There was a lot of talk at Mount Vernon on Tuesday about "a new day" dawning in the long struggle to restore Chesapeake Bay, with President Obama declaring the bay a national treasure and states agreeing to short-term pollution reduction plans, aka "milestones."  Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine, head of the bay Executive Council (pictured at right), called it a "turning point," though he acknowledged there was still a lot of work to do.  The cleanup effort now is being ramped up and is going to be much more accountable, we were told. 

But take a look at those milestones, at least the two-page summaries handed out to the press and now posted online.  They skimp on key details, especially on what the backup plans are in case those measures fall short, and on what the consequences will be if the states blow these new milestones.  We'll have to wait for those information gaps to be filled, we were told.

Next, look at the graphs showing how much nitrogen and phosphorus pollution each state promises to eliminate.  The graphs start at several million or tens of millions of pounds. not at zero.  Had the graphs had a scale that showed how far pollution ultimately has to be reduced by the "end date" of 2025, the divergence between past reductions and future promises would have looked a lot smaller.

Then there's the case of the mysterious missing information on a few of the states' milestone statements. The two-page outlines of cleanup efforts for the entire six-state bay region and for Maryland, Pennsylvania and Virginia showed graphs with two diverging lines, depicting pollution reductions already in progress and even greater efforts those states were committing to make by 2011.  The graphs projected accelerations of cleanup ranging from 52 to 502 percent. 

But the summaries handed out Tuesday for Delaware, the District of Columbia, New York and West Virginia showed only one line on their graphs.  Each graph depicted the pollution reductions that were being pledged through 2011.   Missing was any line projecting the rate at which pollution would go down based on efforts already under way.

Drafts of the milestone documents circulated only a few days before Tuesday's summit did show current and future rates of cleanup.  The District, New York and West Virginia all were shown  making less progress in the next few years than they had been making up to now.  That's right - negative progress. For New York, the drafts showed a 15 percent backslide on the rate of nitrogen reductions, and for West Virginia a 61 percent slippage in nitrogen and a 45 percent decline in phosphorus removal rates. 

The graph lines and calculations showing negative progress were missing from the final milestone documents handed out Tuesday at Mount Vernon.  What would George Washington think?

Continue reading "Uh, about those milestones ...." »

Posted by Tim Wheeler at 2:36 PM in Politics, legislation, water quality | Permalink | Comments (1)
                       

The growing prospect that there may be federal action on climate change apparently has spawned a wave of lobbyists in Washington.  The Center for Public Integrity reports that in the past year, as climate legislation finally came to a vote on Capitol Hill, more than 770 companies and interest groups hired an estimated 2,340 lobbyists to influence federal policy.

That's a lot of buttonholing - as the center noted, that comes to more than four lobbyists for every member of Congress.  Environmental advocacy groups have ramped up their Washington presence, but so have all the industries that see themselve being affected.  The center's put together an analysis of the lobbying corps, profiled some of the more prominent ones and provides a listing. Check it out here.

Advocates of curbing greenhouse gases have argued that the push will generate "green" jobs and actually boost rather than kill the economy, as skeptics contend.  Looks like the job growth is already happening, though maybe not the kind of jobs environmentalists had in mind, and certainly not the kind of green they were thinking of.

(Photo by Brendan Hoffman, Getty Images)

Posted by Tim Wheeler at 6:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                       

Environmental advocates from all over Maryland met yesterday evening in Annapolis to lobby their lawmakers for state action to fight global warming and a bevy of other green bills coming up, but their loudest cheers were for the arrival in Washington of an avowedly green-leaning national Obama administration. 

Chesapeake Bay Foundation President William Baker roused the overflow crowd in the Senate office building by noting, "Hey, we've got a new President!"  Just yesterday, Obama ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to reconsider letting Maryland, California and about a dozen other states require automakers to produce more fuel-efficent cars than they have to now under federal law.  The Bush administration had blocked the states' efforts to curb climate-warming tailpipe emissions.

