If You Care about the Climate Crisis, Here's What You Need to Know about Maryland's Clean Water Act Permit for Agricultural Pollution
David Flores co-authored this post with Kathy Phillips, the Assateague Coastkeeper, an on-the-water advocate who patrols and protects the Maryland and northern Virginia Eastern Shore coastal bays and stands up to polluters.
Last month, former CPR policy analyst Evan Isaacson wrote in this space about Maryland's proposal to revise and reissue its Clean Water Act pollution permit for concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs). He made a convincing case that those who love the Bay need to advocate for effective and enforceable CAFO regulations.
Traditionally, air pollution permits have been and will continue to be a critical component of climate policy in the United States, controlling emissions of greenhouse gas pollutants. But strong water pollution standards, including permits, are also a vital tool in addressing climate change because they are so important to state efforts to adapt.
Maryland's CAFO permit is what's described as a "general permit" because it's a single permit that will cover many hundreds of individual pollution sources – in this case, CAFOs. And because this one will be issued in 2020, and because it's a five-year permit, this is the permit that will address CAFO emissions until 2025, by which time the state is required to meet the …
As Californians endure yet another round of devastating wildfires, they are rightly wondering if blazes of such frequency and reach are the new normal. The hard truth is that they may very well be. The fingerprints of climate change are all over this disaster, as they have been all over recent hurricane damage, and the trendline is unmistakable. With that in mind, a new report from the Center for Progressive Reform takes a look at the situation in the Golden State and elsewhere and highlights the crucial role state courts play in securing justice for those harmed by climate change.
Just as climate change heats the ocean’s waters, thus increasing the intensity of storms, it also helps drive the drought, wind, and vegetation conditions that provide the fuel and fan the flames of larger and more intense wildfires. Tracing the climate crisis back to its corporate …
On September 23, I attended the Climate Emergency: Tri-State Pipeline Strike in downtown Roanoke, Virginia. While affiliated with the Global Climate Strike week of action, the event in Roanoke was another milestone in the years-long and continuing struggle to prevent construction of natural gas pipelines through parts of North Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia.
The day prior, my family and I attended a “Circle of Protection” event atop verdant Bent Mountain, which is home to a farming community and is part of the Roanoke River watershed, a source of drinking water for urban Roanoke. Bent Mountain and the greater Roanoke region are the site of multiple Native American burial grounds and other archeological sites that have been dug up and destroyed in the last two years to make way for the pipeline, so the event began with an acknowledgment of the original inhabitants of the land, their …
In August, Virginians remembered the devastation wrought by Hurricane Camille 50 years earlier. After making landfall on the Gulf Coast, that storm dumped dozens of inches of rain in western portions of the Commonwealth and killed more than 150 people in flash floods and landslides. Today, Virginians along the Atlantic coast and in the Hampton Roads region have Hurricane Dorian on their minds, with potentially life-threatening flooding, property destruction, and toxic floodwaters being serious hazards.
The National Weather Service is now predicting that Dorian could bring storm surge flooding of two to four feet to Hampton Roads by Friday afternoon. Heavy precipitation could also exacerbate storm surge with urban and river flooding.
Over the next several days, residents of Hampton Roads and government officials should also be cautious about the risk of floodwaters contaminated by wastewater and debris and, especially, the threat of flood-induced chemical disaster. Based …
2018 was one of the wettest years on record in Virginia, causing catastrophic floods and landslides, as well as unexpectedly high levels of pollution in the Commonwealth’s waterways and the Chesapeake Bay. While the last waterlogged year is only a recent memory for Virginians, seemingly unremarkable snow and rainfall at the end of February caused the James River to crest last week at its highest level in Richmond in almost ten years. Climate change has clearly transformed our experience with weather and our relationship with water. In a new report published today, the Center for Progressive Reform explores how this drives environmental injustice in Virginia through toxic flooding and the increasing risk of chemical exposures.
