All You Need To Know About EPA Pruitt Hearing In Congress Today (C-SPAN) ... by gimleteye

EPA Scott Pruitt, who has turned into a symbol of the Trump Administration, is being grilled by Congress for transgressions that would be disqualifying but for the conversion of the Republican Party into a tool of Donald Trump.

Here is the brief from today's hearing: if you are a Republican member of Congress, you support the collapse of the federal environmental mission.

If you are a Democrat, you support a federal role to regulate polluters of the nation's air and water.

This is war.

It is a war with bright lines unlike the so-called culture wars where -- it now is clear, if it never was before -- that "morality" and "values" were a smokescreen for political power grabs.

For voters, there is one question: do you believe in the greater public good or not?

If you are a Republican member of Congress today, you don't. You believe that government serves no useful purpose except when it gets out of the way of private enterprise. If you are a Democratic member of Congress, you believe that government can and must protect people because corporations won't.

There is no place in the federal government where this bright line is painted with more sharply than the US Environmental Protection Agency; an agency that commands less than 1% of the federal budget but is -- in the mind of President Trump -- his proof that killing regulations is what will "make America great again."

Any regular reader of this blog will know what bullshit that is.

One Great Reason To #climatemarch This Saturday ... Join the #resistance ... by gimleteye

Fingers crossed that @RealDonaldTrump will pay attention to millions of marchers and protesters of his climate change denial agenda, this Saturday. The Miami March is scheduled for 1PM at Jose Marti Park.

Nothing seems to penetrate Trump's fixed mind. As he retreats further and further into the walled-off White House, surrounded by plutocrats and swamp animals, it is going to take more and more Americans protesting to make an impression. That's why it is important for millions, not hundreds of thousands, to make the point tomorrow: climate change is real, the red lights are flashing now, and the Trump White House needs to act to protect our futures. (See, "How A Warming Climate Drives Human Migration", NY Times)

That's one great reason to march tomorrow. There are others:

NY Magazine writes: "Back before America was great again, energy companies would lobby the Environmental Protection Agency to prevent robust action on climate change. But in Donald Trump’s America, the head of the EPA is, more or less, the managing director of Big Energy’s public-sector branch — and, thus, the EPA lobbies the coal industry to oppose global climate-change agreements: "A coal mining industry group’s board of directors voted on Tuesday to press President Donald Trump to withdraw from the Paris climate change agreement — just one day after EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt met with the group’s leadership and urged them to push the issue, two sources told Politico. Pruitt personally attended a meeting of the National Mining Association’s executive committee on Monday to lay out his concerns with the Paris accord, and called for the group to publicly support pulling out, according to one source.

Here is another:

"Sean Becketti, the chief economist at Freddie Mac, warned in a report last year of a housing crisis for coastal areas more severe than the Great Recession, one that could spread through banks, insurers and other industries. And, unlike the recession, there’s no hope of a bounce back in property values." ("The Nightmare Scenario for Florida’s Coastal Homeowners", Bloomberg)

We're not making any of this up. Not FAKE news. Everything we take for granted in our daily lives will be upended by climate change, and the longer we delay implementing a clear vision and policies to pragmatically steer civilization away from catastrophe, the more painful the impacts will be. Make no mistake: those in control of the Trump White House are locking down THEIR privileges and priorities, not YOURS.

For further reading in The Nation: "The Policy Weapon Climate Activists Need". Tomorrow's march is a means to an end: putting voters back in control of democracy. On that front, too, we have a long, long road ahead.

Climate Change and the Trump Presidency: two months old and already a tragedy ... by gimleteye

This is not a matter of honest people having an honest disagreement about the facts. The utterly dishonest Trump administration, including U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions from Alabama and EPA chief Scott Pruitt, former attorney general of Oklahoma, refuse to acknowledge the fact of climate change. Trump, himself, just proudly admitted to Tucker Carlson of Fox: "I don't even read books".

This willful anti-science, anti-intellectualism has been a slow burning fire in the Republican Party for decades. It was sparked by the perception of the party's leadership that its base comprised of Christian conservatives whose faith was more powerful than reason.

Trump, a marketing genius, pulled the niceties off the Christian program because he intuited that the underlying fabric of the religious right was not strictly religion. It was more a sense of grievance against intellectualism and the Hollywood crowd and economic benefits concentrated on the coasts and away from the geographic center of the nation: faded rural and industrial America.

The extremism embraced by Lee Atwater, Karl Rove, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, CATO, and the Heritage Foundation, and funders like the Koch Brothers and Robert Mercer, always pointed in the direction of locking down the privileges of an extraordinarily wealthy elite; primarily fossil fuel producers and its supply chain that organized consumer behaviors. When Donald Trump climbed atop his primary challengers, the horse he rode to the White House had been weaponized against science and reason.

The consequences to the rest of America -- to the majority of American voters -- are already dire. The Trump presidency is scarcely two months old.

The biggest threat to the United States is climate change and collateral damage. If you just woke up, here is the bad news: the Trump/ GOP budget eliminates all federal money for climate change research and science.

News that Donald Trump lied when he accused his predecessor of wiretapping is distracting reporters from the disastrous blow to federal agencies charged with providing taxpayers with the science of climate change. Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe praised the Trump cuts to EPA and to NASA: saying American children will no longer be "brainwashed".

On Twitter, Peter Gleick posted, "Climate change is a car racing for a brick wall. Trump's budget disables the air bag, takes the foot off the brake and closes our eyes."

Meanwhile, the climate is clearly wobbling off center, like a spinning top losing its centrifugal force.

In South Florida, excessive, hot temperatures cut at least a month from the growing season that depends on seasonal cooling.  Even Republicans in Utah watched temperatures soar into the fifties in the mountains in February.

There is a strain of thought that weaponizing American society underlies the Trump agenda. "America, First!" means building a police state and military for the event the climate -- on which our food supply depends -- spins out of control. That is what "dismantling the administrative state" is for: it is not about empowering a military whose total budget is already bigger than the next seven competitors combined. It is about eviscerating the science and reason that could reanimate a democracy that addresses itself to the public interest in health, safety and welfare.