The audience for the annual legislative lobbying event also voiced its appreciation for Gov. Martin O'Malley for renewing the push for greenhouse gas reductions in Maryland, and it whooped support for a never-say-die bid to halt construction of the hated Inter-County Connector highway in the Washington surburbs.

In between, the group heard pitches for legislation to enhance citizens' rights to sue polluters, to safeguard poor minority communities from pollution and to change suburban sprawl into "smart and fair" growth.  

But they also got a sobering warning that because of the state's severe budget crisis, no environmental program is safe from cuts - not even the ones the governor has pledged so far to spare.   Even the climate bill, despite its improved prospects after winning over business and labor opponents from last year, may face resistance, the activists were cautioned before they headed out to buttonhole their elected representatives.

Among the speakers at the annual lobbying event were Attorney General Doug Gansler, House Speaker Michael E. Busch, other key lawmakers, the state's environment secretary and leading activists. 

But the hit of the summit was its keynoter, the Right Rev. Eugene Taylor Sutton, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland.  Installed last year, he is the first African-American to hold that religious leadership position in the state, but he says he also wants to to be seen as a "green" bishop.

"Ultimately, it's not about the color of our skin. It's about what we are about; it's about what we do," Bishop Sutton told the crowd.

Environmental protection is a spiritual issue, he said, saying it's impossible for Christians to follow the Golden Rule without caring about the environmental impact on others of their own consumption and wasteful habits.  And he suggested that the widespread threats to humanity from drought, diseases and storms that might be caused by global warming overshadow even the more immediate fears about terrorism.

"The biggest terrorist issue we have today is environmental degradation," Bishop Sutton said.

For more on the environmentalists' agenda in this session of the General Assembly, check out a rundown at the Web site of the Maryland League of Conservation Voters.

Posted by Tim Wheeler at 10:33 AM in Politics | Permalink | Comments (1)
                       

Environmentalists, who spent much of the past eight years shunned by - or shunning - the Bush administration, are celebrating the inauguration of Barack Obama in a big way.

Tonight, the president-elect and his running mate and their wives will be feted at the "2009 Green Inaugural Ball," with former Vice President Al Gore as the honorary chair and music provided by  will.i.am, Melissa Etheridge, Maroon 5, John Legend and Michael Franti.

The black-tie event, cosponsored by a host of environmental groups, will be at the Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture, part of the Smithsonian Institution museum complex in Washington.  It bills itself as a celebration of a "new green economy" built around development of clean and renewable energy and environmental restoration, among other things.

Naturally, the organizers are pledging to make this "the greenest inaugural ball possible," with local, organic and seasonal food, recycled paper and carbon offsets meant to neutralize the energy expended by throwing and attending this bash (or at least to salve the consciences of the partiers.)

Don't even think about joining those green festivities, though.  The tickets sold out back in December.  For those shut out of that affair, or who couldn't celebrate enough the election of a green-talking president, there was "The GREEN Inaugural Ball" on Saturday night in Washington.  That more down-home shindig cost $500 a head, or $1000 for VIPs, and featured just one headliner music act, Wyclef Jean.

Posted by Tim Wheeler at 3:33 PM in Politics | Permalink | Comments (0)
                       

Carol Browner is back!  The former Environmental Protection Agency chief and Maryland resident has been tapped by President-elect Barack Obama to be his climate "czar."  She's pictured above, third from left, in the Associated Press photo of Obama's press conference in Chicago. 

Head of EPA from 1993 to 2001, Browner has the distinction of being the longest serving administrator in the agency's at-times turbulent history.  (Remember Anne Gorsuch Burford and Rita Lavelle?)  Browner's also close to former Vice President Al Gore, the Nobel-winning advocate for urgent action on climate change.  She worked as an aide to Gore when he represented Tennessee in the Senate.

