Category Archives: water

09.01.17
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A Brief Follow-Up on Houston, City Planning, And Over-Reactions

 

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Wetlands are pretty, but they wouldn’t have saved Houston. (They’re still good though!)

 

In the post below, I wrote “There might be some doubt if this particular tropical storm was a direct result of climate change, but there is no doubt that it was made worse by the simple fact that we have completely altered the way water drains itself, which is to say: it no longer does. It relies on our pavement floodplains, our sewers, our channels. And when those aren’t enough, as we know, water never slinks off.”

Charles Mahron and Daniel Herriges at Strong Towns think I am being unfair.

OK, they don’t think I’m being unfair. Neither of them have read my piece, and indeed wrote their articles before mine. I probably shouldn’t take it personally. But they both think that narrative- Houston overdeveloped, paved over wetlands, and is paying the price- is unfair. And that’s worth listening to.

They have a very good point. In their articles, they go into how Houston isn’t particularly less-regulated than other cities (though in a way it is) and how it is weird to say that “they shouldn’t keep developing”, as if development wasn’t a reaction to the desire of people to live there. (Essentially, if you took that to its logical conclusion, cities should shut people out once they reached a point, and the people shut out would most likely be poor).

But, more broadly, they point out that Harvey would have obviously overwhelmed the most porous city in the world.

As Mahron says:

he Texas A&M research I highlighted above suggests reckless wetland filling robbed Houston of 4 billion gallons of stormwater storage capacity. For context, the Washington Post is reporting now that Harvey dumped 19 trillion gallons on the Houston area. That means that, had those wetlands never been filled, they could have accommodated 0.02% of the water that fell in Harvey. I tried to plot this up in some type of graphic representation, but at no scale could I get the wetland capacity to even show up, it’s so insignificant.

That’s very true. It isn’t Houston’s “fault” that they got flooded. Harvey would have destroyed anywhere, and if my article implied that better city planning would have saved Houston, I take it back.

But the broader point is still true: our choices, all of them, helped create catastrophe, both isolated ones like Harvey and civilizational ones like climate change. And all the little disasters in Harvey, each individual explosion and each chemical leak, is the result of decisions made as to how we arrange our society and technology.

(And the point isn’t that wetlands are bad. You should still have them. Not every storm is Harvey (for now!), and a lot of flooding can be prevented.)

Both articles are very learned, well-reasoned, and worth reading, providing nuance to the story. I worry that there is a little too much “now is no time to be talking about this”. It’s the same argument about “politicizing” tragedy that lets us avoid making hard choices about how we’ve set up our lives. I don’t think either writer is saying that. Strong Towns, which I love and support, is based around the idea of asking hard questions about that very topic. But I always worry about a counter-narrative that “everything was fine and you are being hysterical” can easily take hold.

And, though both articles imply it, I think the idea that people are saying Houstonians “deserve it” is overblown. I haven’t heard any of that. And what is there shouldn’t be countered with overwhelming cries for “decency”. We can help the people of Houston and ask how we can do better at the same time. Irma might already be bearing down. The opposite of knee-jerk snark isn’t piled smarm. It’s intelligence.

08.28.17
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Bear Eras Update: It Turns Out People Like National Monuments

 

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Surprisingly, most people like the way this looks without oil derricks. 

Last week, we revisited our old friend Bear Ears National Monument, which is Patient Zero for the GOP’s attempt to destroy the Antiquities Act. They don’t like the idea that land can be set aside just for public use, and not for the gain of private extraction and logging concerns. It’s one of the driving motivations of the contemporary GOP: the idea that the government is an alien, and that if something can be sold and converted into capital, it should. It’s why the Sagebrush Rebellion is one of the primary events in modern Republican history.

But, it turns out, just as people don’t like being kicked off their health care in order to finance tax cuts for the rich, people also like the idea that we should have unspoiled land for everyone to enjoy, not just for the few to profit off of. And they let Ryan Zinke’s Department of Interior know just that.

Most regulations are subject to public comment, which lets lawmakers know where people tend to stand on things. The attempt to eliminate or reduce 27 national monuments is no different. They received an incredible 1.3 million comments. And the results? It was close!

