Scott's Blog Archive

February 16: Short-lived climate forcers Politico has a piece from John Podesta and Andrew Light about the State Department's announcement of a new agreement today between the U.S. and several other countries designed to reduce emissions of so-called "short-lived climate forcers." Read it here. Short-lived climate forcers are things like black carbon, methane where reductions now could have more immediate impacts on mitigating global warming. CO2 gets all the attention, and it is the biggest part of the problem, but it is also a gas that can remain in the atmosphere for hundreds, even thousands of years. That means even drastic reductions in CO2 emissions will, in some sense, just keep things from getting worse, not actually reduce the levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Reductions in short-lived GHG's can have more noticeable results faster.
February 16: New York Times and Chisago County Certainly the #1 topic of conversation in Minnesota policy wonk circles this week has been the New York Times piece last Sunday, pointing out how counties like Chisago County with the greatest dependence on government benefits are typically the counties with the strongest anti-government political fervor. Read it here. The article cites work done by Prof. Dean Lacy at Dartmouth, who has found that the states where the federal government spends more than it collects, i.e. the states most dependent on federal largesse, typically vote Republican, and states who pay more in taxes than they receive back (e.g. Minnesota) typically vote Democratic. And it's not demographics or social issues. This is something deeper, kind of like the strong correlation between counties and states with the highest rates of divorce and domestic violence and the highest percentages of "family values" voters. Anecdotally, we often see the greatest opposition to environmental safeguards coming from areas where the threat of environmental degradation is the highest. To say that Americans are conflicted is a bit of an understatement.

February 11: Continuing criticism of state's review of PolyMet proposal The Star Tribune reported on EPA's concern that the state agencies' proposed water modeling is going forward without adequate new field data. Read the article here. That was one of the key criticisms of the first draft EIS in 2009, from EPA, MCEA and other commenters, but, again, the agencies have been determined to the do the water modeling work without new or complete data. They are planning or have already drilled additional monitoring wells in the area, but they need to actually collect data from those wells over a reasonable period before they complete any analysis of potential water quality impacts.

February 2: Turning swords into shields David Shaffer has an article in today's Star Tribune addressing the EPA's proposal to exempt facilities like XCel Energy's giant Sherco coal plant from stricter air quality requirements because they are in the region covered by the new Cross-State Air Pollution rule (CSAPR).  Under the EPA's proposal, XCel can purchase or cash in credits in a cap-and-trade system and avoid having to invest in better air quality control technology at Sherco.  (Big Stone 1 in South Dakota, on the other hand,  has to spend nearly half a billion dollars to bring the plant up to "best available retrofit technology" (BART) standards, because they are not in the region the Cross-State rule covers.)

This is the issue covered in the new report prepared by the National Parks Conservation Association, MCEA, and other groups on how the EPA's proposal will exacerbate the "regional haze" problem we are seeing in protected areas like the Boundary Waters Canoe Area and Voyageurs National Park. The bottom line is that we need to have both market-based incentives to move toward cleaner energy, and strict regulation, if we hope to achieve our goals. Frankly, I'm not sure this policy is doing XCel any favors.  If they do soon what I think they know needs to be done, and what regulators will eventually require--moving Sherco away from coal or putting in hundreds of millions of dollars of air pollution control technology--their shareholders and ratepayers may squawk because there appears to be a cheaper way out now.  This proposed exemption creates an incentive for utilities to think more in the short term than in the long term, and that is truly unfortunate.

February 1: More on ag water pollution "certainty" program From MCEA board member Don Shelby.

January 31: Why farmers should care about Lake PepinNice op-ed from Michael McKay in today's Star Tribune, executive director of the Lake Pepin Legacy Alliance, on agriculture-related water pollution in Minnesota--where it comes from, what it does to the river and the Gulf, how it can be fixed.  Doesn't shy away from the size of the problem, but remains optimistic.

January 31: Check out this editorial on Ellen Anderson rejection

January 30: "The past is never dead.  It's not even past."*

One of the chronic problems with public policymaking is the dogged persistence of old, outdated visions of reality.  Ask a legislator what industries are at the core of Minnesota's economy, and many will say "agriculture, forestry, and mining," even though that probably has not been true for decades.  That problem is exacerbated by the fact that it is the old, mature industries that have the lobbyists, and the result often is policy that seems directed to restoring some past golden age, rather than to putting Minnesota in the best position for what will almost certainly be a very different future.

The Star Tribune's latest editorial in support of the big, freeway-style bridge over the St. Croix River is a case in point.  In my view, the case for the big bridge has never been strong, but it is much weaker now than it was five, ten, or even forty years ago, when the big bridge idea first got seriously promoted.  The whole premise of the bridge is a 1960's mindset, where gasoline is cheap, growth means expanding outward, government's role is to facilitate that outward expansion by building  bigger and bigger highways and bridges on the urban edge.  None of that makes any sense anymore.  Now, we face increasing fossil fuel costs, tougher health-based clean air standards, and demographic shifts toward smaller households, more and more back in the urban core.  Government's role, then, should be to focus on the core cities, with a vision of a transit-oriented, walkable, compact, even dense urban development pattern, and an end to sprawl around the edges.  Far from reflecting "21st century transportation needs," as the Strib editorial declared, the freeway bridge over the St. Croix will only siphon away scarce resources from much more urgent and genuine "21st century transportation needs" in Minneapolis and St. Paul.

Minnesota is very good at "planning" for the future, and we are well-stocked with true visionaries who can see what our future can potentially hold.  When real decisions about where to spend the money have to be made, however, we fall right back into old patterns of thinking that are going to inhibit Minnesota's real potential.  So instead of LRT, streetcars, and, yes, road and bridge repair in the core cities, we get giant bridges in the exurbs and giant stadiums and shopping centers in the suburbs, just like we would have done in 1965, and our real needs go unmet.

The bridge controversy  is not about traffic congestion in Stillwater, or structural deficiencies in the lift bridge.  There are far cheaper, less damaging ways of addressing those specific problems.  What this is about is competing visions for the future of the Twin Cities--on the one hand, an unsustainable and weak future based on fossil fuels, constant car travel, and large single-family homes 30 miles from town, or a sustainable, strong future with genuine housing and transportation choices, reduced vehicle miles traveled, greater reliance on renewable energy, and a vibrant, economically competitive urban core.  Our leaders are making the wrong choice.

* For you literati out there, the quote is from William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun.

January 23: Backfilling with Legacy Dollars Conservation Minnesota, the state outpost of the League of Conservation Voters, recently released a report showing how the legislature and the governor have been using dedicated Legacy Amendment dollars to make up for general fund budget shortfalls. That is directly contrary to the intent of the voters, and I applaud CM for shining a light on this problem. I have thought the practice of dealing with the Legacy spending and the other program budgets in separate bills makes it easier for the Legislature to evade the constitutional requirement.  Legacy projects and program support should be on the same budget sheets as general fund (or other dedicated fund) projects and program support, so any shifts onto the Legacy funding would be more transparent.

We have certainly heard some legislators say they intend to push the Legacy funding just as far as the courts will allow, to make solving our long-term general fund budget problem easier.  But the Constitution is something all three branches of government are sworn to uphold.  The Legacy Amendment should not end up as something the legislature and governor try to get around.  It should be something all three branches of government do their best to implement.

January 20: KeystoneXL Battle Enters New Phase As anticipated, President Obama formally rejected the proposed KeystoneXL pipeline this past week.  When the payroll tax bill included the new deadline for the President's decision, the outcome was, in my view, preordained.  If he approved it, right after saying that the environmental review was inadequate because it did not consider alternate routes, there would have been lawsuits the pipeline advocates (and the Administration) would likely lose, and the President would have been accused (rightly) of a pretty major flip-flop.  Now, by denying the petition, but encouraging TransCanada to reapply, the decision gets kicked down the road.  So I think the celebrations have been a tad premature, but maybe living to fight another day is something to celebrate.  I still think it quite possible that the Administration will eventually approve the pipeline, again on the grounds that killing the pipeline will not stop Canada tar sands mining, and will therefore not reduce GHG's.  It won't be approved soon, however.

January 18: More on "Agriculture Water Quality Certification" Two more stories on the proposed new agriculture water quality certification program.  Dennis Lien in the Pioneer Press, and Stephanie Hemphill on MPR, both worth a read. 

January 17: What to do with Sherco Nice piece by MCEA board member Don Shelby on XCel Energy's giant Sherco coal-burning power plant. Sherco is reaching the end of its shelf life, and we will have to decide whether to retire it, convert it into a natural gas plant, or continue it as a coal plant with continued major pollution investments.  

January 17: Agriculture water quality certification This morning, Governor Dayton, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, and Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack announced that Minnesota would be the first state to set up a new "agriculture water quality certification" program, designed to reduce ag-related water pollution, particularly in the Mississippi River basin.  Josephine Marcotty has a front-page story on this in today's Star Tribune.

The devil will be in the details, and there are as yet no details about this proposed plan.  Farm groups are rallying around the concept of "certainty"--that, if they adopt certain best management practices, they will be protected from any environmental regulation for a period of years.  Environmental groups, including MCEA, see a risk that such a program could do nothing but reward current practices, and make it harder, not easier, to solve the massive problem of ag-related water pollution.

A certification program with the requirements tied to science-based water quality plans, i.e. the real needs of the receiving waters, enforceable, compliance based on results, not inputs, designed to help target cost-share dollars or create a consumer market for "environmentally friendly" commodities, might have some promise. The right people have to be at the table, though, or this could easily turn out to be counterproductive.

January 13: Focus on smog and soot? Yesterday, NPR ran a story on how many scientists are now advocating a policy focus on "short-lived climate forcers" like ozone (smog) and fine particulates like black carbon.  The concentration on carbon dioxide has been politically difficult, and, even if we were successful in significantly reducing carbon dioxide emissions, it would take a long time to see positive effects because of the length of time carbon dioxide persists in the atmosphere.  Reducing smog and soot, on the other hand, which can be accomplished much more quickly, could reduce overall global warming by one-half degree Celsius, not an insignificant amount, and also would reward us with enormous public health benefits and less damage to crop production.  A UN report from last year goes into more detail. 

Here in Minnesota, the metropolitan area is likely to reach "nonattainment" for ozone and fine particulates, very soon if not already.  That means we will be out of compliance with the federal Clean Air Act, and will be required to develop a state implementation plan (SIP) to get our numbers into compliance. That may present a signal opportunity for Minnesota to make a substantial contribution to reducing global and regional climate disruption.