That brutalism finds its match in Russia, where Putin's only safety net is the carbon footprint. Scientific evidence points in the direction that climate disruption will not save the oligarchs or the billionaires.

The failure to put measures in place to mitigate the damage from climate change and to protect creation is a dismal refutation of faith. It should also be an impeachable offense.

US Environmental Protection Agency to be pushed off the cliff, today, if Scott Pruitt is confirmed as secretary by the GOP Senate ... by gimleteye

Scott Pruitt's EPA nomination will be voted on by the Senate today

Trump, in a wild and chaotic press conference yesterday, claimed, "I inherited a mess!" With the likely confirmation of EPA secretary Scott Pruitt today by the GOP majority, Trump will set in motion a mess of historic proportions: unravelling fifty years of federal environmental protections at a moment in history when man-made climate change -- "far from settled", Pruitt believes -- begins to roar.

The GOP leadership is delusional in its practice of throwing heavy blankets over climate change reality. It may claim to be independent of the Trump White House mess, but the one place their collaboration is secure; the elimination of federal environmental law.

For the entire thirty years I have been an environmental activist and writer, the EPA has been mainly a promise, a hope, an aspirational force. Citizens have often had to use the federal courts to get the EPA to do its job, in cases where political pressure from Congress and the White House has inhibited the agency.

That's the case in Florida, with polluted water.Citizens have also had to litigate to define the role of the federal government versus the states on many environmental fronts, including energy. In fact, the entire GOP Congressional delegation, lead by Senator Marco Rubio, has been in constant antagonism with the goals of the EPA; against federal protections for the Everglades and against federal measures to strengthen Florida's historically weak water pollution laws that favor big campaign contributors from commodity producers like Big Sugar.

As Attorney General of Oklahoma, Scott Pruitt has been on the other side, or, the same side as Florida's polluters. He sued EPA fourteen times in federal court to limit the agency's authority, on behalf mostly of the state's most powerful industries tied to fossil fuel production.

In this way, Pruitt represents not only special interests who define "the swamp"; he also represents wealthy billionaires who profit when the climate loses. When the climate loses, we lose big time.

Through the confirmation process, Pruitt's main ally in Congress has been Oklahoma senator James Inhofe. If the ignominy of U.S. legislators who blocked the nation from responding to the existential threat from climate change, Inhofe ranks worst. As the Republican leader of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee throughout the Bush terms, Inhofe not only ridiculed climate change, he also put great pressure on EPA political appointees to inhibit the agency from doing its job.

In recent days, Democrats in the US Senate have desperately tried to persuade Republicans to require Pruitt to disclose thousands of emails he and his staff have hidden, related to his anti-environmental record in Oklahoma. In spite of fierce public pressure, the Republicans appear serenely aimed to confirm the worst EPA chief in the agency's history. Yesterday, it was disclosed that Pruitt's chief of staff closely coordinated "soft ball" questions from Senator Inhofe on water regulations.

Meanwhile the statistics -- that the GOP ignores -- pour in: according to NOAA, an agency under the EPA umbrella -- January temperature across global land and ocean surfaces was 1.58°F above the 20th century average of 53.6°F. This was the second highest for January in the 1880–2017 record, behind 2016 (highest).

The Arctic north has been roiled, all winter, by temperatures 30 - 50 degrees above normal. Glacial ice for this time of year is at the lowest extent ever measured. Although the Rockies snowpack is high this winter, temperature patterns have been freakish. I was in Utah's Wasatch range last week, at 12,000 feet, where the afternoon temperature in February was 53 degree Fharenheit. Unheard of.

Last week in Magnum, Oklahoma -- in the dead of winter -- the daily temperature reached nearly 100 degrees: twice the historical average.

Oklahoma temperature, last week: off the charts but GOP continues to deny climate change

The New York Times reported yesterday, "Employees of the Environmental Protection Agency have been calling their senators to urge them to vote on Friday against the confirmation of Scott Pruitt, President Trump’s contentious nominee to run the agency, a remarkable display of activism and defiance that presages turbulent times ahead for the E.P.A. Many of the scientists, environmental lawyers and policy experts who work in E.P.A. offices around the country say the calls are a last resort for workers who fear a nominee selected to run an agency he has made a career out of fighting — by a president who has vowed to “get rid of” it."

I can't begin to explain how extraordinary it is for EPA staff to break from tradition this way: it is a signal that things are desperately wrong in the Trump WH, but also a signal that scientists and professionals are under attack at precisely a point in history where public policies need to focus intently on protecting people and the economy, not rigid orthodoxies that destroy democracy and will destroy jobs. EPA staffers are so alarmed, they secured an independent server site and published the agency website as it existed before Trump, so that citizens will be able to compare the changes after. These are dark days for the nation and for the world.

With climate change, there are no alternative facts. We wasted decades since scientists first defined the problem of the atmosphere over-saturated with greenhouse gases. With Trump and Scott Pruitt, and apparently with the support of US Senator Marco Rubio, that wastefulness will be memorialized for history and all time. Sad!

Trump Contempt For Rule Of Law, Encapsulated In Toxic EPA Nominee Scott Pruitt ... by gimleteye

Trump EPA Nominee Answers Senators With Contempt and Extremism
January 26, 2017 John Walke, Natural Resources Defense Council

President Trump's nominee for EPA administrator, Oklahoma attorney general Scott Pruitt
AP/Sue Ogrocki

President Trump has nominated Oklahoma attorney general Scott Pruitt to be administrator for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Mr. Pruitt’s career reflects an extreme antagonism to the very agency the president wishes him to head, after Mr. Trump called for the EPA’s elimination. Mr. Pruitt’s Senate confirmation hearing was marked by him misleading senators, refusing to disclose energy companies from whom he solicited donations, and evading questions that prompted a scathing rebuke from environment committee senators.

On Trump Administration: we know what is to come, the horizon is here ... by gimleteye

Please follow my Twitter feed: @gimleteyemiami

US Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) wrote an excellent OPED for the Washington Post the other day, "Republicans want to fight climate change, but fossil-fuel bullies won't let them." (Reprinted, below.) Yesterday on C-SPAN, Senator Whitehouse and other senate Democrats grilled Trump's choice to lead the U.S. EPA, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt. The confirmation hearing was a clear indication that Senate Republicans will not show any backbone with respect to a Trump executive branch.

