The EPA Region 5 recently published a refreshingly blunt report on the state of concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO) permitting in Illinois, and the assessment is disturbing. EPA concluded that the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency’s National Pollution Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permitting program for CAFOs “does not meet minimum thresholds for an adequate program.” Ouch.
As in many other states around the country, agriculture in Illinois is one of the state’s leading economic drivers and one of the leading sources of water pollution. The state has the fourth largest concentration of large-scale hog confinements in the United States, producing 4.5 million hogs each year. This massive hog production, highly concentrated in CAFOs, comes at a significant environmental cost. According to the state’s 2004 Water Quality Report, more than 85% of Illinois’ public lake acreage is impaired, largely attributable to agriculture. Moreover, the agriculture industry is responsible for 73% of Illinois’ river and stream impairments.
As a result, environmental groups filed a petition in 2008 to request that EPA withdraw Illinois EPA’s delegated authority to administer the CAFO permitting program. Under the Clean Water Act, EPA may delegate authority to states to administer the NPDES permitting program, but that authority may also be withdrawn under certain statutory conditions. For example, EPA can withdraw delegated authority when a state agency is no longer acting sufficiently to administer the program in compliance with federal requirements, such as failing to issue NPDES permits, to act on violations, or to seek adequate enforcement penalties or collect adequate administrative fines.
Full textEPA’s proposal to curb emissions from the second largest source of mercury in the United States – industrial boilers and process heaters – has come under fire in recent weeks. Those industries that would be subject to the “boiler rule” have objected to its costs, and some senators have embraced their claims (see also Lisa Jackson's response). The industry story, however, leaves out important facts.
The industry story does not mention that, on balance, the estimated costs of the rule are dwarfed by the benefits it would deliver in terms of human health. According to the Regulatory Impact Analysis (RIA) for the rule, regulating boilers would result in societal benefits ranging from $18 billion to $45 billion, at a cost of $3.4 billion. Thus, the rule is estimated to deliver net benefits in the neighborhood of $15 billion to $41 billion. To put it another way, these estimates mean that Americans would receive five to twelve dollars in health benefits for every dollar spent to meet the proposed standards.
The benefits accounted for by these numbers reflect real impacts for real people – including some 2,000 to 5,100 fewer premature deaths among us each year; 1,400 fewer people suffering from cases of chronic bronchitis; and 35,000 cases of aggravated asthma prevented.
These figures, moreover, do not even attempt to account for a whole host of the boiler rule’s benefits. Importantly, while the proposed rule would cut mercury emissions from these sources in half – eliminating 8.3 tons of mercury emissions annually – the resulting benefits aren’t included at all in the RIA’s cost-benefit calculus. In fact, the RIA does not attempt to include the benefits from reducing any of the numerous toxic air pollutants that would be reduced by the rule – it excludes not only mercury, but also other heavy metals and dioxins from its accounting. Were the figures to reflect the considerable benefits of reducing these notoriously toxic pollutants, the cost-benefit tally would even more strongly favor regulating boiler emissions.
Full textA new CPR white paper today argues that the BP oil spill and its attendant environmental and economic harm were entirely preventable, and indeed, would have been avoided had government regulators over the years been pushed and empowered by determined leadership and given sufficient resources to enforce the law.
The paper, Regulatory Blowout: How Regulatory Failures Made the BP Disaster Possible, and How the System Can Be Fixed to Avoid a Recurrence (press release), examines the performance of multiple regulatory agencies, most conspicuously, the Minerals Management Service (MMS), since reorganized and rebranded as the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (BOEMRE).
Among the recommendations:
The report also focuses on the general importance of using the precautionary principle in decisions over risk, rather than essentially dismissing catastrophic outcomes as too unlikely to warrant serious consideration.
Full textIn 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.
Full textAs 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 we have a long road ahead of us yet. But EPA has stepped up to the plate to its great credit, and to the credit of the Obama Administration.
Over the years, the states have treated the Bay badly, for the most part buckling to industry or other political pressure to avoid meaningful protections. In my home state of Maryland, agri-business has been one such powerful force against progress, for example. As part of its release today, EPA also offered up comments to the states on their draft WIPs, and, again to its credit, EPA seems to mean business. It identified “serious deficiencies” in the plans from five states – Delaware, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia, and “minor deficiencies” in the plans from Maryland and the District of Columbia. The message EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson is clearly intending to deliver to the states should be clear: there’s a new sheriff in town, and she means business.