January 13: Pipeline politics As we mentioned in an earlier blog posting, the bill which extended the payroll tax cut, passed right before Christmas, ended up including a provision requiring the President to make a decision on the controversial Keystone XL pipeline project by February 2012.  You will recall that the President had sent the issue back to the State Department, asking State to reevaluate the proposed pipeline route in light of the controversy that had flared up in the Great Plains states about potential water aquifer contamination, effectively delaying a decision until after the election.

The irony of the provision is that it essentially forces the President to reject the proposal, because he is already on record saying the environmental review is incomplete.  If he approves it, lawsuits will follow, and the project may be delayed even further.

Now, the NRDC is following through, expressly promising litigation if the President approves the current plan. (Read more here.) The pipeline will continue to be an issue in the Presidential campaign, and in Congress as well, since the Republicans all seem to believe that promising immediate approval of the pipeline is in their political interest.

January 11: EPA and the Supreme Court I read the transcript of this week's oral argument in the Sackett v. EPA case. (Available here.) This is the case involving pre-enforcement compliance orders under the Clean Water Act.  The Sacketts had done some grading work to build a new house, and the EPA believes they filled protected wetlands without a permit.  The EPA sent them a compliance order, telling them to remove the fill or face a fine as high as $37,500 a day.  The Sacketts claimed there were no protected wetlands, but were denied an administrative hearing.  They sued, but the lower courts dismissed their lawsuit on the grounds that there was no judicial review under the Clean Water Act until the EPA actually commenced a formal enforcement action.

It is pretty clear that the EPA is going to lose, and the Sacketts are going to get their day in court.  The practical result may not be that much--EPA can change it "administrative compliance orders" into "warnings" and thereby not give alleged violators two bites at the apple in court.  But the transcript reveals the continuing hostility of several members of the Court to wetlands protection under section 404 of the Clean Water Act, as was evident in the earlier Rapanos decision limiting the jurisdiction of the Corps of Engineers and EPA.  This case may not end up being that big a deal (although it could, if the Court rules broadly), but I remain concerned about what this Court might do with a direct constitutional Commerce Clause challenge to enforcement of section 404.

January 11: More on California ruling on low carbon fuel standard Here are some comments by the lead NRDC attorney working on the California litigation over the low-carbon fuel standard. All seem like valid points to me, and I think there is a decent chance the Ninth Circuit is going to reverse.

January 10: Impact of California ruling on low carbon fuel standardOn December 29, 2011, a federal judge in Fresno struck down Califonia's low carbon fuel standard (LCFS).  Under the LCFS, which was put in place in 2007, all fuels used in California are evaluated for their "carbon intensity," the degree to which they contribute to greenhouse gas emissions and global warming.  If a fuel does better than the California state average, the producer gets a credit; if they do worse, they get a charge.  The goal, obviously, is to provide an economic incentive for  the development and production of low-carbon, renewable fuels, and it is an idea that has received consideration in a number of states.

Unfortunately, one of the losers in the "carbon intensity" scoring was Midwest corn-based ethanol.  Its score was lower because the power used to run ethanol plants typically comes from coal-fired sources, because fossil fuels have to be burned to transport ethanol across the country, and because ethanol has prompted many farmers to take forested land and put it under the plow.

So the ethanol producers (and some petrochemical interests as well) sued California, claiming that the LCFS unconstitutionally discriminates against interstate commerce.  And, at least in the first round, they won.  The federal court in Fresno found that considering factors like electricity sourcing, deforestation, and transportation amounted to discrimination based on location, and was therefore illegal.  The State has already appealed, contending that the carbon intensity formula applies equally to all fuels from all locations (for example, cane-based ethanol from Brazil scores well), and that, if the State cannot address the problem of "leakage" (just pushing the high-carbon fuel production out-of-state), the State cannot meet its important interest in cutting carbon emissions.

The case is important to Minnesota for a number of reasons.  First, we really need California to succeed.  Given the utter inability of Congress to address these issues, the states have to get out front, and because California is one-fifth of our nation's economy, California will always be at the center.  They have also adopted a number of other measures to address global warming, including a new cap-and-trade system governing electrical generation, and they are all now potentially at risk.

Second, this ruling will only embolden the State of North Dakota and the coal interests that are suing Minnesota right now over the carbon offset requirements in Minnesota's Next Generation Energy Act.  Ultimately, I don't think the Fresno ruling will stand, and, even if it does, it will be based on particular aspects of the regulations that are unique to California.  Minnesota's law does not discriminate in any way in favor of Minnesota producers, and the argument that the goal of the carbon offset requirement was to protect Minnesota producers from competition is not going to hold any water.

January 9: Environmentalists vs. economistsProf. Farber has a perceptive blog entry at Legal Planet on how environmentalists are more often utilizing economic analysis and arguments, and on how economists are more often incorporating environmental concerns (ecosystem resources, irreversible changes through "real option theory," catastrophic risks through "fat-tailed distribution analysis") into their work. Read it here.His point is that the "gap" between the two disciplines has been closing over the years, and that there should be more opportunities for collaboration in the future.

January 6: New Toxics Release Inventory -- Hardrock mining remains on top

Today, the EPA released the Toxics Release Inventory for 2010.  Yet again, "metal mining" (copper, zinc, gold, silver) was by far the largest source of toxic substance releases, 41% of all releases reported, up 38% from 2009, but down from 2001.  Here is a link to the EPA's analysis of the data.  

December 21: Two steps forward, one step back

Kudos to the EPA for finally getting the Mercury and Air Toxics standards done.  These are the first national rules regulating emissions of mercury, cadmium, lead, arsenic, formaldehyde, dioxin, acid gases and other air pollutants from coal-fired power plants.   I'm watching Lisa Jackson's press conference right now, and the chair of the board of the American Lung Association is running through the truly astonishing public health benefits we can expect from enforcement of the new standards.  Long overdue, but a significant step forward.

On the other hand, something other than bouquets for the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission (PUC) and the Minnesota Department of Commerce.  Yesterday, the PUC approved the proposal of Otter Tail Energy and other owners for a $500 million retrofit of the old, coal-burning Big Stone 1 plant, and, in effect, keep a major source of carbon and other pollution alive for another thirty years.  MCEA put together a convincing case that it would be more economic to retire the plant, and replace it with a combination of natural gas and wind, and the PUC apparently agreed that Otter Tail's economic assumptions were faulty, but they let the retrofit go ahead anyway.  Big Stone 1 will be cleaner than it was, but, again, approving retrofits like this just extends our dependence on coal to the detriment of the global environment.

December 20: How "Streamlining" Causes Delay Ezra Klein had an interesting blog post yesterday on the Keystone XL pipeline. The Keystone XL pipeline is the project that would run from the Alberta tar sands down to the Gulf of Mexico, and is awaiting State Department and Presidential approval.  A few weeks ago, responding to concerns about possible spills and their potential effects on the Oglalla aquifer, President Obama announced that he was ordering the State Department to go back and consider alternative routes, which would delay the ultimate decision until 2013. The payroll tax cut bill that came out of the Senate last week contains a provision directing the President to instead decide on the pipeline in the next 60 days.

The result, however, may be to delay the pipeline for years.  If the President were to approve the pipeline, environmental groups and other citizens would sue, and would have a good chance of prevailing on the argument that there was inadequate consideration of alternatives under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).  After all, the President just said that publicly.  Then, the State Department would have to start again with the comment periods, the public meetings, and all the things that can delay an environmental review process.  The effect could be to delay the project for 3 or 4 years, when it is still quite likely that, if no new law is passed, the project will get approved shortly after the 2012 election.

We've seen this same pattern in Minnesota.  The governor and other elected officials want to "streamline" the environmental review and permitting process, and the idea that always comes up is to require decisions to be made within a certain number of days.  (Wisconsin is considering just such a proposal for iron mining permits to try to speed up the proposed Gobulic taconite mining project in the northern part of the state.)  When an agency has a proposal that requires more time to evaluate, then, it has only two options.  It can deny the permit request, and force the applicant to start over, or it can issue a permit before the work is done, knowing that its decision is less likely to survive a challenge in the courts. 

"Streamlining" is not something you can legislate.  Streamlining requires effective agency management, and, in the environmental context, being able to say no when a project should not be permitted, rather than continuing, often for years, to try to negotiate some way of allowing a project to proceed.

December 19: Battle lines being drawn? Dennis Lien's story in the St. Paul Pioneer Press on Saturday laid out the fundamental conflict in addressing Minnesota's #1 water pollution problem, which is sediment, nitrogen and phosphorus from farm runoff and drainage. The battle is not between enviros and farmers.  The battle is between local taxpayers and farmers.  Under the federal Clean Water Act, water pollution sources like municipal sewage treatment plants must have permits and their permit conditions can and do get stricter as water quality conditions in receiving waters deteriorate.  But the same is not true under the law for farmers, who are the major source of the problem, but who are not subject to the Act's regulatory scope. And, at the same time, the federal farm bill rewards farmers for putting as many acres under the plow as possible and farming as intensively as possible.  The result is a major shift of wealth from taxpayers to the agricultural sector, and patience is wearing thin.

December 19: Learning from failure Interesting piece by Leslie Kaufman in Sunday's New York Times on the strategic rethinking going on within the national environmental movement in light of the collapse or near-collapse of Congressional and global efforts to address global warming.  The main point is that environmentalists need to "get down to earth" and focus more on "the plant down the road that has adverse health effects" rather than  on abstract, hard-to-understand, murky legislative proposals. Of course, here at MCEA, we learned that lesson a long time ago.  Our focus has always been and will remain on Minnesota, and concrete threats to Minnesota's environment.  We are, frankly, more concerned about what Otter Tail Energy does at Big Stone 1 than we are about the formula of the "agreement to some day agree" that emerged from the global conference in Durban.

 

December 15: Oh good grief! Now it appears that a rider defunding the program requiring transition to more energy-efficient light bulbs is still attached to the "megabus" budget bill going through Congress. Read it here. As some of you may recall, Rep. Bachmann (R-Minn.) has made "freedom to buy inefficient light bulbs" a major talking point in her presidential campaign.  EPA's budget is also taking a major hit in this legislation.

December 15: Climate change gridlock The 17th United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change wrapped up in Durban, South Africa, this past Sunday.  Not much was accomplished.  72 hours of frantic negotiations at the end produced something like an agreement to agree at some future date, and that was labelled a success since it seemed the conference might adjourn without anything at all. Read about it here. At the same time, political experts in Washington, DC project that the U.S. Congress will do precisely nothing on climate change before the 2012 election, in stark contrast to even the later years of the Bush Administration when at least some progress was made. Read the Politco article here. 

Paradoxically, for what is after all a "global" issue, the real action is likely to take place on the state and local level.  California has now promulgated its own cap-and-trade regulations, and, although there will be plenty of litigation before all parts of the new rules will take effect, one-fifth of the US economy has now decided to place a price on carbon emissions.  It now seems likely that progress will start at the local level, gradually expand, and focus on goals that can actually be accomplished.  The notion that a problem like this can be solved by (or only by) grand, worldwide treaties is a mistake, and a mistake I am afraid we are going to pay for.