It was instructive in another way, as well. Scott Pruitt is an important player in the GOP task of empowering states rights over federal authority. Never mind what is in Donald Trump's words or heart: since Ronald Reagan, the nation's biggest corporate polluters have been aiming to shift regulatory authority from the federal government to the states, where they (ie. Koch-funded legislatures) can most easily shape legislation and influence law.

Although Donald Trump promised American voters he would "drain the swamp" and "make America great again", if it is accomplished it will be by right-wing ideologues. Trump is turning, much like Florida Governor Rick Scott did, straight back to the GOP insiders who thrive professionally and financially on the swamp.

There is, among many voters, an unfounded hope that the Trump administration won't do much damage, anyway, because Trump lacks a mandate. Based on the Senate confirmation hearings, they are wrong.

The media did not feature the Pruitt confirmation hearings. For one, the media showed a real antipathy to environmental issues during the presidential campaign, despite the fact that climate change and global warming are defining policy, both social and economic, of our times.

Yesterday, Sheldon Whitehouse and his colleagues (notably including Kamala Harris, the junior senator from California) were unafraid to take Scott Pruitt into the weeds of EPA and environmental policy.

What emerged was a vivid picture of the future: ideologically pure states' rights advocates who will be, in the words of one senator, "plaintiff, defendant, judge and jury" to the wholesale dismantling of federal authority.

Although Pruitt did admit that climate change is real (Trump calls it, "a hoax invented by China"), although he did admit to a federal role in limiting air pollution that wrecks the quality of life and public health of states downwind from major polluters, questions by Democratic senators like Whitehouse showed that Pruitt will be a standard-bearer for what billionaire interests -- like the Koch Brothers and Florida's Fanjul Big Sugar oligarchs -- want: the devolution of regulatory authority to the level where they can best control outcomes: state capitols. Period, end of story.

Part of what is so disillusioning for Democrats, today, is that those of a certain age believed that the progress of the Obama terms, at least on issues of culture, race, and civil discourse, confirmed battles that were fought and won. For example, Obama's victory across the spectrum of American society and the achievements of African American culture was "a done deal", a shining example to other nations where ethnic, religious, and racial divisions still prevail.

This is also true of the environment where progress of the 1970's, including the creation of the nation's most important environmental laws (by Republicans), was viewed as a foundation to address the existential threats posed by climate change and the rapid loss of biodiversity.

In fact, on the environment it turns out that fossil fuel billionaires were just waiting to permanently shift federal authority in favor of states, including a concerted effort to shape the federal judiciary and U.S. Supreme Court with "constitutional advocates".

We know what is to come. The horizon is here.


Opinions
Republicans want to fight climate change, but fossil-fuel bullies won’t let them
By Sheldon Whitehouse January 10
The writer, a Democrat, represents Rhode Island in the Senate.

Talking to my Senate Republican colleagues about climate change is like talking to prisoners about escaping. The conversations are often private, even furtive. One told me, “Let’s keep talking, but you can’t let my staff know.”

"Are you now or have you ever been a ... scientist?" ... by gimleteye

"Are you now or have you ever been a communist?" was the signature question by the House Un-American Activities Committee, lead by the late Senator Joe McCarthy. HUAC both defined the Cold War for generations of Americans and also set the bar low for political witch hunts that needlessly destroyed reputations, careers, and lives.

Back when we lived in Key West, a hero -- now gone twenty five years -- had been called to testify, or, to rat out his friends and colleagues. In this aging brain, the Cold War rattles with many ghosts that have been revived by the election of Donald Trump who holds a ruthless president and former KGB agent, Vladmir Putin, in high esteem. That is not all.

The Trump transition is following a path established in Florida with respect to the imposition of predetermined conclusions on science. Here is the Florida version.

Growth management in Florida was crafted from a bipartisan consensus in the 1980's. Its original mission was based in consensus, forged equally by Republicans as Democrats, that balancing development with the environment was good business and good policy.

Its success beyond the first handshake depended on good will of successive generations of elected representatives. There was a problem: human nature.

The premise pitted the profit imperative against deliberative science. Florida governors, from Lawton Chiles onward, began to erode the mission of growth management -- ignoring science -- in favor of big campaign donors.

Those donors cared less about what had been lost in terms of quality of life and the environment than next quarter's profit.

Donald Trump is a businessman/politician -- much like Florida's Governor Rick Scott -- whose presumed genius ("I'm, like, smart.") conflated with a vision conferred by private jet at a cruising altitude of 30,000 feet.

Over time in Florida, growth management critics with a less exalted view -- they understood perfectly well whose pockets were being lined by zoning variances and building permits in defiance of science-based wetlands or coastal protections  --  formed a chorus in the state capitol.

"Government is inefficient and wasteful and can't do its job," went part of the chorus. Another part: "Environmental regulations kill jobs."

The part that voters and taxpayers missed: that Florida's growth management agency had been slowly and deliberately hollowed out from within, even as citizens and community activists hoped for the protections in state law.

Now Trump inherits federal agencies who have also been starved from within, by the same cast and characters and motivations as in Florida, but on the federal level.

Consider the US E.P.A.

The rampant politicization of science at the E.P.A. began in the George W. Bush White House. Global warming policies were strung out and eroded by Bush appointees to federal agencies from the Beltway. During this time, just like with the Florida Department of Community Affairs -- the growth management regulatory agency -- , Republicans formed a chorus: the agency needed to be stopped, scientists needed to be turned away from global warming missions.

Bush White House operatives lead by Karl Rove prevented scientists from speaking to the public and the press except under circumstances where they controlled the message. For scientists who depend on state research dollars, the effect was extraordinarily swift and chilling.

President Barack Obama did his level best, through executive authority, to reverse the damage to federal missions to protect the environment. Now, Donald  Trump.

This is context for the alarm when Trump's energy transition team headed down the same road as Florida Governor Rick Scott, prohibiting state employees from using the terms in public meetings, "global warming" and "climate change".