Since leaving government, Browner - a resident of Takoma Park - has been a principal of the Albright Group, a Washington consulting outfit formed by former Clinton Secretary of State Madeline Albright.  Browner headed up Obama's energy and environment transition team.  She also leads the board of the National Audubon Society. 

It's not clear just how the White House council on energy and climate that she'll head will work with the long-established Council on Environmental Quality.    She'll also have to work with a high- powered Energy Secretary - Nobel-winning physicist Steven Chu (at right in photo), who now runs the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.  Chu's apparently an outspoken advocate for energy conservation and renewables, having called coal is "worst nightmare," according to the Wall Street Journal's Environmental Capital blog.  So she should have an ally there.

Many wasted no time in praising her selection, though.  Environmental groups inside and outside the DC Beltway, issued laudatory statments.  So did the outgoing CEO of Wal-Mart, the mega-retailer that has charted a greener path in recent years. 

Browner had a reputation while at EPA of forging compromises with the industries her agency was supposed to regulate, but there still were plenty of legal and political battles, particularly over controlling air pollution.  Conservatives and some other business leaders may not be as thrilled by her return to government.

She also brings baggage of another sort - her husband, former New York congressman Tom Downey, is a lobbyist whose firm has clients with energy interests.  Obama has laid down a hard line against lobbyist ties in his administration; a transition spokesperson was quoted in the New York Times saying that appointees will have to recuse themselves from issues involving spouses, and spouses will be barred from lobbying relevant agencies.

Rounding out Obama's green team, he announced Lisa Jackson, (next to Obama in photo) former New Jersey environmental regulator, as his choice to run EPA.  Jackson, who would be the first African-American to head the agency, is chief of staff to New Jersey Gov. John Corzine.  But the Princeton educated chemical engineer has a resume that includes stints at EPA and in New Jersey's environmental agency before being tapped to run it two years ago.  She's worked there to reduce the state's greenhouse gases.

The Chesapeake Bay Foundation issued a statement shortly after her selection was announced, with CBF President Will Baker quoted saying that her extensive state and federal experience "should position her well for cleaning up the nation’s pollution problems, and the Chesapeake Bay."  CBF has threatened to sue EPA for not pushing the bay cleanup more aggressively.

Some environmentalists in New Jersey are not that thrilled with Jackson, either.  A Pro Publica story story jointly published by Politico outlines how critics thought she had been "too close to industry, withheld information from the public—and fallen well short of the pledge she made when taking office in February 2006 to fix the state’s beleaguered toxic waste program."  Others, though, said she was overruled by the governor on some of the issues for which she's now being faulted, according to this Associated Press story in Forbes.com

Posted by Tim Wheeler at 7:29 PM in Politics | Permalink | Comments (1)
                       

Some things apparently don't get better with age.  On the eve of the 25th anniversary of the launch of the Chesapeake Bay restoration effort, a group of scientists, "policy wonks" and activists warned that the bay is getting worse, not better, and needs a new, more aggressive commitment to cleaning it up.  I wrote a story about it in The Baltimore Sun.

Members of the group gathered at a restaurant in Annapolis yesterday to release their statement calling restoration efforts to date insufficient and failing to achieve improvements in water quality and in populations of oysters, crabs and fish.

The problem, the group said, is that the largely voluntary, collaborative approach that state and federal leaders have taken to restoring the bay has failed to make headway against the tide of development and population growth in the bay region.  The result, said the scientists in the group, has been worsening water quality in the bay and much of its rivers. 

The effort, launched amid a surge of popular concern for the bay in December 1983, has struggled in the decades since.  Governors of Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania and the Environmental Protection Agency agreed in 1987 to reduce nutrient pollution fouling the bay 40 percent by 2000, only to miss that goal.  They gave themselves another decade to hit their target, but now acknowledge they still won't even be close by the 2010 deadline. 

If these criticisms of the bay cleanup sound familiar, they should.  Earlier this fall, Rona Kobell and I reported in The Baltimore Sun on the bay restoration's struggles. (Part1 & Part2.) Pamela Wood of the Annapolis Capital contributed another good analysis on Sunday. You can read it here.)