December 7: *Except the Stillwater Bridge MNDOT has been slowly moving in a new strategic direction since Commissioner Tom Sorel came on board.  MNDOT has acknowledged at last that we can’t build ourselves out of congestion and, more importantly, that we couldn’t pay for it even if we wanted to.  In light of constrained fiscal realities, MNDOT is pursuing low-cost/high-benefit projects and has re-engineered big projects in the Twin Cities region to reduce their estimated costs.  In its new 50-year vision, MNDOT has committed itself to sustainability, innovation, and compatibility with natural systems and is beginning to translate these goals into a new state multimodal transportation plan.

I have applauded MNDOT for this transformation but I’m having a hard time squaring the new strategic direction with MNDOT’s obsession to build a blufftop-to-blufftop, four-lane, freeway-style bridge across the St. Croix.  It contradicts everything MNDOT laid out in its new 50-year vision.  It values the commute times of a small number of Wisconsin residents more highly than the health and safety of Minnesota residents.  As the most expensive bridge project in Minnesota’s history, it would push off other projects that represent solutions to conditions that regularly kill and injure Minnesotans.  Then it came to me: I must have missed a footnote in the new 50-year vision that gives the Stillwater Bridge a free pass and exempts it from all of the laudable goals in MNDOT’s new direction.  I’ve re-read the vision and haven’t found it yet. I will keep looking because it is the only rational explanation for MNDOT’s actions.

December 6: Elephant in the room
Thanks to MCEA board member Gene Merriam and former Rep. (and LCCMR chair) Dennis Ozment for pointing out the elephant in the room in the current discussions about using gambling to fund a new Vikings stadium.  Check out their Star Tribune op-ed here. Our state constitution prohibits the legislature from authorizing gambling, with the only exceptions being parimutuel horse racing and the state lottery.  As the op-ed points out, a state-run casino is not a "state lottery."  And, even if it was, the constitution dedicates a minimum of 40% of the proceeds to the environmental trust fund.

We have seen more and more legislative consideration of issues and proposals without any apparent understanding of or concern about constitutional restrictions.  Last session, several environmental bills were heard that were flatly inconsistent with federal law, and therefore unconstitutional, but that seemed to be irrelevant to the discussion.  Legislators take an oath to uphold the constitution, and, even from a purely practical perspective,  enacting things that cannot pass constitutional muster is expensive and kind of dumb.

If it's the absence of previously available legal advice, that can be fixed.  My real concern, however, is that the problem is not failure to get advice, but rather the presence of an atmosphere where few particularly care whether bills are constitutional or not, so long as they seem to be good politics.

December 1: Voice crying in the wilderness? 
Earlier this week, a ruling in a securities case by Judge Jed Rakoff of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York in Manhattan caused a major stir.  The judge flatly and angrily rejected a settlement agreement proposed by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Citigroup, because it contained no admission of liability and insufficient disclosure of facts and therefore could not pass the "in the public interest" test.

It is really rare for a judge to do that.  The "system" depends on settlements, settlements rarely if ever contain an admission of liability, and the ability to control the flow of information to potential civil litigants and the public is often the major incentive for corporations to agree to settle in the first place.  It happens virtually all the time in environmental enforcement cases.  Government agencies get to trumpet seemingly big financial settlements to the press, they get some kind of formal agreement that the alleged polluter will comply with the law in the future (you know, we all have to comply with the law in the future, whether we sign an agreement or not), and they may even get some kind of remediation.  But the company gets to avoid a finding of liability (which may trigger more lawsuits, disqualification from government contracts, loss of business) and gets to hold onto its confidential information and keep it from the public.  Too often, not much of a deterrent.

I have no illusions that Judge Rakoff's ruling will sweep the nation, and settlements of government enforcement litigation will become the exception rather than the rule.  But it is still nice to see one judge stand up and say the public is not always best served by a document government and corporate litigators caption as a "settlement."

Here's a link to Judge Rakoff's ruling. 

December 1: Legacy Amendment report
The Office of Legislative Auditor (OLA) issued its long-awaited report on operation of the Legacy Amendment,  and largely gave the process a clean bill of health. There were some minor financial issues, a question about conflict of interest policies at the Clean Water Council, and, appropriately, a general concern that the funds be targeted for maximum effectiveness. MCEA has focused largely on evaluating the programmatic grants through the Clean Water fund, and identified its concerns in a report published about a year ago (and cited in the OLA report as well).

The OLA also acknowledged the continuing controversy over what the Amendment means when it says Legacy funds should not be used to substitute for "traditional sources of funding."  In our constitutional system, only the courts can finally declare "what the law is," but the OLA report emphasized that it is the duty of all three branches of government to honor the constitution, and that legislators and budget officials need to take especial pains to make sure Legacy funds are not lumped in with other sources of state revenue, to make sure they have adequate historical information about past spending patterns, and carefully scrutinize possible appropriations.  The public expected that spending for clean water, parks and trails, and outdoor habitat be maintained and enhanced, not just sunk into the rest of the budget.

November 29: Don't need, don't want new coal plants
Stephanie Hemphill has a good piece on MPR, explaining the current energy situation as it affects Minnesota and North Dakota.  The economic situation has lessened demand for energy, so new base load coal plants like the Spiritwood facility in Jamestown are sitting idle.  Most of the utilities are taking steps to shift from coal to natural gas and renewables.  Of course, they are legally required to at least put those plans together, but companies like XCel are recognizing that coal does not make much sense economically anymore.  That is one of the principal reasons the Big Stone 1 coal plant retrofit referred to in the article is a mistake.   We hope the Public Utilities Commission will agree.

November 28: Decouple from production, recouple to stewardship
Josephine Marcotty has a front-page article in today's Star Tribune on an extremely serious problem that threatens to doom any efforts to reduce agricultural runoff pollution into Minnesota's lakes and rivers.  [link] Millions of acres of Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) contracts to take ag land out of production are due to expire soon, and current inflated commodity prices will drive many Minnesota farmers to restore those lands to production.  That will include buffer strips, marginal land with poor soil quality, quasi-wetlands--all the kinds of land that should be managed for conservation purposes.  The impending 2012 farm bill may make this situation even worse, if anticipated cuts to USDA conservation programs go through.

Lord knows that voluntary best management practices are not sufficient to address what is after all the #1 water pollution problem in the state.  Neither are regulations.  We need to change the financial incentives so that we stop artificially rewarding intensive, input-intensive farming on as many acres as possible, and start rewarding genuine land and water stewardship.  But don't hold your breath.

November 28: Stillwater Bridge Update (Jim Erkel)
Monday's Star Tribune will have an article by Kevin Giles hammering on the cost considerations relating to MNDOT's proposed big, bluff-to-bluff Stillwater Bridge.  Frank Hornstein and Scott Dibble are quoted extensively and there is a mention of a map by MCEA of structurally deficient bridges throughout the state on which the dough saved by building a more modestly scaled bridge at Stillwater could be spent.  The article hits on the two issues that have gained the most traction in this controversy -- total cost (the most expensive bridge in MN's history, more than 2X the cost of the 35W Bridge) and equity (other projects that would solve problems on MN roads and bridges that are actually a genuine threat to the safety of Minnesota residents).  The proponents claim they have to spend the big money because so much growth is going to be coming to western WI but Saturday's Star Tribune shows that average daily traffic is down from the peak, coincidentally when MNDOT projected the need for the big, bad bridge.  In other words, Rep. Bachmann, Gov. Dayton and Sen. Klobuchar, want to spend more than 20X the ratio of the construction cost divided by the daily average traffic count for new 35W Bridge to help support a pattern of low-density development whose time has past.

Staff Editorial: Time for a Sustainable Solution
By Jim Erkel - 11/15/11

Secretary Ray LaHood has brought a new direction to the U.S. Department of Transportation.  It is reflected in the Partnership for Sustainable Communities between the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT), the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Department.  The Secretary’s commitment to sustainability will be seriously tested this week when he meets with the congressional delegations of Minnesota and Wisconsin to discuss the legislation being pushed by Rep. Michele Bachmann and Sen. Amy Klobuchar to exempt a $690 million, blufftop-to-blufftop, freeway-style bridge on the St. Croix River proposed by the Minnesota Department of Transportation (MNDOT) from the protections of the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act.

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November 16: Why the ozone standard got tubed
Excellent article in the New York Times on the political machinations behind the White House decision to postpone consideration of tightening the ozone standard until 2013.  It is a great case study of how politics and policy mix, and how the real world works.  It also once again demonstrates the continuing power of the "jobs vs. environment" frame.

November 15: KeystoneXL pipeline: bad economics

Good article in this week's Bloomberg Business Week about the KeystoneXL pipeline proposal.  This is the project that would transport crude oil from the Alberta tar sands in Canada down to the  Gulf Coast refineries in the U.S. and to global markets.  President Obama announced last week that approval of the project would be delayed until after a further review of alternative routes was completed, i.e. until after the 2012 election.

The focus has been on potential leaks into the Oglalla aquifer, and on the carbon pollution from tar sands mining operations.  But this article puts some numbers on these concerns, and suggests that if TransCanada, the pipeline proponent, actually had to pay for the costs of cleanup, reclamation, treatment of tailings basin wastes, mitigation of mercury and arsenic emissions, and, yes, carbon pollution, the project would not even be good business.  Extracting oil from tar sands is incredibly expensive anyway, and especially now that the companies have already taken the oil near the surface, and they have to start injecting steam into deeper deposits to get the oil to flow (so-called in situ extraction).  If the significant external costs are internalized, tar sands oil may end up costing well over $100 a barrel, and most experts agree that demand starts to drop dramatically once prices reach $120-150.  As readers of this blog know, I do not have a lot of confidence in the willingness of our government to stop this pipeline.  But maybe, as is so often the case, it will be the investors who pull the plug.

November 11: Pre-Veteran’s Day Blowout Lots of environmental news on the Thursday before Veterans’ Day.  The White House announced it was sending the KeystoneXL pipeline issue back for further consideration of alternative routes that would have less potential impact on the Oglalla aquifer, and would defer any final decision on the pipeline project until after the election.   Kudos to the folks in Nebraska and the other Great Plains states who brought that issue to the fore.  There was little acknowledgment of the more fundamental problem of where the pipeline would start—the Alberta tar sands—but these days, we will take victories where we can find them.