Charlottesville, Virginia-based Key-Log Economics used an innovative combination of crowdsourcing and machine learning, to comb through and analyze every one of the 1.3 million comments that were publicly available by the end of the official comment period. They found that 99.2 percent of comments oppose the possible elimination of the national monument designations or a reduction in their size and protected status.

(That the study was conducted in Charlottesville is just a coincidence, but does provide nice harmony about who wants to unite the common good and the forces arrayed against it.)

This is unsurprising! Most people are in favor of national monuments. But that’s one of the more insidious things about the Republican Party. They simply don’t care what most people want. And they have always used the manipulation of language (government overreach, private land, etc) to convince people to support things that they don’t actually support.

Any Western GOP politician, from Chaffetz to Zinke, has the speech down pat. The government wants to take over this land! They’ve taken it over without actually setting foot in it, a bunch of Washington bureaucrats! We want to return it to the people.

“The people”, here, are of course private concerns, who would shoot your ass for trespassing on their newly fenced-off land. But it sounds seductive, and is part and parcel of their overall philosophy that the government is the enemy of the people, and not the expression of our politics. It is contempt for democracy at the most basic level.

But we can push back. Who knows if these comments will do any good. Zinke is already showing himself to be a good Trumpista by wildly spinning the results.

Comments received were overwhelmingly in favor of maintaining existing monuments and demonstrated a well-orchestrated national campaign organized by multiple organizations. Opponents of monuments primarily supported rescinding or modifying the existing monuments to protect traditional multiple use, and those most concerned were often local residents associated with industries such as grazing, timber production, mining, hunting and fishing, and motorized recreation. 

Well-orchestrated national campaigns. You can almost hear him whispering “Soros” and “fake news.” They contrast this with locals, though at least they are honest enough not to hide the mercenary motivations.

Again, this is part of the GOP and right-wing emotional strategy. A bunch of elites want one thing, and are ramming it down the throats of the hard-working locals, simple folk, really, who just want Uncle Sam off their back. Never mind that they aren’t going to be doing much huntin’ or fishin’ on Amalagamted Strip-Top Mining land. It’s freedom is what it is.

Don’t ignore either the way that the “national” campaign is sneered at, as if we as Americans shouldn’t have a say in our national heritage. It is the politics of division, as if a few people in one area have the full rights over who we are as a nation. It’s really a funny sort of patriotism. The million comments are dismissed because they came from people who care enough to comment, which is, I guess, a bad thing.

Will it work? I don’t know. I kind of feel like this is one of those things that could go either way. It is so unpopular that in a normal system they’d have to back off, but it is also under the radar enough that it can slip under the constant deafening storm of nonsense. But if the Antiquities Act goes, our national heritage is up for sale. It’s something to keep fighting.

****BONUS COMMENTING COMMENT***

You can now comment on the Water of the United States Act, which the admin wants to roll back. I think it is a bad idea. If you have an opinion, comment. It actually does mean something.

 

 

08.28.17
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Weekend News Roundup: Gorka, Tillerson, and Harvey

Image result for day lasts more than a hundred years

There’s a Soviet-era sci-fi book by the Kyrgyz writer Chingiz Aitmatov called The Day Lasts More Than A Hundred Years. I really liked it as a book (though it has been like 18 years since I’ve read it), but love it as a title. It’s a truism every day, of course, the long pace of a day, with each individual tumbling thought taking up its own space, elongating the day beyond memory. But it is especially true in our moment of nitwit authoritarianism, when we’re so consumed with the daily thrum of horror and inanity that time itself is distorted.

All of this is a long way of saying that a whole lot happened since Friday. Let’s do a quick breakdown of the hits (we’ll have a standalone post on the Arpaio pardon).

Continue reading →

08.07.17
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Water Monday: Too Much in New Orleans, Too Little in The Plains, and a Big “Who Cares” on the Border by DHS

 

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But her emails, etc

 

When it comes to arguing about the proven and increasingly-lived reality of climate change, deniers have one big asset on their side: climate change is really complex and slow. It affects different parts of the world differently, and in ways that can be very unexpected. This is because the earth’s climate is big and complex; in fact, one could say it is all-encompassing.