With its recent "questionaire" to federal agency scientists on climate change, the Trump White House -- and its appointment of the ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson to Secretary of State -- is either heading to a public witch hunt, or, a more carefully obscured effort to weed out fact.

It is not what a majority of American voters wanted, and not even what a majority of Trump supporters endorsed, given his victory by a hair-breadth. But, who is measuring the weight of anything except those fingers tipping the scales of justice?


First Look
Trump team's 'intrusive' memo alarms federal climate scientists
Seeking the names of employees who attended climate change talks 'feels like the first draft of an eventual political enemies list,' said an employee with the Department of Energy.
By Rowena Lindsay, Staff DECEMBER 10, 2016
Christian Science Monitor


Donald Trump’s transition team has sent a list of 74 questions to the Energy Department (DOE), asking, among other things, for the identity of all employees and contractors involved in international climate meetings and domestic attempts to cut carbon emissions.

The questionnaire specifically asked for the names of all DOE employees who attended the United Nation’s annual climate talks for the past five years, employees who helped develop the President Obama’s social cost of carbon metrics, and which programs are essential to President Obama’s Climate Action Plan.

Anno Horribilis: the divided states of America, the US EPA, and a future under Donald Trump ... by gimleteye

I want to state this as clearly and as succinctly as possible: most Americans have no idea what the E.P.A. does.

I’m not even sure that Donald Trump, president-elect, understands what the US Environmental Protection Agency does, but I am sure that he has just appointed someone to head the E.P.A. whose work has been to undermine its mission.

It is never a good sign when your steward is a wrecking ball.

One of the features of the Trump ascend was knocking down government regulation. Many Americans equate the Environmental Protection Agency with job-inhibiting regulation because it is one of those generic canards repeated so often as to acquire the patina of truth.

Like rules governing power plants that emit heat-trapping atmospheric gases. Like rules establishing protections for wetlands. But even that level of detail escapes most Americans who hear from the ecosystem of disinformation: environmental rules = bad.

I have spent the better part of thirty years as a volunteer advocate for the environment, committed to restoring the damage done by polluters and government in places like Florida’s Everglades. In the early 2000's, the organization I now represent, Friends of the Everglades, found a way to hold the federal government accountable for breaking a law protecting water quality in the Everglades that the state of Florida would not protect.

We sued the E.P.A. That litigation settled in our favor but winning a battle against a federal agency is not like accounting responsibility for a traffic accident.

What the litigation did, in fact, was force the E.P.A. to hold the state accountable to the law. The federal agency had been unwilling to do so because of political pressure by the state. The state of Florida and the polluter, Big Sugar, continue to argue that a federal judge overstepped boundaries when he sided with Friends and its co-plaintiff, the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians.

Notwithstanding the federal court record, proactive protection of the environment by the EPA has ALWAYS been aspirational. You set a rule and hope it works. If it doesn't, you hope to make it stronger. The record is clear on Trump's appointees: they want the EPA to be weaker, not stronger.

Just visit EPA headquarters in Washington DC and you have all you need to know.

The agency is dismally old -- it looks like a stage set from a 1940's movie, antiquated, technologically impoverished and surrounded by barriers and extreme security. Its employees -- many absolutely dedicated to its mission -- are hostage to a hostile political culture that just became, if even possible, more hostile.

With his appointment of Scott Pruitt, the attorney general of Oklahoma — a state that produced the nation’s fiercest global warming denier, US Senator James Inhofe — Donald Trump has removed hope that there will be any strong federal authority to protect the environment in the foreseeable future. (For more, read Jane Mayer's excellent piece in this week's New Yorker Magazine, "Scott Pruitt, Trump's Industry pick for the E.P.A.")Before setting foot in office, Donald Trump has removed hope for our nation's air and water and a leadership role for the U.S. in solving the planetary crisis of climate change.

This comes at an extraordinarily dangerous time, as logarithmic impacts of global warming become visible in our day-to-day life. Miami, for example, is setting record temperatures for December now and temperature anomalies in the Arctic winter are frightening.

What Trump has decided — with no evidence beyond a predetermined, impulsive conclusion — is that states can deal with environmental problems one by one. What Friends has learned is that it is always easier for environmental rules to be weakened by the state.

Trump is playing right into the hands of big polluters/ campaign contributors like the Koch Brothers who already dominate state legislatures and state executive offices, preventing environmental rules from taking hold when those rules impact their profits. This isn't speculation. This is fact.

Friends of the Everglades sued the federal government in the early 2000's because there was no state law to hold Big Sugar accountable for its pollution of the dying River of Grass. All Friends had was the federal Clean Water Act that specifically delineated the responsibilities of the federal government to protect the national interest — the interest of all taxpayers. Not Florida. Not Oklahoma. Not Texas.

The aspirational goal of the E.P.A. -- notwithstanding lawsuits -- is under assault, today, by a president-elect and his appointees — including the designated attorney general of the United States, Sen. Jeff Sessions — of Oklahoma.

One of the observations imprinted on my memory from these three decades of E.P.A. failures is how environmental regulations in America prove dysfunctional government: the metastatic growth of a lobbyist culture built around protecting corporate profits by hobbling the intent of laws like the Clean Water Act. The agency has been so hacked that it is literally now designed to fail.

Yet, in its science and informational, data-gathering missions the E.P.A. and other federal scientific agencies are the sole supplier of essential tools for taxpayers and voters if we will only understand them.

What Donald Trump said to his supporters was that he will “drain the swamp”. Before even setting a foot in the White House, his appointments already demonstrate that science and fact will be BIG losers in the United States while he is president.

Republican clamoring, for example, to cut the staff and budgets of NASA's climate gathering mission will achieved by a Trump White House. They argue bureaucratic redundancy and mission creep, but that is another lie. They claim that another federal agency -- NOAA, under a Commerce secretary billionaire who made his fortune scavenging assets -- will do that work. No it won't.

Trump will be president of a dessicated federal landscape dotted with leadership by corporate brands like his own. While president, he and his family will continue to profit from his brand. (The Republican National Committee will hold its annual meeting in a Trump DC hotel.)