At the same time, the DNR handed Lutsen Mountains Corporation yet another free pass for taking water out of the Poplar River to make snow this winter.  Even the legislature, which bent over backwards to get LMC what they wanted, was unwilling to allow them to take water out of the river if the flow levels got too low, but the Administration was willing to bend over even further.  We believe the DNR did not have legal authority to do what it did, but the main issue is that LMC cannot be trusted any longer.  They must be subject to an enforceable requirement to build a pipeline down to Lake Superior to get their water, get out of the river, take serious steps to mitigate the sediment runoff problem they have on the hill, and to do it all before next ski season.  I hope any skiers out there will let LMC know they expect no less.

Finally, an administrative law judge sided with Otter Tail Power and its partners, who want to make a major investment in retrofitting the old Big Stone 1 coal plant in South Dakota.  What the utilities should be doing is taking that old plant down and building a new source with greatly reduced carbon emissions, ideally a combination of natural gas and wind.  But this ALJ, and, unfortunately, the Administration, took the position that it would be OK to leave this old plant on line for several more decades, so long as it was “modernized” and other Clean Air Act problems were addressed.  If Minnesota is at all serious about meeting its greenhouse gas emissions reduction goals, it cannot be leaving old coal plants running for another 30 years.  It is now up to the PUC to decide whether Minnesota is serious or not.

November 9: Poisoned Places Sorry about the lag in blog entries.  MCEA's unwavering support for the Central Corridor LRT project wavered a bit when someone cut a cable late last week and knocked out our telephone and Internet connections for days.  But we seem to be back up, at least for now.

I certainly urge you to check out NPR's series called "Poisoned Places," about lax enforcement of the federal Clean Air Act. On Monday, Stephanie Hemphill from MPR put a Minnesota spin on this by talking about the likelihood that the Twin CIties metro area will fall out of attainment for ozone and fine particulates sometime soon.  MPR's report pointed out that we likely cannot make the improvements we need by focusing solely on traditionally regulated stationary sources without imposing extraordinary costs on businesses, so we are going to have to look hard at diesel engines, which seem to be contributing a lot of the soot, and gasoline-powered automobiles, which contribute to the smog.  Stay tuned.

November 1: Copper Mining and Perpetual Water Quality Problems Front page story in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel today about water quality problems showing up 17 years after the Flambeau copper mine closed. Read it here. The Flambeau mine operated in the 1990’s, and is often touted as a model for how current mining practices have “solved” the water quality problem with sulfide mining.  The article also notes the importance of good baseline date in evaluating the environmental impact of a copper mine, something that I hope our state agencies take to heart with the Polymet project. 
October 30: Very bad news on 2012 farm bill The Environmental Working Group (EWG) is reporting on an attempt by friends of industrial agriculture to go around the normal democratic processes and get a new farm bill adopted through the deficit supercommittee process. Read it here. Decoupling farm subsidy payments from high-input, intensive farming on every available acre and recoupling them to land stewardship practices is critical if we are ever to solve the problem of ag-related water pollution.  That will not happen with a "secret" farm bill.

October 26: Berkeley Earth climate reports Here’s a link to the Berkeley Earth reports on climate change.  Yesterday, I linked to the Economist piece on this same set of reports. 

October 26: We’re Number Eight! The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) recently ranked the states on their policies to promote energy efficiency, and Minnesota came in #8.  (Our friends in oil and coal-rich North Dakota came in #51.) Check out the scorecard here.

October 25: New climate science reports The conservative London Economist this week reports on a new set of climate studies from a group called Berkeley Earth,  partly funded by the ultraconservative Koch Foundation. The researchers  apparently started from the premise of many “climate skeptics”  that the temperature data indicating global warming is fishy.  But, despite using a wide range of alternative methodologies, the Berkeley Earth group reached the opposite conclusion.  They concluded that the consensus view that the earth’s temperature has risen just under one degree in the past 50 years was essentially correct, and there is no legitimate basis for denying that the earth is warming fast.  Facts can be pesky things. 

October 25: Star Tribune opinion page gets it right twice in one day Today’s lead editorial in the Star Tribune condemns the current round of EPA-bashing that has become fashionable in Republican circles, and points out the costs in human lives if the EPA is not permitted to do its job. Read it here.    Also, the opinion page put in a plug for  Shawn Otto’s new book “Fool Me Twice:  Fighting the Assault on Science in America.” Read the opinion here.  Otto points out that science is inherently anti-authoritarian, because it calls certainties into question, and that is why people in power have so long assaulted science’s claims.  We, of course, need science more than ever to solve the very serious problems we face, but, if we dismiss science as partisan propaganda, we have little hope of finding solutions. Check out Fool Me Twice here. 

October 19: Fixing deficient bridges in the core vs. Big Shiny Bridge in Stillwater Today, Transportation for America released a new report on structurally deficient bridges by US metro area. Read it here. Bill Salisbury reported on the Twin Cities results on the front page of today’s Pioneer Press, available here. One in every 17 Twin Cities bridges is structurally deficient, which does not mean they are about to collapse, but does mean that they are restricted to light vehicles or require repairs and must be monitored, inspected and maintained.  The list includes five of the busiest bridges in the metropolitan area:

Bridge	Average Daily Traffic
I-35E over Cayuga Street, St. Paul	148,000
Minnesota 36 over Lexington Ave., Roseville	85,000
I-35W over East 60th St., Minneapolis	85,000
US 52/Lafayette over Mississippi River, St. Paul	81,000
US 52/Lafayette over Eaton St., St. Paul	74,000

 The article reports that work has already started on the Lafayette bridge, and that the I-35E Cayuga Street bridge is scheduled for work in November 2012.  Then, right at the end, there is a short mention that a new, freeway-style bridge is proposed for crossing the St. Croix River south of Stillwater, if Congress approves an exemption from the wild and scenic rivers act.

What the article does  not do is tie the two together.  If we use Minnesota tax dollars to build the big, freeway bridge over the St. Croix, not only will we have done irrevocable damage to a wild and scenic river, but we will have blown a chunk of the money we need to fix the bridges in the metro core that need fixing.  And we will have done it to serve a much smaller number of drivers (fewer than 20,000 cars cross the Stillwater lift bridge today), most of whom live in Wisconsin.  MnDOT was ready to redirect the money for the Big Shiny Bridge to needed repair projects, before Governor Dayton reversed course and Sen. Klobuchar jumped on, I guess, to avoid giving Michelle Bachmann a campaign issue.  Ironically, it appears that Rep. Bachmann’s support for the Big Shiny Stillwater bridge cost her considerable credibility with the fiscal conservatives in her own party, and may have helped put her presidential campaign on the ropes.

Today’s report just confirms that the Big Shiny bridge in Stillwater remains a bad idea, not just for the environment, but for Minnesota’s taxpayers, for the economic competitiveness of the Twin Cities metropolitan area, and for those who work or live in the Twin Cities who have to drive over crummy bridges every day.

October 17: Mining controversy crossing state boundaries

The controversy over proposed sulfide mines and the continuing problems with Minnesota’s taconite industry are getting attention in other states.  Ron Meador writes about the discussion going on next door in Wisconsin, (available here) and Steve Karnowski’s AP piece, picked up in the Columbus, Indiana paper and available here, shows how interest in these issues keeps growing. 

October 17: More on problems with TCAAP stadium proposal 

Steve Dornfeld lists many of the reasons the TCAAP proposal is a bad one for the region.  Read them here.

October 17:  Someone always pays

As the anti-EPA-athon continues in the U.S. House of Representatives, the constant refrain is that environmental regulations impose excessive costs on businesses.  The implication is that, if businesses did not have to absorb those costs, no one would and we would all be better off.  Robert Adler’s op-ed in yesterday’s New York Times, however, points out that those costs do not just go away; they just get shifted to someone else.  Whenever there is an environmental problem, there is a cost, and the only question is who is going to pay.  Will it be the taxpayers?  Will it be the “polluter,” the person creating the problem?  Or will it be the people who suffer from a degraded environment?

October 14: Vikings stadium report

The Metropolitan Council and Metropolitan Sports Facilities Commission took a harder look at the problems involved with the Vikings’ preferred Arden Hills site for a new stadium (and the proposed new commercial and residential development for the Wilf family). It is available here. Highlights include the following:

1. The Arden Hills Twin Cities Army Ammunition Plant (TCAAP) is the largest hazardous waste site in Minnesota, and a lot of people have been trying to get it cleaned up for 30 years.  (For a very long time, the Army took the position that they could not be a responsible party under CERCLA, the federal Superfund law, and refused to cooperate.)  The site is NOT cleaned up, and even the parts that are “cleaned up” are only clean to a level acceptable for military or industrial development.  No one knows what it is going to cost to complete the clean-up; a fair assumption is that it will cost more than anyone now anticipates.  No one has stepped up to the plate to take responsibility for any cost overruns or delays.

        2.  A half-cent sales tax increase in Ramsey County is going to make it impossible for the County to use its sales tax levy authority for new transit and transportation projects.  That means a Vikings stadium in Arden Hills is not only going to leave Ramsey County taxpayers and businesses with the highest sales tax rate in the state, but it is also going to directly prevent  badly-needed transit projects from getting done.

        3. This project is going to require federal review, certainly for the highway construction that will have to occur, perhaps for other connected parts of the project.  That fact alone virtually guarantees that this is going to take several years to do.  The state legislature and the governor may exempt a Vikings stadium from every state environmental law, but that won’t change the federal situation.

        What the report fails to do is assess whether there are alternative sites that would be less risky economically and environmentally.  To be fair, no one asked them to do that.  But the Metropolitan Council does not have to wait for a request.  They have the authority to review projects of “metropolitan significance” under current law, authority which was intended for just this situation where we need to do a thorough assessment of alternative sites and find out which would benefit the public most (or cost the public least).

Personally, I don’t see any reason the taxpayers should be asked to foot any part of this bill.  But sometimes our choices are between the bad and the terrible, and, more and more, the Arden Hills option looks like it’s the terrible one.

October 13: Editorial on nonferrous mining

Excellent editorial in the current issue of the Ely Timberjay. Check it out here.  The editorial hits the key economic and environmental issues right on the head.

October 11: This week’s terrible environmental bill in the U.S. House

This week, the U.S. House will likely vote on H.R. 2273, a bill that will prohibit the EPA from regulating “coal ash” or coal combustion waste (CCW) as anything other than non-hazardous waste.  Coal ash is a byproduct of coal-fired electricity generation, and, for decades, has been treated as essentially harmless landfill material.  Newer scientific research has shown, however, that coal ash typically contains arsenic, cadmium, hexavalent chromium, lead, mercury and selenium and other substances potentially harmful to human health, often finds its way into drinking water supplies, and therefore needs to be handled much more carefully.  The states have very weak regulations in place—Minnesota is typical that it does not require groundwater monitoring, composite liners, or financial assurance for existing coal ash landfills, and likely will not toughen those standards significantly unless so directed by the EPA.