But that can make it easy for deniers. They can sneer and say things like “Oh, so climate change makes it hot some places and cold in other places? That’s really convenient.” They also sneer about how “climate change” replaced “global warming”, as if scientists were caught in a lie and so changed the name; as if no one was saying that global warming would change the climate.  A simple lie is easier to digest than a complex truth.

(Unsurprisingly, Donald Trump was one of those idiots who tweeted about global warming every time it was chilly out. He was even one of those idiots who would use record-setting colds across the entire country as proof everything was fine. There’s a reason he had instant appeal to the GOP voters.)

Anyway, this is to say that if you don’t believe in climate change, this post is good fodder for your argument.

(Note: the invaluable folks at Circle of Blue linked to much of this in their daily newsletters; that’s where I got it from. Don’t want to take credit for it)

Too Much Water, Not Enough Infrastructure

 

This was yesterday, not 2005. Image nola.com

 

NEW ORLEANS — Heavy weekend rainfall in New Orleans overwhelmed the municipal pump stations, leaving parts of the community flooded, and some officials say they’re not satisfied with the city’s response.

“Are our city pumps working as they should?” Councilman Jason Williams said, according to local news reports. “If we can’t handle a bad storm, then what will we do when there’s a hurricane?”

What indeed? Now, heavy rain can’t be blamed on global warming, nor can hurricanes. But the intensity of both is modeled to increase as the oceans heat up. That’s not conspiracy or far-fetched. Even the dimmest denier admits that there is such a thing as “hurricane season”, and it isn’t when the water is coldest.

This just highlights the dangers of climate change in our most vulnerable cities, and our lack of preparation in how to mitigate its effects. We know that climate change is going to hit hardest in poorer countries ill-equipped to handle environmental and demographic shifts. But it will happen in America too. And our politics, indeed our culture, rarely gives precedence to the poorest and most vulnerable. Except poor Gulf communities, black and white (but especially black) to be decimated.

Even with good planning, water can and will overwhelm. We don’t invest in infrastructure, and we don’t take care of what we have. As a species, we’re spectacularly ill-equipped to handle enormous issues. As a wild and fragmented democracy, America might be especially ill-suited for it. That just means we have to keep fighting, though.

Flash Drought: Too Little Water

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How flash drought start (citation needed)

HELENA, Mont. (AP) — The drought plaguing eastern Montana and much of North and South Dakota came on quickly and is intensifying, leading ranchers to sell their cattle and farmers to harvest early whatever crops that have grown so far this summer.

Just three months ago, no areas of moderate drought were recorded in the Northern Plains region by the U.S. Drought Monitor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. But July’s soaring temperatures and lack of rain quickly parched the soil and dried up waterways, creating what climatologists call a “flash drought.”

Now, 62 percent of North Dakota, more than half of South Dakota and 40 percent of Montana are in severe, extreme or exceptional drought, according to the drought monitor’s weekly report released Thursday. There are also pockets of drought in the Southern Plain states of Nebraska, Iowa, Oklahoma and Texas.

In Montana, 12 percent of the state’s land is experiencing “exceptional drought,” meaning widespread crop and pasture losses and water-shortage emergencies, mainly in the northeastern part of the state.

“We would expect to see conditions that bad once or twice in 100 years,” said Deborah Bathke, a climatologist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s National Drought Mitigation Center and a co-author of the drought monitor.

I’ve never heard the terms “flash drought”, or “exceptional drought” before, but, like “hydro-political strife”, is just another one of those damn things we’ll have to get used to. These are baking regions, and are prone to drought, and we (as a political entity working together, through the government), worked to transform them from arid to arable.

And it worked! But like the high-water mark of the Colorado, it won’t last forever. It couldn’t last forever. And climate change will accelerate that, with unknown political, economic, and agricultural impact.

Up the Wall! 

 

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Walls are dangerous

 

The Secretary of Homeland Security has determined, pursuant to law, that it is necessary to waive certain laws, regulations and other legal requirements in order to ensure the expeditious construction of barriers and roads in the vicinity of the international land border of the United States near the city of San Diego in the state of California.

Yup. In one of his last acts as DHS head, General Kelly (who is a Wise and Steadying Hand, remember) waived the need to study environmental impacts of a border wall. This isn’t the whole wall, of course. But it sets an precedent.