It’s long past time.
Full textWith 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 own Bay-Love rhetoric. So long as that love does not involve commitments to pollution reduction that would cost real money, the scam was viable. But after missing two highly publicized deadlines for reducing the nutrients that render large areas unfit for fishing and recreation, Congress wheeled around and started withdrawing funding for this PR fest. And we wonder why people hate government.
With the election of Barack Obama and the appointment of “eco-warrior” Lisa Jackson as EPA administrator, Bay cleanup efforts may be getting a big stick to go with its many baby carrots. Sometime later today, EPA will issue the Chesapeake Bay Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) – a numerical cap on the total pollution that can be dumped into the Bay. For years now, the Bay states have permitted pollution sources, from publicly owned sewage treatment plants to privately owned factories without really paying attention to the cumulative load—sadly measured in millions of gallons of watery waste—pumped into the Bay’s tributaries. After years of effort involving the best and brightest scientists, engineers, and other technicians in the country, EPA will cut that Gordian Knot, setting forth 92 individual caps on pollution loads for each of 92 segments of the Chesapeake Bay, 89 of which are considered “impaired,” meaning that the water is unfit for its designated use as a source of drinking water, place of recreation, or fishing area. By 2025, the Bay states and the District of Columbia must have accomplished—through binding regulations, far more stringent permitting, and incentive programs to reduce agricultural pollution—both the 92 individual TMDLs and, collectively, the overall TMDL.
Or, in other words, the goal posts are anchored into the ground, the game has real rules, and unless Congress interferes, we will have accountability at last.
Full text
Two items of note tomorrow in the Chesapeake Bay realm:
We’ll be keeping an eye on them and have more on these items tomorrow.
Full textThe 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.
Full textThe 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 a sip if the cockroach was merely laid to rest peacefully beside the glass, as opposed to dunked inside it. As amazing, they refused to drink the dunker juice, even if it was placed in a freezer for one year or the cockroach was dipped in the juice very, very quickly. So, conclude the researchers, “while shunning may have evolved from an adaptive response to avoid contaminated food, it can be triggered in inappropriate circumstances.”
Now why on earth am I bringing up this bizarre experiment in the context of this perfectly staid hearing on a hyper-technical EPA rulemaking proposal, which covers—count ‘em—138 pages in the Federal Register, leaving many supposedly more relevant points to be addressed by witnesses today? I am telling you the cockroach story because it is at the root of the reasons why the OMB Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) mangled this rulemaking, constructing a fanciful but deadly cost-benefit analysis that predicts negative net benefits of as much as $239 billion if EPA regulates coal ash appropriately, as a special waste under subtitle C of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. Or, to put it more bluntly, electric utility executives who generate 136 million tons of coal ash annually will squander $239 billion of the nation’s resources over the next 50 years because, suffering from the stigma effect, they will send millions of tons of the stuff to lined landfills rather than dumping it in road beds and mine shafts.
Full textThe 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 who seek to protect the fragile, endangered Everglades. Under the plan, the Water Management District will pay $197 million for 26,800 acres of land owned by U.S. Sugar Corporation, a major sugar grower in the Everglades Agricultural Area (EAA) situated south of Lake Okeechobee and north of the “river of grass.” The District was also given an option to purchase the remainder of U.S. Sugar’s EAA property—more than 100,000 additional acres--if and when the District’s property tax revenues increase.
To understand the significance of this major land purchase, one must consider the history of its evolution. In the 1980s and 1990s, when scientists drew up plans to restore the Everglades, they noted the critical importance of converting some of the farmland in the EAA to use as a water treatment and storage area. The problem, as those scientists saw it, was that the water flowing into the Everglades from EAA agricultural operations contained such excessively high levels of nutrient contaminants that it had to be captured and treated. Moreover, under the prevailing arrangement, there was frequently a need to divert oversupplies of water into nearby rivers and the Everglades itself. This situation did (and continues to do) considerable damage to the Calusa and St. Lucie estuaries and to the natural systems of the Everglades themselves.
Full text