Earthjustice did a report a couple of months ago describing the coal ash problem in greater detail and highlighting the weakness of existing state regulation. Read it here. Right now, the priority is to keep Congress from taking away the EPA’s authority to take on this serious problem.  This is an every-week request now, but please consider contacting your House member today and asking them to vote against H.R. 2273.

October 10: More Energy Economics
The current issue of the New York Review of Books contains an excellent piece from Prof. William Nordhaus from Yale, reviewing Prof. Michael Graetz’s book, The End of Energy: The Unmaking of America’s Environment, Security and Independence, published earlier this year, and last year’s report from the National Research Council, Hidden Costs of Energy:  Unpriced Consequences of Energy Production.  All of these make the same point that the American Economic Review article in the current issue made—that our present energy production system, and especially coal-fired power plants, impose enormous costs on the American public, mostly health costs, that are not reflected in the price of electricity.  Prof. Nordhaus’s review is here.  Michael Graetz is a tax law professor at Columbia, and his book  makes a strong case for taxation on carbon emissions and other environmental externalities. The NRC study can be found  here.

October 7: Kudos to Walz, McCollum, Ellison on votes against TRAIN Act
Belated congratulations to Reps. Tim Walz, Betty McCollum, and Keith Ellison for their votes against the so-called TRAIN Act on September 23.  The TRAIN Act, which, unsurprisingly, passed the House, would block the EPA’s Mercury and Air Toxics standard and the Cross-State Air Pollution rule, and subject many EPA regulations to a costly and wasteful second level of “review” before they can be enacted.  The White House has strongly signalled a veto, should this pass the Senate.  We know that, in particular, Rep. Walz received a lot of pressure from the rural electrical co-ops who work with the coal industry, but he had the guts to vote to protect the citizens of his district, his state, and his country, and we thank him for that.

October 6: Honest Accounting
Lots of attention (and deservedly so) for an article recently published in the prestigious American Economic Review with the not-so-snappy title “Environmental Accounting for Pollution in the United States Economy.”  The authors were Prof. Nicholas Muller from Middlebury College, and Robert Mendelsohn and William Nordhaus from Yale, all solidly in the mainstream of current economics study.  For decades, most economists have recognized that the way we measure things like gross national product is deeply flawed, because we do not account for environmental externalities, but these guys have done something about it.  They work with a concept called “gross external damages” (GED) from pollution, and apply it to specific U.S. industries, focusing at least initially on air pollution.  Their conclusions are startling:

1. Seven industries have air pollution damages that are clearly larger than their total market value added.  The seven are solid waste combustion, petroleum-fueled electric power generation, sewage treatment, coal-fired electric power generation, stone mining and quarrying, marinas, and petroleum and coal products.
2. In the electric power generation sector, coal-fired plants account for 95 percent of the gross external damages.
3. The gross external damages/value added ratio for coal-fired power plants is 2.20.  That means that, for every dollar of value added by coal-fired electricity generation, more than two dollars of damage is done.
4. That does not include damage from carbon emissions.  Adding in carbon-related damages to GED under their very conservative model increases the number by 30 to 40 percent.
5. 94 % of the damage from coal-fired power plants comes from “increased mortality.”  That means from more people dying sooner.  Most of that is from sulfur dioxide emissions, but some from nitrogen oxide and fine particulates as well.

The authors are careful to point out that they are not calling for the immediate closure of all coal-fired power plants.  They just think that air emissions from those plants should be reduced by 80% or more, and the cost of electricity generated from those plants should reflect external damages.  Couldn’t have said it better myself.

You can read the article on the AER website, although, if you are not a member, they will ask for $9.50 to purchase the article.  If you have a taste for economic equations, air emissions modeling, and mortality/morbidity assessments, I say go for it. You can read Prof. Dan Farber’s account here. 

 

October 5: Global warming and Australia

The current Rolling Stone features a long article on the effects global warming is now having on Australia, to demonstrate what we in North America can expect if we continue down the current path. Read it here.

 

October 4: Welcome to my world

Monday’s New York Times featured a front-page story about a series of e-mails showing a cozy relationship between Trans-Canada, the company that wants to build the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, and the U.S. State Department, which has final say over whether the pipeline can proceed.  Hiring lobbyists with personal relationships with decision-makers, special access for  project proponents, government officials counseling corporations on how to get through the regulatory process, information requests from environmental organizations ignored (or indefinitely deferred), and a general sense that the outcome has long been pre-ordained—these are the circumstances under which many, if not most, big projects with serious environmental consequences get reviewed. Read the article here. 

 

October 3: Need to Know

In case you missed it, Need to Know on PBS was devoted to environmental issues last Friday.  The main story was about toxic releases in Endicott, NY, and the EPA’s inability under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) to do anything about it.  There is also a Ray Suarez interview with Matt Kibbe, who gives us the standard Tea Party position on the EPA.  For what it’s worth, there is also an online poll, showing that 85% of viewers think EPA should issue more regulations, 12% think the EPA should be abolished, and 3% think the EPA should issue fewer regulations.  Jon Meacham also has a short piece pointing out that regulations have improved our lives significantly and should not be abandoned.   I believe “more regulations vs. fewer regulations” is a pretty dumb question, and reflects the sterile debate currently going on in Washington (and St. Paul).  A more relevant question is “what should we do about the problems in Endicott?”  When discussion about the environment gets out of the “jobs vs. environment” or “regulations or not” frames and becomes about how do we solve this very real problem in front of us, the partisan lines come down and we can make real progress. Learn more here.

 

September 30: Controversy over BWCA Fire Management

Dennis Anderson had a nice piece in yesterday’s Star Tribune about the history of the BWCA and the development of modern US Forest Service fire policy in wilderness areas. Greg Breining made the case for the old “suppression” policy

 

in last Sunday’s paper.  In my view, the Pagami Creek fire should be an occasion to fine-tune Forest Service fire policies, but not to abandon the whole concept of “wilderness,” as Breining’s article suggests.

 

 

September 30: Sunday Front-Page Story on Sulfide Mining

Been meaning to link to Josephine Marcotty’s front-page piece on mining from last Sunday’s paper, but half the article was not included on the web page.  Until today.  I thought the story was fair.  The proposed mining projects in Minnesota present a lot of issues beyond acid mine drainage—direct and indirect effects on protected wetlands, damage to critical habitat for endangered species, reliance on electricity generated by coal-fired power plants, and so on.  But the article did a nice job of putting the socioeconomic issues in perspective (we don’t hear as much about the down side from the mining companies and their advocates), and put proper emphasis on the financial assurance question.

September 22: Lisa Jackson on jobs and environment

Here is EPA Administrator's written testimony today. 

Well said.

September 22: Will the White House now hold the line on environmental rollbacks?

Interesting story this morning in The Hill about Lisa Jackson and the EPA after the President’s decision to shelve the tightened ozone (smog) standard the EPA was prepared to announce.

(Read it here.)

It almost seems there are two schools competing at the White House—the William Daley school, which believes the best political strategy now is to accommodate business interests to the extent possible, and what may be the David Plouffe school, which wants to run a Truman-style “give ‘em hell” run against Congress campaign.  If there is a fight for the heart and soul of the 2012 Obama reelection campaign going on, environmental issues appear to be where we’re going to find out which side is prevailing, at least in the next few critical weeks as the 2012 budget bills work their way through Congress.

September 22: Anti-Environment Votes in the U.S. House of Representatives?

Rep. McCollum’s office sent over this list of anti-environment votes taken during this Congress in the U.S. House.

The list is astonishing.

September 20, 2011: More on Pagami Creek Fire

Josephine Marcotty’s article in today’s Star Tribune focuses on how climate change will affect the regrowth of the forest in those parts of the BWCA affected by the fire.

 

Read it here.

September 19, 2011: Update on PolyMet 

PolyMet issued this press release today.  No surprises.

What “Algal Blooms” and “Dead Zones” Really Mean

Nitrogen and phosphorus pollution is the #1 threat to Minnesota’s waters.  When those “nutrients” reach too high a level in surface waters, they promote the growth of blue-green algae, which in turn suck up all the available oxygen, leaving a “dead zone.”  We have been focused here on the Mississippi River, but many of the same problems are now threatening Lake Erie.  The resurrection of Lake Erie from the dead is one of the great environmental success stories, but now the lake appears to be dying again.

This piece does a nice job of explaining the hazards to human health involved, and the role that invasive species like zebra mussels can play.

Pagani Creek fire and “let it burn” policies

Not unexpectedly, some people, including the mayor of Ely, have been harshly critical of the US Forest Service’s policy of letting forest fires burn unless and until they pose a direct threat to private property.  John Myers has a nice piece in the Duluth News Tribune pointing out the benefits of the Forest Service’s policy, citing Lee Frelich, who is an expert in the area.  Forest fires can be a critical part of necessary forest regeneration, and too-aggressive intervention interferes with those natural processes. Read the article here.

Barriers to Progress on Transit

Today’s lead editorial in the Star Tribune focuses on the need to come up with necessary funding to allow two major transit projects to move forward—the Southwest LRT line from downtown Minneapolis out to Eden Prairie and the completed Cedar Avenue bus rapid transit (BRT) system.

Check it out here. One other potential barrier did not get mentioned, and that is the issue whether the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul have complied with their commitments to change their zoning and land use restrictions to promote economic development around the new transit stops.  Part of the reason the Twin Cities have been able to secure federal funding has been the integration of land use changes with transit in new comprehensive plans, but now the question is whether the cities will actually deliver.  If they do not, they may put future federal funding in jeopardy.

Who Needs Congress?

The current issue of Rolling Stone has an article spelling out ten things President Obama can do—must do--for the environment that do not require the cooperation of House Republicans. Read the Rolling Stone article here. 

September 14, 2011: Asian carp and the Dayton Administration

Here is the PowerPoint presentation the DNR presented at the governor’s Asian carp summit earlier this week. The Administration is asking Congress to authorize the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to close the locks at the Ford dam and at Upper St. Anthony Falls if Asian carp species are found nearby.  One of the clear messages from the environment and conservation groups was that any such legislation should have explicit triggers that would compel the Corps to close the locks before the carp reach those stretches of the Mississippi.  The DNR is also seeking funding from the Lessard-Sams Outdoor Heritage Council to build a sonic/bubble barrier at the mouth of the St. Croix River, a technology that has not been tried at that scale in those kinds of circumstances.

September 13, 2011: Pagami Creek Fire in BWCA

MPR has a slideshow of pictures from the Pagami Creek fire in the BWCA near Ely on its web site. See it here. I was in the Ely area on Sunday, and can testify that it was very eerie, while driving between Tower and Ely on Hwy 169, to be listening to coverage of the 9/11 anniversary on the radio, with the huge “mushroom cloud” from the fire right in front of me.