Trump’s wall will be (among many other things) a potential environmental disaster. It’s going to be in the middle of a floodplain, which, as we’ve emphasized, doesn’t care who is in the White House, or what a “Mexico” is.

Everyone involved in the wall, advocates like Kelly included, know that it is a political disaster. Now they don’t even want to know if it will be an environmental one. The rush to get it up is as unseemly as its end goal. But that it could be a disaster on the enviornment has to be seen, for these jackals, as a feature.

07.24.17
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The Coming Assaults on the Environment

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The Russia investigations are a grand opera, and there is a strand of thinking among the clever set that it is a Distraction from the real evil of the Trump campaign. To that, as part of the meta-clever set (and we’re just as irritating), I say: very true! But also: nonsense.

It’s nonsense because the Grand Guignol corruption, of which the Russia element is a key part, is a direct threat to our democracy.  That this is making an already deeply-ignorant and hair-trigger dumb President even more unhinged is an enormous issue. Trump’s respect for the mechanisms of our republic are already paper-thin, if that (witness the CinC telling active-duty service members to call their Congressmen in support of GOP policies); if he feels his misdeeds threaten his power, who knows what he’ll do. To say this is a distraction is to say an earthquake is a distraction from your looming heart attack. Both things are bad!

Because, yes: we do get distracted from the day-to-day awfulness of this administration, and the GOP in general. Perhaps the longest-lasting impact will be on the environment, or what is left of it.

Regulations Are For Chumps

 

Mulvaney: As you can see, freedom is dead. 

 

Last week the WaPo did a deep dive on the administration’s dismantling of the regulatory state. This has little to do with Trump, except for his self-sworn and entirely self-centered belief that businesspeople (businessmen, really) would do great if they were just left alone, because they are geniuses and don’t need any interference or help from Uncle Sucker, except when it comes to bankruptcy protection. And patent protection. And the police that protect the interests of the monied class. But still.

It’s mostly gnome-standard GOP stuff above and beyond Trump. The stated philosophy is to unleash the power of the market. The sub-philosophy is that government has no role and that any regulation is bad. The underlying idea is that there is no common good and the rich should be able to plunder.  That’s why they want to dismantle any worker and environmental protections.

We can argue about which regulations are needed and which go too far. We can argue about the role of government. But they truly believe there is no role. And they believe that because workers and the environment are the fodder of capital for other people. They go in, get churned up, and money comes out and into the pockets of the rich.

Congress Takes on Pipelines and Conduits, With Expected Results

Congress is involved too. Last week, a couple of bills passed the House and were sent on to the Senate.

One, HR 2786 seems noncontroversial (and indeed was almost unanimously passed). This makes it easier to build hydroelectric conduits. The good people at Circle of Blue, who flagged both of these bills, explain.

The bill amends the Federal Power Act to encourage the development of small hydropower projects. Currently, a hydropower project installed in a conduit — a pipeline or canal, generally — is exempt from the licensing process if it is less than five megawatts. The bill eliminates the five-megawatt cap. The bill also shortens the time frame for issuing a licensing exemption from 45 days to 30 days. There have been no national assessments of hydropower potential from adding turbines to conduits, but it is assumed to be far less than adding turbines to dams without them. Conduit projects, however, can have significant local benefits.

I admit I don’t know much about this. This might be very needed, and very good. It might be completely insignificant. But it is part and parcel of a desire to step back, to regulate less, to have less interference by experts. Maybe it will turn out great. But when we mess with water, when we alter it, it has a way of coming back to bite us. Dams break down. Cities flood. I think, as we enter an era of water instability, we shouldn’t make moves that make it easier to tamper with the flow.

The second one is less ambiguous and more immediately insidious. H.R.2883 is known as the Promoting Cross-Border Energy Infrastructure Act, so you know it is going to suck. And it is a doozy.

This bill prohibits any person from constructing, connecting, operating, or maintaining a border-crossing facility for the import or export of oil, natural gas, or electricity across an international border of the United States without obtaining a certificate of crossing.

Great! Totally approve. Seems uncontroversial so far. Who wants Canadian companies to lay pipelines willy-nilly?

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), with respect to oil or natural gas pipelines, or the Department of Energy (DOE), with respect to electric transmission facilities, must issue a certificate of crossing for the border-crossing facility within 120 days after final action is taken under the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, unless it is not in the public interest.