Over the last two years, plant explosions in Texas and flooded coal ash impoundments in North Carolina have reminded us about an unmet need to adapt our approach to chemical safety. And …
This op-ed originally ran in the Bay Journal. Reprinted with permission.
Recent extreme weather — Hurricanes Harvey and Florence — caused widespread toxic contamination of floodwaters after low-lying chemical plants, coal ash storage facilities and hog waste lagoons were inundated.
Such storm-driven chemical disasters demonstrate that state water pollution permitting programs are overdue for reforms that account for stronger and more intense hurricanes and heavy rainfall events, sea level rise and extreme heat.
As the District of Columbia and the states in the Chesapeake Bay watershed prepare their final watershed implementation plans for cleaning up the Bay, two important lessons should be clear from the recent disasters: First, climate change will greatly complicate Bay cleanup efforts and must therefore be factored into planning. Second, the state regulation of pollution sources can and should be a critical component of the plan.
The potential pollution implications of climate change are many …
This post is part of CPR's From Surviving to Thriving: Equity in Disaster Planning and Recovery report.
The 2017 hurricane season demonstrated the “second disaster” phenomenon. Climate-fueled storms are the first, named disaster. The second disaster is the tragedy that results from the lack of preparedness of decision-makers — at all levels — who have failed to plan in a manner consistent with the risks presented.
Perhaps few phenomena underscore that more than the post-disaster displacement and long-term relocation that climate change is increasingly inducing. While there is an infrastructure to manage post-disaster displacement and support displaced persons, its ability to effectively and equitably support individuals and communities has been lacking.
For planned, long-term relocation, the circumstances are more concerning. The United States has no coherent and coordinated regulatory approach to address the core questions facing communities that will need to relocate: Who is …
This op-ed originally ran in the Bay Journal. Reprinted with permission.
Science is hard, environmental policy is complicated and regulatory science can seem endlessly confounding.
It does not have to be. Earlier this year, the Chesapeake Bay partners stepped into a time-worn trap, heeding calls from overly cautious states to wait for more refined scientific modeling of climate change impacts before taking action to eliminate pollution in the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries. Having punted action until 2021 at the earliest, the Bay Partnership needs policies to prevent further delay. An innovative policy tool called "stopping rules" could be the answer.
Chesapeake Bay Program scientists have determined that Bay states need to eliminate an additional 9 million pounds of nitrogen pollution and 500,000 pounds of phosphorus to offset the impacts of climate change and ensure that dissolved oxygen standards can be met in the Bay by …
A new report in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A published earlier this week presents a suite of new scientific and policy research meant to improve and drive forward progress under the Paris Climate Agreement. The report – from the oldest science journal in the western world – is the culmination of presentations first delivered by attendees at the 25th anniversary conference of the University of Oxford's Environmental Change Institute. CPR Board President and Member Scholar Rob Verchick is among the contributing authors.
In his article, Verchick argues that the rise of global temperatures by an additional half a degree above the agreement's target could hamper our ability to address the unavoidable harms of climate change to the world's most vulnerable populations. In "Can Loss and Damage Carry the Load?" Verchick explains that developed nations have a moral and political obligation to address "the …
This post is the first in a forthcoming series about climate change and the increasing risk of floods releasing toxic chemicals from industrial facilities in Virginia.
At the tail end of winter, a succession of "bomb cyclones" and nor'easters has brought fierce winds and surging coastal flooding to the mid-Atlantic and Northeast. These storms remind us of the deepening vulnerability of our coastal and riverfront communities and infrastructure to intensifying extreme weather and flooding. This "freakish" winter weather comes just six months after a previously unimaginable trio of hurricanes laid waste to parts of Texas, Florida, and Puerto Rico. The flooding that followed the hurricanes also unleashed significant amounts of toxic chemicals into the environment, signaling that any state with industrial facilities near coasts and in floodplains – including Virginia and other mid-Atlantic states – could be vulnerable to toxic floodwaters in the aftermath of powerful storms.
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