Diversification of species and environmental safeguards will drift away, left to states controlled by legislatures captured by the contributions from big polluters; exactly the case of Florida and its opportunistic Gov. Rick Scott and his designated successor, Adam Putnam, now state secretary of agriculture whose family farm was purchased by the state -- before he sought elected office -- at five times its appraised value.

Perhaps there are enough Republicans in the US Senate to join Democrats in ferociously opposing Trump appointees who require confirmation. If they haven't already, the American people need a wake-up call.

Florida's water quality catastrophe: taxation without representation ... by gimleteye

June 2016 Martin County, photo courtesy of James Breig

Florida taxpayers and voters should be nauseated by the toxic slime puking from Lake Okeechobee onto both Florida coasts. Tourists certainly are. It takes an even stronger stomach to listen to Florida Governor Rick Scott's non-responsive answers on who bears responsibility for the state's worst environmental catastrophe: the state does.

Social media sites like Bullsugar.org and SWFL Clean Water Movement, are filled with photos and videos of toxic blue-green algae coating iconic real estate with visually compelling disgust. That algae is being linked by scientists to brain disorders in humans, like Alzheimer's. That algae is tied to horrendous skin infections resistant to standard antibiotic treatment. All of this is adding up to a massive problem for Florida's tourism-dependent businesses, silence from the Florida Department of Health, and evasions by Gov. Rick Scott.

Yesterday, Gov. Scott feebly answered the media in Palm Beach, not far from Martin County where local commissioners listened to a crowd of furious citizens. According to a WPTV report, "He (Scott) didn't take any blame for the growing problem, saying the problem lies with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. He said the Corps wasn't being a "good partner" and needed to spend the money to improve infrastructure around Lake Okeechobee so there isn't a constant need to remove water. "The state, as you know, doesn't have any control over Lake Okeechobee. The federal government has got to put the money in to be able to hold more water there when we have a rainy year like we have now. It's 100% controlled by the federal government," the governor said Tuesday." ("Florida Gov. Rick Scott aware of algae problems, blames feds")

Let's parse Gov. Scott's comments. What the governor means is that Lake Okeechobee needs its levies reinforced because otherwise with high rainfall events, there is a threat of breach and flooding downstream residents. If he were honest, he would acknowledge that while the responsibility for maintaining Lake O hardware belongs to the federal government, the responsibility for the software, the state's water quality regulation, monitoring and enforcement, belongs to the state of Florida.

That is what Gov. Scott won't say and that's what makes his blame-shifting so transparent: permitting and enforcement of water quality is strictly Florida's responsibility.

Long ago, the nation's top environmental agency, the U.S. EPA, "delegated" the administration of water resources to the state of Florida. In the interval, at each and every point in time that the EPA sought to bring Florida back into line on water quality problems, the agency has been attacked by the GOP.

Let's name names: Gov. Rick Scott and his predecessors including Jeb Bush, Agriculture Secretary Adam Putnam and his Republican predecessors, Senate president Joe Negron and his predecessors (Ken Pruitt, John Thrasher), Attorney General Pam Bondi and her predecessors, Representative Matt Caldwell and his predecessors (Jimmy Patronis, Gaston Cantens, Marco Rubio) -- all worked overtime on behalf of Lake Okeechobee polluters like Big Sugar and Big Ag interests north of Lake Okeechobee.

Don't forget: the Florida Congressional delegation bears enormous responsibility for pressuring against EPA involvement in Florida's water quality catastrophe. For Gov. Scott to "blame the feds" is just plain bullshit.

The U.S. EPA has been so hammered by right-wing extremists representing polluters, the agency is not just ghost-like in Florida; its top staffers would just as soon wash their hands of Florida entirely as read about the devastated St. Lucie or Caloosahatchee Rivers.

What would you do as a civil servant aiming for retirement if, for thirty years, every time you piped up your voice about awful foot-dragging by Florida on water quality standards -- narrative instead of hard numerical criteria -- Big Sugar picked up the phone and berated a member of Congress whose campaign they had funded?

Democrats bear responsibility for pay-to-play politics and the devastating impacts on protecting the environment, but to be fair to Florida's bedraggled Dems, it has been a very long time since they had any influence over the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, the state agency that could but won't make polluters pay for the costs of their pollution.

The mainstream media should not let Gov. Scott or his designated hitters get away with blaming the feds. "The Florida Department of Environmental Protection has the primary responsibility to establish the State NPDES program priorities that are consistent with national NPDES goals and objectives." ("National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System Memorandum Of Agreement Between The State of Florida and The U.S. EPS Region 4", Nov. 30, 2007.) That's from a memorandum signed by the then-Florida Secretary of the Department of Environmental Protection Mike Sole, now a senior executive for Florida Power and Light that the state of Florida recently let off the hook for contaminating water resources of a national park.

NPDES is the National Pollutant Discharge System, and if Florida had tough, numeric water quality standards tied to tough best management practices on farmland tied to NPDES permits it enforced, Florida taxpayers and voters might have more than a crock of shit to bathe in this Fourth of July weekend, the day when Americans stood up against taxation without representation.

Friends of the Everglades: headed to the US Supreme Court for a third time? … by gimleteye

Friends of the Everglades is a tiny, Miami-based environmental organization. Yet it is the lead plaintiff in one of the nation's most critical court cases related to water pollution; a case that has been heard twice in the US Supreme Court but not yet settled. There is a huge amount at stake. Huge, as in whether polluters will ever be held fully accountable for their costs of pollution.

Our entire political system is organized along the lines of socializing these costs of pollution -- and shifting profits to large corporations. If you want a close, narrow view of how it works, just check out today's blog post by G.O.D. outlining the massive campaign contributions flowing to an incumbent first-term county commissioner in Miami-Dade, Lynda Bell, who is fighting against a well-organized challenger. Bell's signature achievement has been to consistently represent inside, special interests that are determined to roll-back environmental regulations. While she, herself, has little clue about the long history and struggle to put in place regulations that were meant to protect water quality in Miami-Dade, her campaign funders certainly do -- and if they don't, all they need to do is hear the word "anti-regulation" and their wallets flop open.