"What kind of a legacy are we leaving?" asked Gerald Winegrad, a former Anne Arundel County legislator and activist who called the group together last week to hammer out its position statement.  "How bad does it have to get before we stop the politics of postponement?"

Howard Ernst, associate professor of political science at the Naval Academy and author of Chesapeake Bay Blues, a critical look at the bay restoration, suggested that the bay partnership -once touted as an international model of ecosystem rehabilitation - has proven inadequate to the task and needs to be discarded in favor of a mandatory, enforceable regimen.

"The light-green approach to regional environmental management has left the area with nonbinding agreements instead of enforceable laws, goals instead of pollution limits, an environmental bureaucracy that lacks enforcement powers and a severely impaired ecosystem that shows no sign of systemic improvement," he said. 

Ernst said he'd like to do away with the Chesapeake Executive Council, the rotating cast of state and local elected officials and EPA administrator who set goals and deadlines for the restoration effort, and replace it with a bay restoration authority set up by Congress, with legal clout to set enforceable targets and impose penalties for failure to comply.

Others in the group, though, were not willing to go beyond a more general statement that the restoration needs mandatory, enforcable measures.

Continue reading "The bay cleanup's rocky silver anniversary" »

Posted by Tim Wheeler at 6:00 AM in Politics | Permalink | Comments (0)
                       

Whether such issues were uppermost in their minds or not, voters yesterday gave a boost to the Chesapeake Bay, and to environmental protection in general, it would seem.

Democratic president-elect Barack Obama ran on a pledge to tackle the threat of climate change, and in his victory speech last night in Chicago's Grant Park (pictured above) he listed "a planet in peril" right after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as he ticked off the greatest challenges facing the nation.  He's called for reducing climate-warming emissions of carbon 80 percent by 2050, using a cap-and-trade regulatory scheme and an infusion of $150 billion in government investment in renewable energy, efficiency and other green technology.

The party platform Obama ran on also calls for a "comprehensive solution" to restoring national treasures such as the Chesapeake Bay.  As Obama campaign aide David Bancroft wrote in an op-ed in the Baltimore Sun earlier this fall, the Democratic policy statement also pledges to step up enforcement of environmental laws and increases in federal incentives (aka funding) for reducing nutrient and sediment pollution - two of the bay's biggest nemeses. 

It's anybody's guess at this point, but would an Obama administration be more likely to settle the recently filed lawsuit by the Chesapeake Bay Foundation over the lack of federal push on bay cleanup?

How much an Obama administration will be able to do about environmnental problems depends in part on factors beyond its control.  Federal spending is likely to be limited by the flagging national economy, and by the massive debt burden the government has taken on to bail out the financial markets.

Apparently, though, the president-elect will have a somewhat "greener" Congress to work with.  Environment News Services reports that seven of the "dirty dozen" lawmakers targeted by the League of Conservation Voters lost their election bids yesterday.  Though some races are still too close to call, it appears that most of the candidates the league endorsed won.  Here's the rundown.

For another perspective, a Web outfit called enviroVOTE reports that 142 out of 271 winners in yesterday's races were endorsed by environmental groups.  That's about a 14 percent increase in what it calls "eco-friendly" officeholders over the last election. 

I can't vouch for all their tallies, but in Maryland, where they say greenies won six out of six elections, the 1st District congressional duel between Democrat Frank Kratovil and Republican Andy Harris is so close (Kratovil had an edge of less than 1,000 votes, out of more than 300,000 ballots cast) the final outcome depends on absentee ballots, or even a recount.  So that one deserves an asterisk, at least for now.  And this race is to replace arguably one of the greener Republican incumbents in Congress, Rep. Wayne T. Gilchrest, so if Kratovil does secure the win it may be a wash in the larger picture.

