The Chesapeake Bay Program
In a CPRBlog post on Friday, 9/24, we inadvertantly referred to the Chesapeake Bay Program as the Chesapeake Bay Commission. The Program is a regional partnership of states and the District of Columbia working together to restore the Bay. The Commission is a group of 21 elected officials, appointees and citizen representatives conducting research, policymaking and consensus-building on Bay issues.
There's a big difference between the two entitites, their methods, and their work. It was a simple mistake, but not insignificant. We regret the error. We've corrected the post, here.
As expected, the Environmental Protect Agency issued its draft Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) for the Chesapeake Bay this afternoon – essentially a cap on total pollution in the Bay, as well as caps on each of 92 separate segments of the Bay. EPA also issued assessments of each of the affected states’ Watershed Implementation Plans (WIPs), evaluating proposals for implementing the TMDL from Delaware, the District of Columbia, Maryland, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and West Virginia.
As I said in this space this morning, the TMDL is a major step forward. Reading through the draft reinforces my view that there’s good reason to hope that, decades from now, we’ll look back on the issuance of the TMDLs as a watershed moment in the protection of the Bay. It’s been a very long road to this point, with a couple decades of false starts. And …
Over at Grist, CPR Member Scholar Frank Ackerman and The Lomborg Deception author Howard Friel debunk Bjorn Lomborg's new tack in their piece "Bjorn Lomborg: same skeptic, different day."
With more than 7,000 miles of coastline and thousands of stream and river miles and lake acres, the Chesapeake Bay is the crown jewel of the region’s natural resource heritage. And its value to the region's economy is immense--$1 trillion according to one frequently cited estimate. But the ecological health of the Bay is tenuous. Primary pollutants are nitrogen, phosphorous, and sediment. These nutrients have accumulated in the Bay to unsustainable levels, contributing to algal blooms and dead zones during the summer months.
For 20 years, a moveable feast of bureaucratic in-fighting known as the Chesapeake Bay Program* has bobbed and weaved, making pretend promises to the public and, for as long as they could get away with it, posing the Bay State governors at annual photo ops with their hair blowing in the wind and their eyes misting in response to their …
Cross-posted from Legal Planet.
Imagine a problem: it’s global; it stems from an extremely complex, interconnected system; it has major economic implications. Sounds like climate change, or in other words, like the kind of problem that the world can’t seem to address effectively. But no, it’s not Global Climate Change, it’s Global Economic Change. And the world seems to be coalescing without much fuss around major regulatory initiatives.
From the NY Times, a story about how the major governments came together and adopted tough rules to deal with potential global crises:
BASEL, Switzerland — The world’s top bank regulators agreed Sunday on far-reaching new rules intended to strengthen the global banking industry and shield it against future financial disasters.
The new requirements more than tripled the amount of capital banks must hold in reserve, an effort to bolster their financial strength and provide …
In Tuesday's New York Times story, “In a Feast of Data on BPA Plastic, No Final Answer,” Denise Grady characterizes the continued development of new studies about the endocrine disrupting chemical as yet another dispute between environmentalists and chemical manufacturers over a ubiquitous chemical with uncertain health effects. While her assessment of the state of the science is accurate, she expends thousands of words parsing the uncertainty and profiling the scientists who’ve made it their work to reduce the uncertainty without fully exploring the bigger picture context that would explain why this isn’t a petty dispute.
The question Grady left unanswered was, Why is there so much uncertainty about the health effects of a chemical that is produced in quantities of nearly a million tons per year? Two reasons immediately come to mind.
First, chemical manufacturers operate under a system of antiquated laws. The …
The Capital of Annapolis reported recently on the alarmingly low penalties assessed by the Maryland Department of Environment for massive spills of raw sewage—containing a mix of untreated human, residential, agricultural, and industrial wastewater—into the state's waters. This article supports one of the key findings from CPR’s report, Failing the Bay: Clean Water Act Enforcement in Maryland Falling Short, released earlier this year. These low penalties, sometimes “about the same as a speeding ticket,” do not and cannot serve as the basis of an effective, deterrence-based enforcement program—precisely what is needed to compel compliance with the Clean Water Act and state water quality laws.
CPR Member Scholar Douglas Kysar has an opinion piece in the Guardian making the case for Carbon Upsets. Upsets, you ask? That is:
Rather than award credits based on development that moves us toward a cleaner but still very dirty future, why not award credits to legal and political actions that have more dramatic impact? For instance, rather than bribe fossil fuel companies to stop flaring natural gas, why not reward indigenous groups that entirely block new exploration activities? Rather than transfer money to logging operations for incremental replanting programs, why not award credits to forest-dwelling communities that successfully fight to stop logging altogether?
The below is testimony (PDF) given today by CPR President Rena Steinzor at the EPA's public hearing on coal ash regulation. The hearing, in Arlington, VA, is the first of seven; the public comment period has been extended to November 19. See CPR on Twitter for updates from the hearing.
We are all familiar with the psychological studies that have become a cottage industry at American universities. Consider this one. A presumably dead cockroach is “medically sterilized”—and I honestly do not know what that means—and then dipped into a glass of juice in front of a group of people. The purpose: to gauge the test subjects’ willingness to drink the juice after the cockroach is removed. To the researchers apparent surprise, the people—all victims of an irrational phenomenon known as “stigma effect”—would not drink the juice, although they were willing to take …
The past year has certainly had disappointments for people who care about protecting the environment. A major international conference on global climate change yielded no sweeping agreement to reduce greenhouse gases. The United States Senate declined to pass comprehensive climate change legislation, and residents of Louisiana and other states bordering the Gulf of Mexico suffered the ill effects of a long-running, disastrous offshore oil spill. One recent—far more sanguine—development development should not be overlooked, however: the decision of a special district in Florida, the South Florida Water Management District, to purchase a large tract of land for use in the treatment and storage of surface water. The deal was approved by the District earlier this month and cleared one of its final legal challenges on Monday.
The “sugar deal,” as it is known to many Floridians, represents a significant victory for the environmentalists and scientists …