 

September 9, 2011: Protecting the Environment Creates Jobs

CNN did a report last night on the never-ending debate over whether protecting the environment is a “job-killer” or a “job-creator.” The flaw in the business-side argument is always the same:  when companies have to spend money to clean up pollution, they do not just flush it down the toilet.  They spend it on personnel and equipment, equipment that is, in turn, manufactured and distributed by people.  And, in many, maybe most cases, the work that is done at the source to reduce pollution ends up making older plants and facilities more efficient and more competitive in the long run.  This is the “technology-driving” benefit to getting companies to comply with environmental standards, and it has been of enormous value to our overall economic competitiveness.  The political problem is that those who stand to lose something in the short run are the ones who yell the loudest; the public interest in tougher environmental safeguards unfortunately does not have as big a megaphone.

September 6, 2011: More on Ozone Decision

Here is a sampling of articles and blog posts on last Friday's White House decision to shelve the new smog standard until after the election:

Backpedaling on Air Quality from the Legal Planet

Environmentalists Weigh Options from AmericaBlog

When Agencies Want to Get Sued from the Legal Planet

Obama Administration Withdraws Proposed Ozone Standard from Marten Law

September 2, 2011: KeystoneXL Controversy Escalates

Environmental organizations are stepping up their efforts to convince the White House to reject the proposed KeystoneXL pipeline, which would run from the Alberta tar sands all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.  Nearly a thousand protesters have been arrested in front of the White House.  Even the most staid, collaborative groups, who rarely if ever get involved in direct action, are condemning this project in the strongest terms, and openly supporting the civil disobedience efforts on Pennsylvania Avenue. Here’s the letter these groups sent to the President:

Dear President Obama:

Many of the organizations we head do not engage in civil disobedience; some do. Regardless, speaking as individuals, we want to let you know that there is not an inch of daylight between our policy position on the Keystone Pupeline and those of the very civil protesters being arrested daily outside the White House. This is a terrible project-many of the country's leading climate scientists have explained why in their letter last month to you. It risks many of our national treasures to leaks and spills. And it reduces incentives to make the transition to job-creating clean fuels.

You have a clear shot to deny the permit, without any interference from Congress. It's perhaps the biggest climate test you face between now and the election. If you block it, you will trigger a surge of enthusiasm from the green base that supported you so strongly in the last election. We expect nothing less.

Sincerely,

Fred Krupp, Environnmental Defense Fund
Michael Brune, Sierra Club
Frances Beinecke, Natural Resources Defense Council
Phil Radford, Greenpeace
Larry Schweiger, National Wildlife Federation
Erich Pica, Friends of the Earth
Rebecca Tarbotton, Rainforest Action Network
May Boeve, 350.org
Gene Karpinski, League of Conservation Voters
Margie Alt, Environment America
Kevin Knobloch, Union of Concerned Scientists

And, finally, here is the MPR story about the protests.

September 2, 2011: Disaster on Ozone Standard

More Friday bad news. This morning, President Obama announced that he is overruling the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and has ordered that the new ozone air pollution standard be held up indefinitely, at least until 2013.  In my view, this is an indefensible capitulation to the American Petroleum Institute and other business interests on a critical public health issue.  Minnesota has been working on developing new policies to reduce smog and fine particulates, anticipating that the state will fall into “nonattainment” when the new standards become effective.  This should not be a convenient excuse for slowing down that effort.

Here's the news story on the President's announcement. Just a little over a week ago, the EPA told the court that has ordered the EPA to develop a new ozone standard that they would issue it in October. Here is the EPA story.

August 29, 2011: Direct Assault on Environment (and Labor too)

Here is a link to a memo distributed today from House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.), outlining the top 10 “job-killing” regulations the House leadership intends to repeal once Congress gets back from their August recess. http://majorityleader.gov/blog/2011/08/memo-on-upcoming-jobs-agenda.html.   Seven of the ten are environmental standards the EPA has adopted in the last few months, or has announced plans to adopt in the future:  the maximum achievable control technology (MACT) for utilities and the cross-state air pollutions rule (CSAPR), the boiler MACT, the cement MACT, the coal ash rules, and the long-delayed and still not issued rules governing ozone and fine particulates.  Two of the ten are decisions by the revived National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), where I clerked as a young law student 30 years ago, and the last involves the grandfather clause in the health care reform legislation.  Each proposal is supposed to get its own week, starting the week of September 12 and going until they recess again for the holidays.

This really is the worst assault on our environmental protections in decades.  The Senate leadership has declared that these anti-EPA proposals will not pass, but, as we have seen time and time again, there is a shifting group of “dirty Democrats” who cannot be counted on to support strong environmental standards.

This would be a very good time to contact our two senators, and emphasize the importance of keeping these proposals from becoming law.

August 29, 2011: State Department Issues Final Environmental Impact Statement for the Keystone XL Pipeline Project

Funny how bad news usually comes out on Friday.  Last Friday, the U.S. State Department released the final environmental impact statement (FEIS) for the massive Keystone XL pipeline project.  This proposed pipeline would run from the tar sands area in Alberta, Canada to Houston, Texas and is intended to transport at least 380,000 barrels of heavy crude oil per day to refineries on the Gulf Coast.  The extraction of crude oil from the Canadian tar sands is a major greenhouse gas emissions problem.   Even the FEIS, which is clearly written to support the project, acknowledges that, compared to typical domestic sources, tar sands extraction of these amounts of crude oil will add 3 to 21 million extra metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.  That is the same as putting 588,000 to 4,061,000 new passenger vehicles on the road.

The Keystone XL project is a real test of the White House’s commitment to addressing global warming.  My prediction is, unfortunately, that the project will be approved. The argument will be that the tar sands oil is going to be extracted anyway, whether the pipeline is built or not, so there will be no net greenhouse gas effect, and the U.S. needs the oil.   Our addiction to fossil fuels will go on unabated (good grief, Rep. Bachmann is open to drilling in the Everglades now).   I hope I will be surprised.

August 25, 2011: Words Matter

Earlier this week, we highlighted some of the more extreme rhetoric coming out of the current presidential campaign, calling for abolition of the EPA and repeal of most of our environmental protections.  The New York Times today published a debate discussing what would happen if the “kill-the-EPA” people had their way. Read it here.

By the way, it was not a surprise that the Times went to the Competitive Enterprise Institute for the radical right position.  We can always count on the so-called “Competitive Enterprise Institute” to provide what football coaches call “bulletin board material” for MCEA.  Here’s another recent example:

Help Stop Radical "Environmentalists"

Why do they want to kill the essential resources of capitalism and democracy?

It's simple: Capitalism and human progress are the antithesis of radicals' planned enviro-topia because they believe man and all we have achieved is the scourge of earth.

Unfortunately more and more people are being fooled into following the radical enviro-conspirators down this dangerous path. Our crashing stock market, growing unemployment- and Chinese control of essential minerals and economic ascendency are signs of their success.

Don't be fooled - they have a vision for America and it's not one either you or we share.

Let's STOP them now before it's too late.

Take the FIRST STEP right now to STOP the Radical Agenda.

Defend America by standing up and being counted - it'll cost you nothing other than your willingness to join.

Resourceful Earth, a project of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, is ready to kick some green and take the fight to them.

Our sole focus is to free the American resources of capitalism available under our feet that have been held hostage by Radical greens and their compliant EPA.

You know what will destroy the Radical Environmentalist Agenda to destroy our nation? They lose when we can produce cheap gas, affordable electricity from coal, and vast domestic supplies of minerals like copper and rare earths.

The radicals know it! That's why they are so strenuously fighting every plan to drill or mine.

Here's what we will do to fight back:

- Dominate the public debate to show the public the radicals war on coal, oil, and mining is stalling economic growth.

- Expose the corporate cowards, media know-nothings, and Green RINOs. the radicals hide behind. We will call them out by name and judge them by the company they keep.

- Uncover and sever the big greens' funding from foundations, radicals, and foreign sources. 

- Finally we will fight in the trenches and no longer allow them to own the voice of the people in public hearings and the permitting process.

We are prepared to take the fight to them - for you all it takes is for you to join with us as we build this army. Together we will dismantle the green agenda and restore American prosperity.

CEI’s funding, of course, has come from the usual sources:  the Koch Family Foundations, the Scaife foundations, the Olin foundation, ExxonMobil, Philip Morris, Ford, General Motors, Pfizer, Texaco, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers Association, the American Petroleum Institute, and so on.  CEI first came to my attention when the confidential documents produced in Minnesota’s tobacco litigation in the 1990’s showed the extent of the tobacco industry’s involvement with the organization.  More recently, CEI has focused on climate change denial, which involves many of the same PR consultants who have worked with Big Tobacco over the years.

Clearly, we can expect more of this “environmentalists are traitors” messaging.  It would be nice to shrug this kind of stuff off as silly, but CEI and other similar groups have a great deal of influence in Congress and in our state legislature.

August 18, 2011: EPA and the GOP Field  

The same kind of anti-environment, anti-EPA posturing that is driving the raft of bad environment policy riders in the U.S. House has become the norm in the GOP presidential race.  Unfortunately, the White House response is sometimes too defensive.  The positive and accurate message in my view is that environmental protection creates jobs--in the short term, by requiring companies to hire people to ensure compliance, in the longer term by driving new technologies, new ways of conserving energy and natural resources, and new, more efficient business methods.  Nice summary of the unfortunate campaign rhetoric in today’s New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/18/us/politics/18epa.html?_r=1&hp

August 17, 2011: Most Anti-Environment House of Representatives Ever?

Lost in the debate over raising the debt ceiling and the “resolution” that eventually emerged have been the regular appropriations bills that set the terms of next year’s federal budget.  H.R. 2584, the FY 2012 Interior and Environment Appropriations bill, not only slashes funding for the EPA and the department of interior, but it contains 39 anti-environment riders, enough to prompt Rep. Betty McCollum (D-Minn.) to call this, accurately, “the worst assault on clean air and water in history.”  The Agriculture, Energy, and even Homeland Security appropriations bills are almost as bad.  HR 2584 would gut the Endangered Species Act, it would prevent the EPA from regulating carbon pollution from power plants, refineries and other large sources, it would block EPA oversight of mountaintop removal mining, it would stop the EPA’s efforts to regulate toxic coal combustion waste, it would prevent the EPA from defining which “waters” come within the scope of the Clean Water Act, it would exempt US Forest Service forest plan projects from public participation, it would give the timber industry a huge exemption from clean water permit requirements, it would keep the EPA from revising the stormwater discharge regulations and permits, it stops the EPA’s current effort to update the clean air standards for ozone (smog) and fine particulates (soot), it would lift the mining moratorium near the Grand Canyon, it would axe Clean Water Act regulations of pesticide applications directly into waterways, it would stop the EPA’s work on rules to require financial assurance from the hardrock mining industry, and defund EPA programs to enforce the new Mercury and Air Toxics standards and the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule.  This list is not complete, but you get the idea.