120 days doesn’t really seem like a lot, to me. These are huge, often continent-spanning pipelines. The impact they have on natural resources is enormous and hard to judge. I don’t think I like this.

No presidential permit as required under specified executive orders shall be necessary for the construction, connection, operation, or maintenance of an oil or natural gas pipeline or electric transmission facility, including any border-crossing facility.

This is where the bill really kicks in. While this seems like it is taking away power from Trump, what it is really doing is taking these enormously impactful pipelines out of the realm of public dispute and accountability. It is depoliticizing them in the truest and worst sense. The decision, say, to let bitumen in leaky pipes flow under the Great Lakes will be shunted off to a bureaucracy.

While you could say: good! Let the experts decide without political considerations, what this is really doing is making sure that the decisions are made without scrutiny, and without the negative political ramifications that come with posioning the aquifers. And this isn’t a coincidence. They want this bill passed so that the decisions ultimately are in the hands of this guy.

 

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I know he’s like the least-objectionable person in the admin. He’s still really objectionable. 

 

Rick Perry believes very strongly in pipelines and in “energy independence”. He believes not very strongly in climate science or environmentalism. This bill is a way to greenlight the pumping of Canadian posion into America.

WHAT TO DO?

Call your Senators. Tell them you oppose HR 2883, because you think decisions that can impact the water we drink and the land we farm on should be decided in the open, and not by unelected bureaucrats. It’s ok that it seems hypocritical. They’re being hypocrites about it, and we’re in the right on this one. Call often.

This is a bill that can be easily overlooked thanks to the “distractions”. Which means it is one that a concerted effort can stop. If not, the whole issue of pipelines in this country will be altered, and citizens will have nearly no say in what happens to our land. Which, again, is just the way they want it.

 

07.20.17
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Some Good News About Asian Carp…For Now (Or: Why Trump’s Budget Ruins Everything)

In this 2012 photo, an Asian carp, jolted by an electric current from a research boat, jumps from the Illinois River near Havana, Ill., during a study on the fish’s population.

So, the Great Lakes actually got some good news this week, when it turned out that the canal leading up to Lake Michigan was free of Asian Carp. There had been a two-week monitoring of the area following the discovery of a carp in the Calumet River.

This is good news because if the Asian Carp get into the lake, they’ll be able to get into all the Great Lakes. They have no natural predators around here, and are expected to be able to out-compete local species for food and resources. They could potentially change the entire ecosystem of the lake, ruining commerical fishing (there isn’t much of a market for them right now), and having huge repercussions both environmentally and economically.

If you aren’t familiar, these are big suckers that jump out of the water when they hear a baot, and can do serious damage to boats and people. They fly around and can break your nose. They hurt when they hit you.

They were brought to America for fish farms, but then during a flood escaped into a river, and have worked their way up. Parts of the Illinois, for example, are completely choked with these monsters. Check this out.

It’s super unpleasant. Even if you don’t care about the ecological ramifications of them dominating the Great Lakes (and you should, what’s wrong with you?) just imagine the havoc it will wreak on boating, on the lakes and their tributaries. It’s a nightmare.

That’s why the US has spent a lot of money to keep them out of the Great Lakes, especially on the the Cal-Sag Channel, and the Calumet River. and the Sanitary and Ship Canal, where there is an electronic fence south of the city. And everyone agrees that’s a good thing. Who could be against it?

Oh, for the love of god…

The alarming discovery of an 8-pound, 28-inch adult silver carp comes as President Donald Trump is proposing a federal budget that would gut funding for efforts to block Asian carp and other invasive species from the world’s largest body of fresh surface water.

The Trump administration also has refused to release a government study on new proposals to prevent carp from moving upstream from the Illinois River, where the fish already have wreaked havoc on the ecosystem.

Seriously, what the hell? How is it possible to be on the wrong side of everything? How is it possible to be on the wrong side of this? If you had asked me a year ago, I wouldn’t have even imagined there could be a wrong side. I didn’t think there was a pro-Asian-carp-in-the-Lakes contingency.  Especially not from someone so concerned about keeping America safe from foreigners!

