging political defeat.
"While Dave and Jeff are sitting around wasting time fighting with each other, there are other people doing real work," said Dena Mottola Jaborska, the head of Environment New Jersey and a friend of both. "We’re facing, really, an unprecedented moment, where protections we’ve put in place over a decade or more are threatened, and if we don’t come together we’ll lose all of it."
Tittel and Pringle are both well-known veterans of the Trenton political scene. Tittel, 54, director of New Jersey Sierra Club, grew up in a family of activists and has a reputation for turning jargon into a snappy quote.
Pringle, 45, a lobbyist for the federation, was steeped in politics as a child and made his name by lining up lawmakers and hammering colleagues who soft-pedaled the green agenda.
For decades they were co-Captain Planets, fighting together against corporations and big polluters for their more than 120,000 members. Until Christie came to town.
At the time, in 2009, environmentalists agreed Democratic Gov. Jon Corzine was a failure. But they disagreed about who would be better. Tittel broke for Chris Daggett, an environmentalist but also an independent with little chance of winning.
Pringle and the federation made a more risky decision: They endorsed their first Republican candidate for governor.
"It was our assessment that Christie was more likely to implement more of his agenda by working with him whenever we could rather than attack, attack, attack," Pringle said.
The decision distressed Tittel and other environmental groups, who considered Christie’s green talk a red herring.
"We saw the endorsement as a leap of faith right off a cliff," Tittel said.
the breaking point
Though the two friends were drifting apart, they didn’t fully break until the months after the election. The rollout of Christie’s agenda worried many environmentalists, and the community stepped up its rhetoric.
But Pringle hesitated.
"It’s fair to say that the federation has given this governor the benefit of the doubt longer than most because we thought it made strategic sense to do so," Pringle said.
That increasingly rankled Tittel as Christie continued to press his agenda.
"Dave’s undercutting everybody else," Tittel said. "When you look at the long list of what Christie’s doing environmentally, there is no inside strategy that’s working. By the time he figures it out, there may not be anything left."
Pringle admits Christie looks little like the candidate the federation endorsed. Last month, the governor pulled the state out of a regional program to curb air pollution that contributes to climate change. Then he rolled back clean energy goals.
Those moves prompted Pringle to ramp up his criticism of the governor, but he refuses to grant Tittel a public apology for endorsing Christie and says he does not regret it.
Without such a statement, Tittel said, Christie will continue to use Pringle as "green cover" to show voters he has support for his environmental agenda.
from ‘weenie’ to ‘bratwurst’
Pringle once called those soft on the environment "green weenies." Tittel said Pringle’s become something worse — a "green bratwurst." Pringle rejects the swipe, but won’t top it.
"If you’re on the schoolyard and someone takes a swing at you, there’s a lot of ways to stand up for yourself," he said. "The worst way is to hit back with a shot to the nose."
Christie’s office declined to comment on the feud, but the governor stands to benefit politically, said Ross Baker, a political scientist at Rutgers University. He called Christie the "wizard of wedge politics."
"This situation is very much in the governor’s interest, particularly in an area he’s getting a lot of opposition from," Baker said. "It also tells you a lot about how the leaders of so many of these interest groups are driven by their own egos."
Though Tittel and Pringle may not shake hands, their movement chugs along. Both appeared at a rally of 28 environmental groups last week in front of the Statehouse to protest Christie’s agenda. As Tittel’s voice boomed over the speaker, Pringle stood off to the side at the bottom of the steps
Both admit their fight hurts the cause, but don’t expect a reconciliation soon. Tittel said he regrets "not having an intervention" with Pringle six months ago, and hopes Christie’s environmental policies will bring him into line.
"I hope we can get to a better place," Pringle said. "But you can only bang your head against the wall so many times, and then you move on."