This all-out assault on our environmental protections is truly unprecedented.  We of course hope the Senate will insist on dropping these riders; we hope the President will veto any appropriations bill that lands on his desk with these kinds of policy riders attached.  But House members need to hear that this is not why they were elected, and that voters are going to hold them accountable.  We’ll try to keep you posted as this continues to develop.

August 11, 2011: Back from Vacation

And yet the world has not changed.  Check out Josephine Marcotty’s story in today’s Strib, reporting on the latest study documenting the continuing contribution Minnesota and Wisconsin make to the “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico.  http://www.startribune.com/lifestyle/wellness/127495888.html.  Agricultural practices remain the #1 water pollution problem here, and those practices will have to change dramatically if we are going to make serious progress toward cleaning up the Mississippi River.  For more background on this topic, take a look at the material posted about our water quality program.

July 18, 2011: Complete Streets

On vacation.  I spent the weekend in Copenhagen. Bicycle paradise.  Virtually every major street has a bike path separated from the car traffic.  Half the people who work downtown commute by bicycle, including many members of Parliament. One bridge gets an average of 70,000 bike crossings each commute.  And, over 30% of their electricity comes from wind power already.  So don't let anyone tell you things like genuine complete streets or renewable energy cannot happen.  They have already happened here because of enlightened public policy over the past 20 to 30 years.

July 13, 2011: Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch

While we sit here, frustrated, watching positions harden in both our state and federal budget battles, we should not forget that there is still good work going on.  This week, the Center for Law, Energy and the Environment at Berkeley, the Emmett Center on Climate Change and the Environment, and Bank of America released a white paper called All Aboard:  How California Can Increase Investments in Public Transit, http://www.law.berkeley.edu/files/All_Aboard_July_2011.pdf.  Definitely worth a look.  Many of the ideas in the report reflect analysis and proposals MCEA’s Land Use and Transit program has developed over the years, including the concept of using tax-increment financing to support transit-oriented development (“TIF for TOD”).

July 12, 2011: Denial of Reality

One of the common refrains from pundits, lobbyists, and other experienced government-watchers over the past few months has been that what is now happening cannot possibly be happening.  “They’ll get a budget deal done—they always do.” “There is no way the United States will default on its debt obligations.  They’ll raise the debt ceiling—they always do.”  I think this optimism may well be misplaced.  At this point, I would not be shocked if we go all the way through the 2012 election without a genuine state budget in place—that we muddle through with a series of judicial orders, unilateral executive decisions, or limited “lights on” budgets opening up different parts of state government, gradually adding to the 70 to 80% of the state budget that is already continuing without appropriation.  Nor would I be shocked if the debt ceiling is not raised, and the U.S. Treasury is forced to decide which legal obligations the federal government is going to ignore.  Current federal revenues are not sufficient even to  cover Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and defense, so the result of not raising the debt ceiling can only be another huge reduction in purchasing power in the American economy, at precisely the time we need to be doing the opposite.  That, plus the permanent loss of confidence in US securities in global markets will, at minimum, cause a permanent increase in interest rates or, at worst, the possibility of another global financial crisis.  Everyone loses, and the environment will, of course, lose big-time.

In normal times, reasonable people would reach reasonable accommodations.  What is different this time is the willingness and striking ability of too many of our political leaders and too many of our citizens simply to deny reality.  I guess we environmentalists should be used to that; the most common response to our initiatives these days seems to be complete denial that problems like global climate change or water pollution exist.  Deniers are everywhere—“global warming is a hoax,” “agriculture has nothing to do with water quality,” “there is no evidence that tobacco is harmful,” “the debt ceiling doesn’t matter.”  Add to that the judgment of political leaders—Democrats and Republicans alike—that the worse things get, the more likely “we” will win the next election, and you have a recipe for disaster.

F. Scott Fitzgerald (whose namesake theater is next door to MCEA’s building in St. Paul) said “the test of a first-rate intelligence is . . . to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”  Let’s hope some first-rate intellects are hard at work.

July 11, 2011: Jobs and the Economy vs. the Environment

Berkeley law professor Dan Farber (former member of U of M law faculty) put up a couple of posts on Legal Planet last week on the impact of environmental regulation on the economy.  His first post, headed “Some Simple Arithmetic About Environmental Regulation and the Economy,” points out that, even if one accepts the most grandiose estimates of the total cost of compliance with environmental laws, e.g. $280 billion from the Small Business Administration’s Office of Advocacy, they are dwarfed by the current level of corporate profits ($1,659 billion in the third quarter of 2010) and almost all of those environmental compliance costs are counted in GDP anyway, because they involve equipment and labor.  legalplanet.wordpress.com/2011/07/02/some-simple-arithmetic-about-environmental-regulation-and-the-economy/  Professor Farber’s second post, headed “Environmental Regulation as a Jobs Program,” makes the even more critical point that, in today’s economy, environmental compliance forces cash-rich businesses to spend money they would otherwise sit on, in order to hire people who might otherwise be unemployed.  If we abolished existing environmental laws, the immediate result would be layoffs for workers employed in helping industry comply with regulations.  In a recession especially, the assumption that resources and labor used for environmental compliance are being diverted from other productive uses just doesn’t hold up. This commonly held idea that relaxing environmental requirements will somehow create jobs simply has no evidence to support it. Read Farber's blog here.

July 8, 2011: Progress Elsewhere

Time for a positive blog entry.  There is progress being made on the environmental front, just not at the moment in Minnesota.  Yesterday, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) issued revised cap-and-trade regulations to stay on track with its January 2013 implementation date.  The state will set a greenhouse gas emissions cap, which will decline over time, and major emitters—power plants, industrial plants, refineries, transportation fuels—will receive allowances corresponding to the cap which will be tradeable permits.  California’s goal is to reduce its carbon emissions from 474 million tons CO2-equivalent to 427 million tons by 2020, and then to 85 million tons by 2050.  Minnesota has a similar goal, but to date has taken little action to get there.

According to reports this morning, Australia will be going a step further by rolling out a plan to impose a carbon tax, initially on Australia’s 500 largest polluters.  The amount will be around $24 per metric ton of emissions.  See, there are positive ways to solve a budget problem.  Maybe Minnesota can learn something.

July 7, 2011: Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch

With Minnesota’s state government already shut down, and the federal government teetering on the brink of a catastrophic default, we could take some solace if at least Congress wasn’t fouling anything else up.  Well, not so fast.  Right now, a bill called the “Clean Water Cooperative Federalism Act of 2011,” H.R. 2018, is on its way to the House floor, and it would be a disaster if it became law.  Co-sponsored by Rep. Jon Mica (R-NY) and Nick Rahall (D-W.Va.), chairman and ranking member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee (Rep. Oberstar’s old committee), the bill would strip the EPA of its authority to (1) object to state-approved water quality permits under the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES), (2) revise state water quality standards, or (3) veto “dredge and fill” permits issued by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.  In effect, this proposed legislation would return us to the situation we were in back before the Clean Water Act was passed in 1972—every state for itself—a “race to the bottom” that was a colossal failure.

Predictably, the mining industry is leading the charge on this bill.  The EPA’s decision to veto Corps permits on mountaintop removal mining projects in West Virginia was an act of courage we had not seen from EPA for a long time, and this bill is clearly aimed at that.  Here in Minnesota, it is the opportunity to seek EPA review of permits and water quality standards that allows organizations like MCEA to hold our state government accountable; without that federal oversight, our legislature and our state agencies could not be counted on to preserve water quality.  Witness the taconite industry’s effort to roll back the sulfate standard at the legislature this year.  It was likely only the realization that they could not get that past the EPA that prevented that from becoming law.

Please urge your Representatives to vote against HR 2018, if it comes up for a vote.  We have to hope the Senate and the President will be able and willing to block this.

July 5, 2011: Closed state parks

My family spent Fourth of July weekend up on the North Shore.  The construction on Highway 61 up near Split Rock had halted by Friday, with some makeshift pavement put down at what looked like the last minute.  All the parks and rest areas had snow fences and cones up at the entrances, and the road signs either were covered up or had a “Closed” sticker attached.  Folks seemed to be honoring the fences, at least with their cars, but the “no parking” signs on 61 outside the park entrances became the targets of widespread civil disobedience. 

July 2, 2011: Another EPA Concession on Clean Air 

Recently, we have posted several items on delays and other concessions the EPA has been making on clean air regulations.  The latest came out just before the Fourth of July holiday weekend.  On July 1, EPA announced that it was finally granting a sweeping greenhouse gas emission exemption for all biomass fuels.  More precisely, the EPA made two announcements:  first, that it was deferring the CO2 permitting process for burning biomass fuels for at least three years; second, that it was granting biomass fuels a “categorical exemption” from “best available control technology” or “BACT” requirements under the Clean Air Act.

The problem is that “biomass fuels” includes a lot of different things.  Burning whole trees, for example—which many electrical power plants are now doing in the name of “renewable energy”—can be worse than burning coal.  The carbon in the trees gets released into the atmosphere and deforestation causes us to lose one of most important carbon sinks.  The EPA knows that, I think, but they are bending to pressure from the depressed forest products industry.

These decisions probably will be challenged in the courts, but, in the meantime, we are taking a step backward at a time when we need to be making major progress.  Let’s hope this pattern of EPA backsliding on air quality comes to a halt soon.

June 30, 2011: Shutdown

As of Thursday morning, June 30, there is no word of a budget agreement and now, of course, it is too late to avert a government shutdown.  Starting tomorrow, the MPCA will be down to the commissioner and a few folks in moon suits.  That means enforcement of our environmental laws will come to a complete stop.  The EPA may be able to step in if there is an extreme situation, and there are citizen suit provisions in most of the major federal environmental statutes, so perhaps MCEA or others would be able to go to court to address a major violation. Let’s hope we don’t have any situations like that.

For business, the shutdown at MPCA will start to bite quickly.  No permits will be available, and the ones now in the queue will be delayed at least as long as the shutdown goes on.

This is senseless.  Other states with budget problems, even with conservative Republican leadership in both the executive and legislative branches (Ohio, Michigan), have been able to  put budgets together without cutting environmental funding.  Minnesota clearly can do the same.

June 28, 2011: More Delay?