The bottom line to the question: shouldn't the polluter pay? Not if your government has anything to do with the outcome. It wants YOU to pay.

Water Policy: EPA to appeal decision sending transfer rule back to agency

U.S. EPA will appeal a federal district court ruling that sent its controversial water transfer rule back to the agency for reconsideration.
Court watchers on both sides of the case had been anxiously waiting to see if EPA would appeal the ruling from the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

In March, that court sent the George W. Bush-era water transfer rule back to the agency, holding that its "justification doesn't hold water."

The 2008 rule exempted government transfers between bodies of water from obtaining federal discharge permits under the Clean Water Act, as long as those transfers don't involve industrial, municipal or commercial use.

So much time lost, educating the public on climate change … by gimleteye

"Sea level rise is an urgent issue for coastal environmental planners for the very reason that it lacks urgency for directors of public works. If environmentalists do not lay the necessary paperwork today to institutionalize a gradual abandonment of the coastal plain as sea level rises, the public will almost certainly call upon engineers to protect their homes in the years to come."

That paragraph concludes a report authored EPA's James G. Titus, Office of Policy Analysis. It was published in 1991.

Twenty years ago, I recall the annual meeting of the Everglades Coalition and a scientist who staffed a lonely table on global warming and sea level rise. No one paid attention. Pah, was the general feeling: "We have Everglades restoration to worry about."

I first read Titus' report, "Greenhouse Effect of Sea Level Rise: The Cost of Holding Back the Sea", ten years after it was published. And when I did, I placed a call to Mr. Titus. The year was 2002.

The nation was not focused on climate change. Terrorists and 9/11 dominated public attention. And the economy. The main domestic policy consideration at the time was how to stimulate construction and housing to "rescue" the economy. There was an aspect to fueling the national boom in housing -- a goal whose political origins were planned in large respects right here, in Miami and South Florida -- that required attention of senior political appointees: how to limit the scope of government regulators charged with protecting the nation's environmental laws.

During the Bush White House years, the US EPA was the target of conservatives who had successfully deployed operatives within the agency. How those operatives suppressed global warming is a matter of public record.

I had a hard time getting through to Titus, and when I finally did, Titus was only allowed to speak with me -- a civilian -- so long as a public information officer participated in on the conversation. Needless to say, the point was to intimidate.

In the past decade, an enormous amount of excellent science has filled in, around Titus' 1991 warning. In just the past few weeks, with the release of the third National Climate Assessment by the Obama White House, additional attention has been called to threats to the nation's economy and in particular to the most vulnerable regions like South Florida.

Now, with political control of the US Senate in the balance this coming November, it bears remarking that on climate change issues the United States could actually slide backwards. Florida Senator Marco Rubio, who has refuse to meet with scientists, denies the human causes of climate change but stated, over the weekend, the latest position of the radical right: even if there is climate change, there is nothing we can do about it.

“I don’t agree with the notion that some are putting out there, including scientists, that somehow there are actions we can take today that would actually have an impact on what’s happening in our climate," Rubio said in an interview that aired Sunday on ABC’s This Week. “Our climate is always changing."

Rubio is wrong. The weather is always changing. The climate is now changing in ways the planet last experienced long before the emergence of our own species.

Here is one indication of change. Until recently, the Miami Herald and the local public radio affiliate, WLRN, both ignored global warming (read our archives). On Sunday, CBS investigative reporter Jim DeFede sidled up to climate change with guests Broward County commissioner Kristin Jacobs and UM professor Harold Wanless. DeFede never paid much attention to the environment. It is notable when he does. One could see DeFede's mind at work as he wrapped up the half hour, along the lines that nature kept us out of Florida for a long time (meaning the heat and mosquitoes) and soon it is going to kick us out.

But it so, so much more than "nature kicking us out". If that happens, the pain and hardship are going to be unimaginable. That's what the mainstream media and reporters like DeFede need to drill down on, now, for the public because right wing extremists, like Marco Rubio, believe that reversing climate change is "too expensive for the economy".

Really? The costs of climate disruption tower over the future. A lot of time has been wasted because the United States failed to lead the world on global warming and reforming energy production and consumption.

Voters have a very clear choice: if the US Senate changes control and leadership passed to Big Coal's Mitch McConnell, the United States will be pointed back to the Dark Ages. I don't mean this, as a figure of speech.

Miami-Dade's Doug Yoder to speak today about "CLIMATE READY" Infrastructure to national audience, except that Miami-Dade County is NOT CLIMATE READY … by Albert Slap

(Note by gimleteye: Albert Slap is an advisor to Biscayne Bay Waterkeeper, the lead organization in federal court fighting the proposed consent decree between the US EPA and Miami-Dade County. Readers will recall (search our archives) that Miami-Dade County is guilty of violating the Clean Water Act in the horrendous wastewater infrastructure serving over two million residents plus annual visitors and (virtually for free) the cruise ship industry.

Doug Yoder is a career executive with Miami Dade Water and Sewer and the agency's point person in federal litigation pitting Biscayne Bay Waterkeeper against the county and US EPA. The key point -- EOM readers will recognize -- is the unstated yet official policy of Miami-Dade County to subsidize low cost growth and incentivize construction and development by holding water rates to some of the lowest in the nation. Now, Miami-Dade County taxpayers are not only being asked to play catch up, but to fund nearly two billion of infrastructure 'improvements' that have NOT been calibrated to account for rising sea levels due to climate change. To be climate ready would entail accepting much higher costs. Note that municipalities like the City of Miami Beach are in the midst of a half billion dollar investment just to solve flooding problems on local roadways and predicted worsening in coming years. Ignoring water while claiming to be a good steward of water resources is a defining characteristic of Miami-Dade County. But the county is scarcely the only irresponsible drunk at the bar. There is the state of Florida and US EPA on either side. The conflicts between the state and federal government are constantly at play in the unrelenting, unremitting politics of division driven by the extreme right. Through the decades, the EPA has been in a position of near-constant capitulation notwithstanding the GOP's mao-maoing on 'the burden of unnecessary regulation'. It is enough to make an honest man tear his hair out.)