Yesterday's election was far from a green sweep, though.  Sen. James Inhofe, Republican incumbent from Oklahoma, a vocal skeptic and critic of global warming science, won reelection. So did Republican Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska, over an environmentalist-endorsed challenger. 

In other election news, Pennsylvania voters approved borrowing $400 million to upgrade and repair water and sewer systems, helping to fix up sewage plants along the Susquehanna River that have been pumping excess nutrients into the Chesapeake Bay.  Communities under the gun to upgrade their plants had been balking at the costs.

(Chicago Tribune photo)

Posted by Tim Wheeler at 12:17 PM in Politics | Permalink | Comments (0)
                       

Here's one issue that seems to draw bipartisan support, even in an election year - saving disappearing songbirds. 

A small but bipartisan band of senators, led by Maryland Democrat Ben Cardin, have introduced a bill to boost federal funding to study neotropical migratory birds and protect their habitat.  Maryland Rep. Wayne Gilchrest, a Republican (and lame duck, pardon the expression), has joined with members of both parties in the House to push a similar bill.

 About 127 species of migratory birds have been declining for some time, according to the American Bird Conservancy.  Sixty species have shrunk by more than 45 percent over the last 40 years.  Some, like the Cerulean Warbler (pictured above) and Olive-sided Flycatcher, are down by up to 70 percent since the 1960s, the group says.

Cardin said the issue should be of special concern to Marylanders, according to a news release from the bird conservancy.  "Maryland's natural treasure, our environment, is a lure for millions of human tourists and avian visitors each year,'' he said, and federal funding has been vital to helping the birds - and, by extension, the economy.

Cardin's bill would increase the authorized funding for bird conservation projects from $6 million a year to $20 million by 2015.  That may seem to some like, well, chicken feed, but the federal funds would be matched with money from other sources to finance more projects.

(Photo by Barth Schorre, courtesy American Bird Conservancy)

Posted by Tim Wheeler at 5:46 PM in Politics | Permalink | Comments (0)
                       

  For those who try to read the tea leaves at political conventions, the Chesapeake Bay gets a rare boost in the Democratic party platform being presented today in Denver.  

"We support a comprehensive solution for restoring our national treasures - such as the Great Lakes, Everglades and Chesapeake Bay - including expanded scientific research and protections for species and habitats there," the draft platform reads. 

Whether that means an Obama administration would give a big federal boost to bay restoration remains to be seen.  But it's been quite a while, apparently, since our dear bay merited mention in the laundry list of positions on which Democratic candidates have campaigned for the White House. 

Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, to be formally handed the party's nomination later this week, has long been an advocate of cleaning up the Great Lakes.  The environmental policy statement on his campaign Web site has an entire section devoted to the lakes.  Apparently lobbying from inside and outside of Obama's campaign persuaded party leaders to add the Chesapeake and the Everglades to the plank vowing to work to restore the nation's waters.

One insider plugging for the bay was David Bancroft, former president of the Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay, a Baltimore-based regional nonprofit working to restore the bay. He's now an environmental adviser to the Obama campaign.  Before his stint at the alliance, Bancroft had worked for the Great Lakes Governors Council.

Bancroft wrote in an email that party officials from Maryland and Virginia also pushed for some mention of the Chesapeake, as did several speakers during the nationwide round of public meetings the party had to solicit ideas for its platform.   It probably didn't hurt, either, that Maryland's lieutenant governor, Anthony Brown, was tapped to help write the platform.

It may well be the first time the party's platform has specifically pledged to fight to restore the Chesapeake.  I could not find any such mentions in platform statements going back into the 1960s.

It's not clear if the Republican party will match the Dems in vowing fealty to the Chesapeake.  The GOP's platform apparently is still being drafted.  Arizona Sen. John McCain, that party's presumptive nominee, mentions Gettysburg, the Grand Canyon and the Everglades among the "national treasures" he pledges to preserve.

Continue reading "Obama & the Chesapeake" »

Posted by Tim Wheeler at 1:50 PM in Politics | Permalink | Comments (3)