But then, they manage to be on the wrong side of everything, especially when it comes to the Great Lakes. They are trying to gut the Great Lakes Research Initiative, even though it will hurt their white working class base the most.  They even manage to be against making sure ballast holds don’t bring any more invasive species, which is almost impressive. You think they spend their whole days on operatic evil like ending health care or suppressing the vote, but nope: they take time to block common-sense ballast measures.

There’s been some talk about closing the Sanitarity and Ship  Canal. As most of you know, these were built in order to use lake water to wash the filth of the city down the Des Plaines and Illinois toward the Mississippi, and on to St. Louis, which: haha, screw St. Louis. The great shipping and sanitation channels changed the flow of the water, an audacious move, and the biggest diversion in Great Lakes history (which now could be a casus belli). 

But it did more than that. It erased the divide between the Mississippi Basin and the Great Lakes Basin, which means that invasive species in Arkansas can make their way up the vast river system into the greatest body of freshwater in the world. That’s why some people are advocating closing them down.

It’s an equally audacious plan, to be sure, and I doubt it will ever happen. But that’s the kind of big thinking that is needed to prevent a catastrophe. And that is what makes it equally catastrophic that we are being led by the smallest thinkers in the world, a whole party of petty, short-sighted, gleefully-destructive fools who inevitably take the most destructive possible course on every issue.

Protecting the Great Lakes smacks of environmentalism, and so they won’t do it. It’s pure nihilism. May they all be forced to paddleboard through a swarm of madly agitated carp.

07.18.17
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Water Diversions and War

 

Image result for fury road water

Spring Break, 2030! 

 

Here’s the term you are going to need to know in the next part of your life and the life of the planet: hydro-political strife. From Science Daily. 

More than 1,400 new dams or water diversion projects are planned or already under construction and many of them are on rivers flowing through multiple nations, fueling the potential for increased water conflict between some countries.

A new analysis commissioned by the United Nations uses a comprehensive combination of social, economic, political and environmental factors to identify areas around the world most at-risk for “hydro-political” strife. This river basins study was part of the U.N.’s Transboundary Waters Assessment Program.

Researchers from the United States, Spain and Chile took part in the analysis, which has been recommended by the U.N. Economic Commission for Europe as an indicator for the U.N.’s sustainable development goals for water cooperation.

Results of the study have just been published in the journal Global Environment Change.

The analysis suggests that risks for conflict are projected to increase over the next 15 to 30 years in four hotspot regions — the Middle East, central Asia, the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna basin, and the Orange and Limpopo basins in southern Africa.

Whomever controls the water has enormous power over their neighbors. It’s a pretty terrifying situation when you think about it: just because your weird and arbitrary border has a river in it, you get to control the lives of people across that line? You can divert it, shunt it, dam it and drain it?

But really, that’s the way it always has been. America, of course, has its fair share of problems with that, like how we pretty much shut off the Colorado from Mexico (a situation that has been slowly and promisingly remediated, though no one knows what a Trump presidency will do to it).

That’s the way it has always been, sure, with resources being the reason for and tool of war, but that doesn’t mean we’re not entering scary new times. There are more people and less water. Climate change is going to be scything across the globe like a whirlwinded Queen of Hearts. Resources will be hoarded and dams will lead to war. An irrigation ditch can be a casus belli. We all know that in the 21st-century, water is war. But I don’t think people recognize just how hair-trigger and volatile it is going to be.

Think of how complex the Waukesha Diversion was. And how peaceful it was. Now imagine how difficult and fraught diversion negotiations will be when it is the life and death of a nation at stake. Think of how easy it will be to boil over into violence. Think of how that has happened in America’s past. That’s tomorrow’s world. Unless we actually come up with a legitimate mechanism for handling these situations, which means a de facto dissolving of some measures of national sovereignty, there is no chance.

 

05.23.17
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Vessel Incidental Discharge Act: Even The Boring Stuff Is Made Terrible by Republicans

I admit this image is dull. But look below! MONSTERS!

Odds are you rarely think of ballast water tanks from ocean-going ships in the St. Lawrence Seaway. God knows I rarely do, and I spend 18% of my waking hours thinking about the Great Lakes. But the water from the ballast, which is scooped up in the ocean or the weird and frigid depths of the Black Sea, contains critters. And when it is dumped to balance out the lightened load from taking off the cargo, those animals escape.

