Because the Obama administration's recent initiative on the Chesapeake Bay appears to have gone unnoticed in this community, and has been woefully under-reported in the MSM, I thought I would review the recent events, try to briefly place them in the history of our stewardship of this national resource and set the stage to follow the future developments that, with some fanfare, have been promised.
Is there reason to hope that anything better will come of the Obama administration's organizational changes? Or will the dead areas of the Chesapeake continue to expand, until the sharply diminished, but still significant remaining economic and recreational benefits of this once-magnificent estuary are completely extinguished? For those who care specifically about the state of the Chesapeake, or who are more generally concerned about the health of the nation's water, the success of the recent Obama initiative is crucial. Please follow below the fold to take fuller stock of the current situation, so that we can perhaps begin to consider how we might, in the future, have an impact on the course of events impacting the Chesapeake Bay.
No regular reader of the diaries on environmental topics that appear here will be surprised to hear that there has been little good news about the health of the Chesapeake Bay for many years. Moreover, the little good news that did appear from time to time was almost always later shown to be false once better data had been accumulated and digested.
Prior administrations since Reagan's have entrusted administration and enforcement of the primary federal statutory provision, the Clean Water Act of 1972, to an interstate coalition consisting of Virginia, Maryland, the District of Columbia and Pennsylvania, the states containing most of the Bay's watershed area. This was a voluntary and collaborative experiment in environmental management. Loose coordination of their efforts was provided by a working group, the Chesapeake Bay Program, within the Environmental Protection Agency. This "system" of oversight was entirely consistent with the "deregulatory" thrust of the Reagan era. This model was emulated around the country for other waterways such as the Great Lakes and the Gulf of Mexico, even though it never worked and its few claimed successes were often found to be based on erroneous or falsified data.
Like many other artifacts of the era of deregulation, the management of the environmental quality of the Chesapeake failed and, under the Obama administration, is now in the process of being replaced. Not just revamped or modified or upgraded -- replaced with something very different from what we have had in the past. On May 12, 2009, President Obama signed an Executive Order, directing the federal government to take ownership of the effort to clean up the Bay. His EPA Administrator, Lisa P. Jackson, accepted this new responsibility and promised that a compliance and enforcement strategy would be negotiated with the states and put in place within weeks.
The nature of the prior "regulatory" regime was succinctly captured in a Tom Toles cartoon which appeared in WaPo on May 18, 2009. I won't reproduce it, since I don't know if that would violate copyright laws or other applicable rules (if someone can enlighten me and alleviate my concern, I'll update and add it), but for those who can't link to the cartoon, it can be easily described: 4 figures, representing the 4 Chesapeake jurisdictions, are thrashing about, near drowning, in the waters of the Chesapeake; parked on the shore is a bus with the legend "EPA: sync. swim coach."
To say that the efforts of the coalition of states over the past 25 years have been an abject failure would be charitable. To say that this has long been apparent to everyone would be stating the obvious. And of course, the MSM in the region, principally WaPo (and, prior to its decline to life-support status, the Baltimore Sun), has been deficient in its coverage of environmental issues affecting the area, including everything from the near-extinction of the native Chesapeake Bay oyster to the decimated mountaintops of West Virginia.
After its establishment in 1983, the coalition proceeded by setting goals that were to be achieved by 2010, thus effectively deferring to a then far-distant day any serious consideration of what would be done if the goals were not met. That day of reckoning has now come and gone. Long after it became clear to anyone who cared to look into the matter that the goals would not be met, the states failed to act, and failed to fund the steps they had previously agreed to take. Likewise, the federal EPA, the agency with actual responsibility for cleaning up polluted waterways under the Clean Water Act, failed to step in or do anything to enforce the states' agreements.
A complete history of these failures is, perhaps, pointless. For present purposes, it suffices to note that the most recent effort on the states' part to get a grip on the problems of the Bay was known as "Chesapeake 2000." In that agreement, the states proposed to cut the amount of major pollutants entering the Bay nearly in half over a decade, by 2010. Thus, state leaders once again resorted to the tried-and-true, setting ten-year goals with commitments that came due long after those leaders expected to be gone.
Halfway into "Chesapeake 2000," however, it had become clear that there was no chance the goals would be met. Senators Mikulski and Sarbanes of Maryland and Warner of Virginia commissioned a GAO study of the mess. WaPo reported with respect to the subsequently issued GAO Report:
The government agency leading the cleanup of the Chesapeake Bay has consistently overstated its progress while minimizing threats to the bay and its own failures to address them, according to a federal oversight report released yesterday.