The US EPA is hosting a “EPA Climate Ready Water Utilities Webinar – 4/9/14" called, "Decision-Making in Practice-Florida Case Studies/ An introduction to how utilities in Florida are using different planning methods to prepare for projected climate impacts." The presenters will share their experiences planning for sea-level rise, storm surge, saltwater intrusion and rainfall variability.” The time is: 1 - 2 pm EST. If you are interested to hear one of the speakers at the webinar, Miami-Dade WASD top executive Doug Yoder, register here: https://www.thetestportal.com/crwuwebinarseries2

It will be interesting to listen to what Doug Yoder has to say in light of his sworn deposition and MDC’s sworn answers to interrogatories in Biscayne Bay Waterkeeper’s case against Miami-Dade County.

Recall that Yoder and Miami-Dade County have admitted the following:

1. The consent decree with EPA was never based on any sea level rise model, such as the US Army Corps of Engineers’ model (which is part of the 4-County Climate Compact), even though the design period of the sewer system rebuild extends to the year 2075. Zero sea level rise is the current basis of design.

2. The consent decree never contained and does not now contain (nor is there any formal commitment) any requirement to make the MDC sewer system rebuild climate ready. MDC has no specific plans for preparing for climate impacts in the rebuild and no funds have been committed for such purposes. No site-specific vulnerability and adaptation studies have been done for the 3 POTWs or major pump stations in the MDC sewer system rebuild. Zero climate impact protection is the current basis of design.

3. MDC never even considered or studied climate impact protections for the consent decree rebuild of its 3 Publicly Owned Treatment Plants until Biscayne Bay Waterkeeper brought its Clean Water Act citizen suit on this and other issues. After receiving Waterkeeper’s expert reports showing the extreme vulnerability of the MDC POTWs from climate impacts (storm surge, flooding and sea level rise), MDC hired its own experts (Hazen and Sawyer) who agreed with Waterkeeper experts that climate impact protections were necessary. While the Hazen and Sawyer study was completed in early 2013, there is still no binding written commitment on the part of MDC to make the POTWs climate ready.

It will be interesting to see how the EPA, which has for two years fought “tooth and nail” against Waterkeeper and other groups' efforts to make the MDC multi-billion dollar sewer rebuild truly climate ready, will try to claim some moral “high ground”, here, when it has failed miserably to get MDC to raise up its planned sewer system rebuild one inch.

Mean sea level trend, Key West FL
http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?stnid=8724580

Incredibly poor leadership by the EPA ... by gimleteye

Florida is the extraordinary state that focuses the failures of the US EPA into one irreducible lump of coal.

It is the federal agency that refused to hold the state accountable for turning over Florida waters to polluters. The bill of crimes and misdemeanors by the agency also includes failing to enforce against wetlands violations routinely approved by the US Army Corps of Engineers. When its senior most Everglades supervisor, Richard Harvey, criticized the path of governmental efforts to restore the dying River of Grass, the agency quickly muzzled him.

When President Obama says it is now time to deal with emissions of temperature raising gases, the EPA is the agency that is supposed to be the agent of change. Hah.

EPA is the federal agency that is now cutting yet another bad deal in order to avoid holding Miami-Dade County responsible for its massive violations of the Clean Water Act in treatment of wastewater. What the agency refuses to do is factor in sea level rise and impacts to the infrastructure upgrades recommend by the county.

For its part, the county knows it can push EPA around. It always has. This is the fruit of the radical GOP right promoting and pushing "states' rights", stuffing the judiciary with severe consequences especially in Florida where, compared to other states, the EPA has been under constant attack by polluters like the billionaire Fanjuls and other Big Sugar interests.

Climate change is a runaway train that is moving very fast, away from decades of toil by environmentalists to hold agencies like the EPA accountable -- environmentalists who held hope that it would be easier to persuade than the state, dominated as it is by local campaign contributors from the Growth Machine.

Here is a recent publication by the re-insurance industry, adding yet more ammunition to arguments why it is time to batten down our coastline and water resource infrastructure. The report singles out Florida. It also contains some very florid wording. Consider this example:

"On a more general level, there are growing concerns about the indirect impact of changes in the risk landscape which question the sustainability of the catastrophe risk business in many countries. For some regions, the combination of risking risk levels and a heavily regulated market might lead to decreasing commercial viability. One option to address the insurability challenges of rising risk levels is to engage in efforts to couple risk transfer to risk reduction."

That's a lot of words to describe the flight of the insurance industry from Florida, leaving property owners at the mercy of Gov. Rick Scott, the climate-change denying Florida legislature, and Citizens Insurance whose executives are paid millions per year to sit around and jack up rates to the very edge of affordability.

  GA2013-Warming of the Oceans

For a good summary of the Miami-Dade / EPA mess, read this:

Despite Obama Plan, Court Urged To Block Sewer Pact Over Climate Impacts

Even as the administration is promising to ensure that EPA makes infrastructure more resilient to the effects of climate change, environmentalists are urging a federal court to block entry of an EPA consent decree requiring sewer upgrades because they charge it does not account f or increased risks from rising sea levels due to climate change.

Biscayne Bay Waterkeeper, Inc. June 25 filed a formal complaint asking a federal district court in Miami to block entry of an EPA-negotiated consent decree with Miami-Dade County, FL, alleging that it will not ensure future compliance with the Clean Water Act (CWA) because it does not account for sea level rise. “The draft Consent Decree’s Capital Plan will not achieve or maintain compliance with CWA, primarily because it fails to address sea level rise and climate impacts that will, if not appropriately accounted for, cause major failures in the sewage collection and treatment system during its useful life,” the group said in its June 25 complaint.

US EPA believes in climate change but doesn't believe in sea level rise? ... by gimleteye

The EPA is the biggest disappointment of the Obama administration. It is the single most distorted of federal agencies, thanks to pressure from Congress and its corporate funders.

The agency's record in Florida, with respect to "delegating" water pollution responsibilities to the state is disgraceful.

Now comes the matter of climate change. The media has focused on EPA's fight to acknowledge its rule making authority with respect to air pollution and gases that substantially cause global warming. Practically no attention has been paid to what is happening with respect to EPA's responsibility for managing its permitting role for water pollution, related to water and wastewater infrastructure in coastal zones like Miami, where sea level rise is certain to have major impacts.