Yesterday's post focused on the delay tactics that are at the center of the electrical power industry’s efforts to weaken the EPA’s proposed Air Toxics rule.  Another current example is the long-anticipated new ground-level ozone (smog) standard.  The current standard—75 parts per billion over an 8-hour period—was adopted during the Bush Administration, and was widely criticized as inadequate to address the very real public health problems created by smog exposure.  A 23-member scientific panel, with representatives from the American Medical Association, the American Lung Association, the American Heart Association, and the American Academy of Pediatrics, recommended that the standard be lowered to 60 ppb (or somewhere pretty close to that), based on their review of some 1700 studies.  EPA estimates that tightening the ozone standard could save 12,000 lives annually and save $100 billion by 2020, and they have promised ozone standard changes for years now.

But, in the last year alone, the ozone standard change has been postponed three times.  EPA now says it is coming in July, but there is a strong possibility that it will be delayed further.  The reason is clear.  It will cost a lot of money to comply with a 60 ppb standard.  Industry will need to install new technology, vehicle inspection programs will come back with a vengeance, and states like Minnesota that are likely to go out of attainment if the standard is tightened will have to develop new state implementation plans to demonstrate how they will get into compliance.  That is a great opportunity to make serious public health gains—every month of delay potentially costs us 2,000 more lives—and I am confident the benefits will exceed the costs, but again, the ones who are likely to bear the costs have a disproportionate influence over the political process and their influence often trumps good science.

June 27, 2011: Justice Delayed, Justice Denied

Last week, on June 21, 2011, the EPA announced that it would be extending the comment period on its new Air Toxics rule for another 30 days. This is the new rule that, for the first time, regulates mercury and other toxic chemical pollution from electrical power plants.   Not very exciting news, perhaps, but it illustrates a chronic problem with environmental law and policy—the problem of delay.  It was the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 that mandated the EPA to control air toxics, but there has been no serious attempt to regulate toxic emissions from power plants in the last 21 years.  Now, finally, the EPA is acting—albeit under court order—but this latest 30-day delay may not be the last one.

House Republicans will introduce legislation in August to delay the Air Toxics rule even longer.  The chairman of the House Energy and Power subcommittee, Rep. Ed Whitfield (R-Ky.), laid out the strategy last week:  "We don't really have expectations that we can repeal all of this, but if we can delay the final rule, delay the compliance period and address whether or not technology is really available, then I think we've accomplished a lot."  We are seeing the same strategy here in Minnesota.  The taconite industry does not want to comply with the sulfate standard for wild rice waters, but they can’t get it repealed.  So, the tactic is delay—using “schedules of compliance” to put off the date when they have to comply in the hope that they can get the standard weakened or eliminated at some later date.  For some politicians, this outcome is heaven-sent.  They can take credit for “holding tough” on the standards, and at the same time tell their business constituents that they have gotten them off the hook.

The decades of delay on the Air Toxics rule have been tragic.  Mercury, the major pollutant at stake here, can harm children’s developing brains, including memory, attention, language, and fine motor and visual spatial skills.  And, as we know so well in Minnesota, mercury—much of it from power plants—pollutes our lakes, streams, and fish as well.  Other air toxics, like arsenic, chromium, and nickel, can cause cancer.  Fine particulate emissions—which will be reduced if the Air Toxics rule goes into effect—causes thousands of premature deaths, and tens of thousands of heart attacks, bronchitis cases, and asthma attacks each year.

The EPA estimates the value of the Air Toxics rule, just in terms of positive health effects, will total $59 to $140 billion in 2016.  That means every dollar the utilities have to spend to reduce pollution from power plants yields $5 to 13 in public health benefits.  But, as so often happens, the concentrated business interests and their high-priced lobbyists get heard; the public interest does not.

June 24, 2011: Agriculture, Sediment, and the “Dead Zone”

One of Minnesota’s most serious water pollution problems is nitrogen and phosphorus-heavy sediment flowing from the Minnesota River into the Mississippi, down to Lake Pepin, and eventually to the Gulf of Mexico, where it contributes to a “dead zone” nearly the size of New Jersey.

The main culprit is modern farming practices.  But, taking a page from Big Tobacco and from climate change “skeptics,” big agribusiness interests remain committed to a “denial” and “doubt” strategy.  Thursday’s Mankato Free Press contained the latest example, with another ag-funded scientist trying to make the case that agriculture is not responsible.   http://mankatofreepress.com/latestnews/x1479020937/Researcher-Ag-gets-bum-rap-on-runoff

As always, there are some true statements here.  Most of the sediment flowing into the Minnesota River’s tributaries is not over-land runoff.  That much is correct.  But that doesn’t take ag off the hook.  What is happening is that a century of aggressive farmland drainage practices—older open drainage ditches and newer drain tile systems—have been increasing the flow rates in these streams and rivers, resulting in speedier erosion of their banks.  As natural vegetation holding these banks in place disappears, the erosion process only accelerates. Ag drainage has changed the hydrology of the whole Minnesota river basin, and we are paying the price.

This erosion is not “natural,” and only a tiny portion of it can fairly be attributed to increased precipitation rates.  The solution is to turn around more than a century of public policy encouraging the movement of as much water as possible off farm land quickly toward policies that encourage farmers to leave water on the land.  Some farmers are already doing it; but the commodity groups are unfortunately still digging in their heels.

For a thorough review of these issues, take a look at MPCA’s recent draft report, http://www.pca.state.mn.us/index.php/view-document.html?gid=15794 Trevor Russell from our friends over at the Friends of the Mississippi River did a nice counterpoint on these questions in the Star Tribune on June 1. http://www.startribune.com/opinion/122906358.html

June 24, 2011: Urban Paradise or Urban Hell?

In this week’s New Yorker, Nicholas Lemann has an interesting review of recent books on cities and urban design, including Richard Florida’s The Great Reset, Edward Glaeser’s Triumph of the City, an unusual book called Aeropolis about an urban future built around airports, and Elijah Anderson’s The Cosmopolitan Canopy.  We environmentalists often get caricatured as being only concerned about critters and trees, and as pining away for some subsistence-based, off-the-grid, granola-dominant ecotopia out in the woods.  But the reality is that the “built environment”—how we organize the space where we work, live, get services, shop, and play—is a priority issue for the environmental movement.  We cannot achieve even basic clean air, clean water goals without improving mass transit, reducing vehicle miles traveled, encouraging compact, mixed-use transit-oriented economic development, and paying close attention to urban design issues.  Lemann’s review is at http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2011/06/27/110627crat_atlarge_lemann.  And then check out http://www.landof.org, an MCEA website that focuses on many of these same questions.

June 20, 2011: Federal Common Law Nuisance Suits to Curb Greenhouse Gas Emissions Blocked by U.S. Supreme Court

Today, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with the power companies and the Obama Administration and held that the big federal common law nuisance suits to curb greenhouse gas emissions, filed by several states and conservation groups, could not proceed.  The 8-0 Court, with an opinion from Justice Ginsburg, found that the regulatory system Congress established under the Clean Air Act precludes the kind of federal common-law claims that were pursued in this case.

This ruling was not unexpected, but still disappointing.  If Congress limits the EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases or even if EPA just wilts under the current pressure, there will effectively be no federal remedy for greenhouse gas emissions at all.  The viability of these federal nuisance suits was, I think, critical to put countervailing pressure on the EPA and Congress to do something serious about global warming, and now that pressure is gone.

Nevertheless, it is important to point out what the Court did NOT say.  First, the Court did not overrule the standing decision it made a few years ago in Massachusetts v. EPA, so states can remain key players in future litigation over greenhouse gas and other environmental issues.  The decision on that was 4-4, with Justice Sotomayor not participating and with most analysts believing she would have upheld the lower court’s standing ruling.  Second, the Court did not hold that the Clean Air Act preempted state-law nuisance or other suits, and sent that issue back to the lower court for further consideration.  That is critical in Minnesota, because our Minnesota Environmental Rights Act permits suits to prevent pollution, impairment, or destruction of our natural resources, whether or not there is a state or local regulatory program in place.  MERA is a core Minnesota environmental safeguard, so we will continue to watch that issue closely.

For more information, visit: http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/10pdf/10-174.pdf

June 16, 2011: Dayton Shutdown Plan

Finished reading the briefs filed by both the governor and the AG.  Both recognize that the state constitution explicitly prohibits spending state money without appropriation, and they struggle a bit to find federal or other state constitutional authority to continue "core" or "critical" functions.  I think the governor's argument is more consistent with the constitutional design because it does not propose effectively transferring legislative and executive authority to a quasi-judicial informal litigation process.  I don't see a legal basis for a "special master" (as in 2005), nor, frankly, do I see any legal basis for the court to order this kind of mediation.

Legal issues aside, the potential impact of the shutdown on the environment could be quite severe.  Under the governor's plan, the MPCA will be down to 13 employees, which comes down to the commissioner and some guys in moon suits to handle emergency response.  So, no permits, no enforcement, apparently at all.  BWSR closes altogether.  DNR's uniformed conservation officers will remain, and they'll keep running the hatcheries, but again, no permits, no civil enforcement, no state parks, no licenses. We're going to feel this one.

June 15, 2011: Ray of Hope

Yesterday’s Environment & Energy Daily reported that former Rep. Bob Inglis (R-S.C.) is launching a new conservative coalition made up of Republicans who believe human emissions are triggering global warming and that steps should be taken to stop it.  Rep. Inglis’s comments were on target, in my view.  As he put it, “[c]onservatives typically are people who try to be cognizant of risk and move to minimize risk.  To be told of risk and to consciously decide to disregard it seems to be the opposite of conservative.”  Inglis said that what he hoped to do was to be part of an effort “that calls conservatives to return to conservatism and to turn away from the populist rejection of science.”

I am sure Rep. Inglis and I would disagree on solutions, but at least his approach would allow policymakers to engage in an informed discussion.  Let’s hope some Minnesota conservatives pick up the banner.

June 14, 2011:  Natural Capital Project

Tuesday evening, the Freshwater Society sponsored a talk by Gretchen Daily and a panel discussion including Steve Polasky from the U of M focusing on the Natural Capital Project. The Natural Capital Project is an effort to bring “the goods and services from nature that are essential to human life” into traditional economic analysis. For generations, economists have acknowledged that the ways we account for economic growth and make economic decisions have been skewed by the inability or unwillingness to include environmental values in the analysis. They are using a new set of tools called “InVEST,” which means “Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs,” which is already helping to make the case for investments in pollution prevention and abatement, for acquisition of public land, and for preservation of natural spaces.

This is very important work, and Minnesota’s government would do well to incorporate these principles into its policy analysis and decision-making.  Visit  http://www.naturalcapitalproject.org for more information.  The team’s new book, Natural Capital:  Theory and Practice of Mapping Ecosystem Services is referenced on their site and is available on Amazon.