Save the Bay - Summer 2014

Recovery of the estuary that provides 75 percent of the Atlantic striped bass population is being fought by 21 states, only one of which is in the watershed.

In February 2014, Florida joined a lawsuit to stop the Environmental Protection Agency’s belated effort to render Chesapeake Bay clean enough to be taken off the EPA’s “impaired waters” list by 2025. If this action seems inexplicable, rest assured that it is not. Columnist and novelist Carl Hiaasen has unearthed the answer: Because Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi and Florida Governor Rick Scott are “complete tools” and “pimping” for polluters.

Florida has no monopoly on tools and pimps. They abound in 20 other states whose attorneys general signed on to the same action. The amici curiae brief was filed to seek judi-

cial relief from alleged hardships a clean Chesapeake would inflict on people who live not just in Florida but also Alaska, Kansas, Arkansas, Utah, Wyoming, Michigan, Montana, Texas, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Oklahoma, Indiana, Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, South Carolina, and West Virginia. Only one of these states—West Virginia—is (partly) in the Chesapeake watershed.

As Hiaasen notes, “You can’t make this stuff up.” The original suit was brought October 8, 2013 by nine of the nation’s most brazen and intractable polluters: the American Farm Bureau Federation (worst of the lot and lead plaintiff), Pennsylvania Farm Bureau, National Association of Home Builders, Fertilizer Institute, US Poultry and Egg Association, National Pork Producers Council, National Corn Growers Association, National Chicken Council, and National Turkey Federation.

The reason EPA is finally attempting to enforce the Clean Water Act on the Chesapeake is because in 2008 it was successfully sued by the nonprofit Chesapeake Bay Foundation and partners who value things like striped bass, black sea bass, speckled trout, tautog, shad, white perch, yellow perch, Atlantic croaker, sheepshead, spot, summer flounder, oysters, crabs, water birds, and federal law.

Previously the cleanup had been voluntary—and therefore not sufficient to get the bay off the impaired list. In 1983 a pollu-tion-control agreement was hatched by Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, the District of Columbia and EPA. In 1987, they set a voluntary 40-percent reduction goal for nitrogen and phosphorus by 2000.

When it became apparent that this goal
would be missed these players set a volun-
tary goal for taking the Bay off the impaired
list by 2010. Even by mid-decade it was
clear that this goal would also be missed. So
D.C. and all six Bay states—Pennsylvania,
Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, Delaware,
and New York—agreed that EPA should
write and enforce a [pollution limit—a cal-
culation of the maximum amount of pollu-
tants that a water body can receive and still
safely meet water-quality standards]. The last
three states did so reluctantly and under
pressure from President Obama, who had
issued an executive order to clean up the
Bay. The [pollution limit] would be the
biggest in history, covering the six-state,
64,000-square-mile watershed. It came out
in December 2010.

The Farm Bureau and its fellow polluters were aghast. A region-wide [limit] would require farmers; home builders; and chicken, turkey, and pig producers to suffer such indignities as keeping at least some of their vile effluent out of the public’s Bay and tributaries. So in January 2011, they sued EPA, losing on September 13, 2013, when U.S. District Judge Sylvia Rambo, in a strongly worded decision, upheld EPA’s authority under the Clean Water Act to impose the [pollution limt]. Less than a month later the plaintiffs appealed. And on February 3, 2014, they were joined by the 21 states.

“What are they afraid of if we have clean water in the Chesapeake Bay?” inquires Chesapeake Bay Foundation President Will Baker. It’s an excellent question. And here’s the answer: They’re afraid of other region-wide [pollution limits], especially for the Mississippi watershed. What they are fighting for is freedom to keep polluting and to keep creating bacteria-infested, algae-clogged, anaerobic dead zones like the one in the Gulf of Mexico.

That dead zone, courtesy of most of the amici curiae states, was bigger than Connecticut in 2013. A witches’ brew of their chemical poisons, silt, and soil runs down the Mississippi. And the pollution is made worse by rampant conversion of grasslands, native prairie, and prairie potholes to corn, which requires more insecticides, herbicides, fertilizers, and tilling than any other food crop. A federal law, rammed through in 2007 by the Farm Bureau and its agribusiness allies, is expanding the Gulf dead zone by requiring the amount of corn ethanol in gasoline to be increased from 4. 7 billion gallons in 2007 to 36 billion by 2022. This