A Government Accountability Office review found that the Chesapeake Bay Program Office -- an arm of the Environmental Protection Agency -- has no coordinated, comprehensive plan for cutting pollution in the bay, even after nearly $6 billion in state and federal money has been devoted to the effort in the past decade.
The office also does a poor job informing the public of its work, the GAO report concludes, and its annual State of the Chesapeake Bay report "is neither an effective reporting tool nor does it provide credible information on the bay's current health status."
Even worse, the GAO found that the Bush administration's EPA had lied about the status of the ongoing cleanup efforts. Among other things, the EPA had reported a 40% decline in major pollutants from the Bay's major tributaries since 1985, although the results of actual monitoring in the field showed no such improvement. Apparently, the EPA obtained its reported data by mixing monitoring data with projections from computerized models, which were meant merely as predictions. As reported by WaPo at the time:
That flaw, combined with a lack of independence in the Bay Program's reporting process, has led to "negative trends being downplayed and a rosier picture of the bay's health being reported," the report says.
Though the office has more than 100 indicators for measuring bay restoration progress and guiding decisions to improve it, "the Bay Program lacks an integrated approach that would allow it to collectively determine what the individual measures mean for the overall health of the bay," according to the report. [snip]
The report recommends that the office improve and revamp its assessment and reporting approaches and develop a "comprehensive, coordinated implementation strategy" that is achievable, given the program's limited funding. It also suggests that the office's reports undergo independent review to verify their accuracy and clarity.
A spokesman for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, an environmental advocacy organization, noted that the problems of the Bay were well-defined, and that "we have the science and the solutions. All we need is the implementation and the dollars." However, although the EPA's Chesapeake Bay Program manager expressed "general agreement" with the GAO Report's conclusions (although it resisted the Report's call for ongoing independent review of its processes), there were no new initiatives during the final years of the Bush administration to correct these problems. Indeed, the situation was made worse by such things as cuts in funding for key Bay cleanup programs and proposals for sewage treatment plant upgrades.
Eight years ago, a newcomer to the Chesapeake Bay area, Howard Ernst, took a fresh look at the problems of the Bay. The major conclusion of his book on the subject, "Chesapeake Bay Blues," was that it wasn't pollutants that was killing the Bay, but politics. Something of a shock when he first announced this conclusion, it is well accepted today.
Accordingly, the Obama administration has chosen to deploy a political solution to the problem of pollution in the Chesapeake. His decision provided a merciful coup de grace to the states' coalition, which would otherwise have been forced into the embarrassment of a public admission that "Chesapeake 2000" had been a total failure and that the cleanup goals were, once again, being pushed into the future and probably lowered as well.
However, their relief may be very temporary. In theory, at least, the EPA, the new sheriff in town, has now been positioned to mandate more stringent goals than the politically sensitive state officials could ever accept -- even though what they could accept was in itself far beyond their ability to achieve. Moreover, the EPA not only has rulemaking power, it has the power to enforce its rules against the states, as well as private entities and even individual residents within the Chesapeake watershed. Obama directed the agency to set milestone two-year goals, rather than ten-year (or longer) goals, in order to make current officials more responsible for their obligations under the EPA regulations. These federal mandates will, undoubtedly, require the expenditure of state and private resources, and that inevitably leads to fiction.
Apparently in anticipation of this overhanging threat, Governors Kaine and O'Malley took the occasion of Obama's announcement to put forth their proposed goals for nitrogen and phosphorus reduction over the next two years. Their proposals, which were much lower than the goals set by the "Chesapeake 2000" program for achievment in 2010, were immediately denounced by the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, and Governor Kaine himself acknowledged that higher goals may in fact be mandated by the EPA.
Whether the Obama administration's theory for producing a cleaner Bay works out in practice, of course, remains to be seen. I am encouraged enough to want to track future events in this area and form my own judgment. I encourage others to do the same, and to bring their thoughts to the table. The topic is a large one, and there are many points of view that should be presented and discussed. I know I cannot do justice to all who have an interest in the Bay. But I'll try to make a start. In addition, the Obama administration has announced other major initiatives with respect to major waterways, including Puget Sound and the Great Lakes. Perhaps others with a particular interest in these or other waterways would be interested in tracking developments in these areas for the Kos community.