On Tuesday the Environmental Working Group (EWG) released a report on the status of state and federal agriculture policies for five Chesapeake Bay watershed states: Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, and Virginia. The report focuses on agriculture policies that impact water quality and highlights a gaping hole in the regulation of animal-based operations. Past and ongoing efforts to improve the water quality in the Bay have focused on agriculture, where pollution control measures are fairly cost-effective (compared to wastewater treatment or stormwater runoff, for example). While these measures have reduced some of the nitrogen, phosphorous, and sediment pollution in the Bay, the agriculture sector still contributes the largest share of pollution: 42 percent of the nitrogen, 45 percent of the phosphorous, and 60 percent of the sediment.
For the report, EWG obtained data both on the number of permitted operations and animals covered by the federal and state permitting programs and from the 2007 Agriculture Census. The numbers of unpermitted dairy, beef, and swine agricultural operations are astonishing: in these five states, less than 2 percent of operations have either federal or state permits. This 2 percent covers a mere 35 percent of these animals. The permit rates for chicken operations are much higher: around 7 percent of the poultry operations are permitted, which covers 80 percent of the chickens. Even more astonishing, EWG had to use census data because “state program managers were unaware of the total operations and animals in their respective states or how many operations were eligible for a permit.”
The report finds that voluntary measures are not working for two main reasons: the farms that cause much of the pollution simply do not participate in the voluntary programs and the perennial lack of funding for these voluntary programs fails to cover the geographic areas and agriculture operations that are responsible for much of the pollution. Mandatory regulations of these operations are needed. President Obama recognized the need earlier this year with the executive order on restoring the Chesapeake Bay, and Senator Ben Cardin (D-Md.) is moving forward with a discussion draft for a Chesapeake Bay Reauthorization bill. But the EWG report notes that federal action alone is inadequate: the states must demonstrate the commitment and political will needed to restore and preserve the Bay.
EWG says this report is the beginning of a longer investigation into the actual effectiveness of these state and federal regulations. They're asking smart questions and finding unsettling answers.
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Yee Huang | September 10, 2009
On Tuesday the Environmental Working Group (EWG) released a report on the status of state and federal agriculture policies for five Chesapeake Bay watershed states: Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, and Virginia. The report focuses on agriculture policies that impact water quality and highlights a gaping hole in the regulation of animal-based operations. Past and […]
Rena Steinzor | September 10, 2009
After weeks of sustained attack from the right-wing on issues that are marginal to the job the President asked him to do, Cass Sunstein has emerged from the nomination process bloody but apparently unbowed (here's this afternoon's roll call). He is now the nation’s “regulatory czar,” Director of the White House OMB Office of Information and […]
Ben Somberg | September 9, 2009
Late this afternoon the Senate ended debate, in a 63-35 cloture vote, on the nomination of Cass Sunstein for Administrator of the Office of Information and Reuglatory Affairs (OIRA). Here's a quick look back at what CPR scholars have said about the Sunstein nomination and the role of OIRA in regulatory policy: CPR Member Scholars' […]
Thomas McGarity | September 9, 2009
Yesterday, the Food and Drug Administration implemented a 2007 food safety statute by promulgating a rule requiring food manufacturers to report instances of foodborne diseases to an electronic database that the agency has just established (the Reportable Food Registry). This long-awaited database will help epidemiologists at the Centers for Disease Control, state health agencies and […]
Yee Huang | September 9, 2009
A feature article Sunday in the Philadelphia Inquirer, by Sandy Bauers, describes the impressive restoration of the Lititz Run, a stream located in the Lower Susquehanna Watershed in Pennsylvania. Lititz Run flows into the Susquehanna River, which contributes about 40 percent of the nitrogen in the Chesapeake Bay, as well as a significant amount of […]
Matthew Freeman | September 6, 2009
CPR’s Dan Rohlf had an op-ed in The Oregonian on Friday, taking the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality to task. Faced with news that the nation’s largest emitter of mercury pollution is a cement plant in the state, DEQ moved quickly to…defend the polluter. Rohlf writes: The biggest mercury polluter in the entire United States […]
Douglas Kysar | September 5, 2009
Prominent environmental commentator Bjorn Lomborg is at it again, this time convening a blue ribbon panel of five economists to assess the relative merits of different possible methods for addressing climate change. As reported by Reuters Friday morning, Lomborg’s panel concluded that “‘climate engineering’ projects, such as spraying seawater into the sky to dim sunlight, […]
Ben Somberg | September 4, 2009
The AP reports: A federal judge presiding over hundreds of lawsuits against Chinese drywall makers and installers said Thursday that he plans to hold the first trial in January for the cases, which claim the imported products emit sulfur, methane and other chemical compounds that have ruined homes and harmed residents’ health. U.S. District Judge […]
Holly Doremus | September 3, 2009
This item cross-posted by permission from Legal Planet. We had a flurry of posts on geoengineering a while back (see here, here, here, and here). If you want to learn more about geoengineering, a great resource is this report, just issued by the Royal Society. It clearly explains the background, the approaches being proposed (which […]