And they kill the whole damn Great Lake system.

See, for thousands of years, the Lakes lived in virtual isolation. Niagara Falls served as a natural barrier from the ocean, which meant any species that somehow made it up the St. Lawrence river, with it’s punishing ocean-going rapids, would hit a wall. That changed with the canal system, and then was blown away when the Seaway opened up and the canals were dredged for oceanic freighters.

 

Image result for great lakes sea lamprey

Lamprey! Ahhh!

 

Lampreys, gobies, zebra mussels, quagga mussels: all of these have come from ballast, the terrible price of opening up the Great Lakes to the world. There have been heroic attempts to save the Great Lakes from invasive species, and they have largely worked. It’s still uphill, but there has been legislation that regulates ballast to try to keep other unknowns out.

So, of course…

The Commercial Vessel Act would eliminate existing legal protections against aquatic invasive species discharged in the ballast water of big ships, according to the letter. In particular, the legislation seeks to preempt traditional state authority to take the actions necessary for protecting state water resources, while doing away with existing federal laws that safeguard the nation’s waters against harmful pollutant discharges from vessels, the letter said.

The attorneys general also blasted the legislation as an attempt to jettison the Clean Water Act, the federal law that requires the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to scientifically develop and regularly improve uniform minimum pollution treatment standards, and then incorporate them as discharge requirements in permits that are renewed every five years.

“The Commercial Vessel Act takes the radical step of eliminating these vital Clean Water Act protections and relegates EPA — the federal agency with the greatest knowledge and experience in addressing water pollution — to an advisory role,” they said in the letter. “The Commercial Vessel Act vests primary responsibility for controlling vessel pollution with the U.S. Coast Guard, an agency mainly focused on homeland security that has little water pollution expertise.”

Between this and the attempted dismantling of the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, which would hurt Trump’s beloved working white class the most, it is like they want to destroy the Lakes. All in the fetishistic lust for letting industry control their own regulatory regimes. It’s madness.

There’s nothing in this world that the GOP doesn’t want to make worse.

(Fun fact! If you were to drain Lake Michigan, you could walk from top to bottom without ever touching the ground. It’s all covered with mussel shells from invasive species over the last half century. Pro tip, though: don’t! You’d cut your feet to ribbons. You’re welcome.)

05.08.17
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EPA Replaces Scientists With Industry; Embraces Cartoon Villainy

 

Image result for polluted river america

“Yeah, but those regulations were super onerous…”

 

The phrase “you can’t make this up” is overused, since these days, all you have to do is imagine the worst possible idea being enacted by the worst possible people, and you have a pretty close approximation of reality. Right, NY Times?

WASHINGTON — The Environmental Protection Agency has dismissed at least five members of a major scientific review board, the latest signal of what critics call a campaign by the Trump administration to shrink the agency’s regulatory reach by reducing the role of academic research.

A spokesman for the E.P.A. administrator, Scott Pruitt, said he would consider replacing the academic scientists with representatives from industries whose pollution the agency is supposed to regulate, as part of the wide net it plans to cast. “The administrator believes we should have people on this board who understand the impact of regulations on the regulated community,” said the spokesman, J. P. Freire.

What’s interesting here is how they don’t even pretend to be talking about citizens anymore. Normally, they say things like “those egghead bureaucrat scientists in Washington DC don’t understand the kind of water that we enjoy here in Mudville. Our citizens are just fine with a little bit of cadmium in their soup.” But that’s not even what J.P. Freire is saying. He’s talking about the “regulated community”, i.e., the businesses themselves. It might be a different definition of “community” than you or I understand, but remember, my friend: corporations are people.

There’s not even anything to unpack here; there’s not even the tribute vice pays to virtue. They are straight-up saying that any regulations will be vetted by the people whose profits are impacted by regulations, and how that is the only concern.

It’s a pretty clear baseline. What matters is the impact regulations have on the bottom line of the company. The baseline isn’t what deregulated pollutions has on the humans who lives around the company. That is, at best, secondary. That’s not the impact that matters.

So it doesn’t matter, just to take a quick jaunt around recent headlines, that:

None of that matters (the attack on indigenous rights might actually be a bonus for these jackals). What we need are fewer regulations, and they should be vetted by the industries themselves.

It’s easy to see the counterarguments. More regulations are job-killing, and these plants and factories and industries are the lifeblood of the community, and if those science pinheads continue to ram their globalist climate-hysteric ideologies down our throats, we’ll be forced to close shop and go pollute Mexico. And why should the Mexicans get all our good pollution?

It’s a seductive argument, except it is also a completely phony one. The choice isn’t between “pollution and jobs”; it is between “pollution or slightly reduced profits.” It’s always been a lie that a company can’t follow simple environmental regulations. They made the same argument when smokestacks were regulated to reduce deadly smog, and industry didn’t collapse. It’s a choice made by companies to chase greater profits by moving to deregulated countries.

Reducing or eliminating regulations doesn’t actually help anyone. There will always be a place that cares even less about its citizens, that slashes regulations, that lets you dump paint right into the well. That the US is rushing to join these countries isn’t pro-worker; it is showing absolute contempt for the worker. It’s saying “you can keep your job, but only if we can lower wages, kill your collective bargaining rights, and poison you and your family, working you until you die young or are too broken to be of use.”

That’s Scott Pruitt’s vision of the future. It’s another reason why this administration has to be resisted at every step. Everything they do is carcinogenic. That’s unfortunately too often literal.

04.27.17
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Floodplain Treaty Shows Ridiculousness of Trump’s Mexican Border Wall (and borders in general)

 

Image result for mexican border fence floodplain

As you can clearly see, the wall doesn’t spring forth from the seeded earth. 

 

There are few things more inherently unnatural than a border. We know this on a human level: they are weird and arbitrary lines drawn on a map. We understand this culturally, especially when we look at the Middle East or Africa, at colonial maps that were drawn without concern for how it would impact the people living there, and we are dealing with their legacies. Borders are the result of wars and appropriations and treaties and traditions, and not inherent things unto themselves. They only have meaning because we decide they should.

But step back, and they are even more unnatural. They idea of borders is absurdly recent in human history, which makes it impossibly new on the planet. Borders, geologically, don’t mean anything. Even if a border is drawn to correspond with part of nature, like along a river, well…rivers shift. (Sometimes very quickly!) The land isn’t really interested in political distinctions that only appear on some pencil-neck’s globe.

We’re reminded of this by an NPR story on how the idiotic and immoral border wall proposal by Trump might be stopped by an obscure 50-yr treaty.

Texas-based NPR reporter John Burnett says Antonio Rascón, chief Mexican engineer on the International Boundary and Water Commission, came to NPR with the story.

The commission is both in Juarez, Mexico and El Paso, Texas, and is normally a quiet job about diplomacy and allocation of water, Burnett says. But Rascón told Burnett he was gravely concerned about what a concrete wall would do to the river, especially in the Rio Grande Valley.

“Mexico has been growing more and more alarmed as they see plans for Trump’s wall progress,” Burnett says. “In the west desert on the Arizona-Mexico border we have proven examples that border security fencing has clogged with debris and has caused very serious flooding in places. … These walls, when they get clogged with debris, act like a dam.”

A 1970 treaty signed by both countries says neither side can put an obstruction in the floodplain, unless both countries sign off.

Now, it goes on to explain, we have been putting obstructions there (the fence), much to Mexico’s dismay and protest, but they haven’t really protested much. But if an enormous wall that will be partially underground goes up? A wall that will block the natural flow of water and almost certainly cause flooding on the Mexican side?

It’s almost too perfect. We’ve been using water as a weapon against Mexico for 150 years, whether it has been diverting most of the Colorado and sending them the polluted and salinated trickles, or just dumping pollution in southbound rivers. (And while there has been progress made, that’s in jeopardy now.)  What bigger “Screw you” could there be than to enact a racist, cruel, and dehumanizing border wall that has the added impact of causing flooding? It’s the height of bigoted indifference.

It also shows just how arbitrary and stupid the border actually is. I’m not advocating for “open borders” or anything,  but they are deeply unnatural. The floodplain will exist regardless of what lines we draw or how we pave it over. Water will flow where it flows, and people will imitate that water, crossing and erasing these lines. A wall is nothing more than a vanity-piece for a racist bloated manchild. To even entertain it is to show how fake these divisions on which he’s based his Presidency really are.