There is no point appealing to the House of Representatives, controlled by Republicans who condemn environmental regulation, the EPA in particular, and deny global warming.

The US Senate, under Democratic majority control, is a different matter. It might be possible to gain attention to EPA, there.

Since President Obama is clearly distracted from the business of righting the ship at the EPA, one wonders if any Senate Democrats are paying attention to the mismanagement of priorities by agency officials. Those Democrats who believe that global warming is an imminent threat could start by training their view on Miami-Dade, where EPA is apparently ready to sign off on a $1.5 billion consent agreement with the county that fails to incorporate or even analyze the impacts of sea level rise.

Senators could start with a DC hearing, calling to testify experts in Miami-Dade and Biscayne Bay Waterkeeper who have tried, so far, with no success to attract EPA's lazy eyes.

NY Times focuses on Apalachicola Bay: in fact, no different from Biscayne Bay or Florida Bay. Once gone, it's gone ... by gimleteye

The state of Florida is ringed in a sea of pollution. In Miami-Dade elected officials, having shoveled under the carpet adequate pollution infrastructure until a lawsuit by Biscayne Waterkeeper (and, now, a $1.5 billion sewerage fix that is inadequate to the tasks), ignores its own staff acknowledgement of sea level rise associated with global warming.

Pollution could be tamed. We could be taking steps to reverse the massive changes to the atmosphere by carbon dioxide. Natural resources and our quality of life could be protected. Civilization doesn't have to be on a collision course with the kinds of stark, bleak choices on the horizon. The problem is politics.

In particular, the overwhelming influence of elected officials for whom protecting the environment is on the scale from; doing nothing at all, to, the path of least resistance. In the first case, "doing nothing", accurately characterizes the Republican approach to environmental protection. In the second case, the path of least resistance describes the aversion of Democrats to taking hard positions on rules and regulations, for fear of further inflaming campaign contributors and ideologues on the radical right.

The GOP mantra is, in brief, there is nothing government can do that industry can't do better -- and even if this argument falls flat with its own middle -- the GOP shrugs that China and India are the problem. The Democrats can't summon the enthusiasm for the environment, or for federal regulations like those that might be imposed by the EPA, because the Beltway game fills its roles with lobbyists and the revolving door with regulators. William Butler Yeats described it well, "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are filled with passionate intensity."

This year, Floridians witnessed sinkholes swallowing a man asleep at home, a terrible deal struck between the state and EPA allowing nutrient pollution to plague the state's waters without standards sufficient to block the sources, an Everglades bill that pushes Big Sugar's prerogatives to the front of the line, and now according to a recent NY Times report; a water supply crisis in the Florida Panhandle.

The decline of Apalachicola Bay tracks the same miasmas afflicting other Florida water bodies, historic springs, rivers, and estuarine environments.

In "Thirst for Fresh Water Threatens Apalachicola Bay Fisheries", the New York Times documents an environmental disaster many decades in the making.

This slow motion dissolving is no different from what is happening on the Caloosahatchee River, the St. Lucie and its algae blooms, in Florida Bay affecting the entire Keys or Biscayne Bay. “Our message is that this is worth saving,” said Chris Millender, 38, of the Apalachicola and its historic oyster fishery. Millender is a lifelong oysterman. “Once it’s gone, it’s gone.”

Take a look at the 2012 presidential results in a few Florida counties bordering Apalachicola Bay whose economies depend on clean waters:

Bay County ... 71.2 percent for Mitt Romney
Gulf County ... 70 percent for Mitt Romney
Franklin County ... 65.2 percent for Mitt Romney

Then there are the 2012 election results from Georgia and five counties surrounding Lake Lanier, the largest source of freshwater to the estuary, its flows comprising about 80 percent of the river basin. Combined with the Chattahoochee River, Flint River, and Ochlockonee River they drain a watershed of over 20,000 square miles.

Hall County ... 77.5 percent for Mitt Romney
Forsyth County ... 80.7 percent for Mitt Romney
Dawson County ... 86.4 percent for Mitt Romney
Gwinnett County ... 54 percent for Mitt Romney
Lumpkin County ... 79.4 percent for Mitt Romney

The Apalachicola Bay Chamber of Commerce trumpets, "Miles of pristine beaches, endless shallow bays and marshes, fresh water rivers provide great opportunities for fishing, boating, kayaking, birding or hiking."

The problem is that the Florida Chamber of Commerce is exactly on the opposite side of protecting natural resources. It fought a long, prolonged battle to eviscerate growth management that might have moderated the influence of sprawl in the Panhandle, and it fought against pollution standards in this session of Congress-- enlisting the Florida delegation to push back hard against EPA's efforts to reign in nutrient pollution.

What is there to say about the behavior of voters who continue to elect county commissioners, city commissioners, state legislators, members of Congress, and Presidents for whom protecting air and water falls so far on the list of priorities as though in inverse proportion to the severe deference given to polluters?

It is easier to know the facts of Apalachicola's 1,162 species of plants, including the largest natural stand of tupelo trees in the world, 308 species of birds, 186 species of fish, 57 species of mammals, and the highest species density of amphibians and reptiles in all of North America, than it is to know the minds of Florida voters who consistently vote against their own interests.

It is always someone else. 23 years ago, the state of Florida began a legal battle to protect water quantity flowing out of Georgia.

The Times: "In 2009, Florida thought it had won the long battle. A senior Federal District Court judge ruled that the Army Corps of Engineers could not draw more water from Lake Lanier. The decision would have freed up more water for Florida. But in 2011, the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, in Atlanta, reversed the ruling. It decided that the corps had the authority to allocate additional water from the reservoir to supply Atlanta. The Supreme Court declined to hear the case."

Back in 2007, the Washington Post reported on the water crisis in Georgia, "States Compete for Water from Shrinking Lake Lanier": "This whole situation has been like Katrina in slow motion," said David Goldberg, a "smart growth" advocate and Atlanta-based writer on urban affairs. "It's the same confluence of factors. There's Mother Nature, the Army Corps of Engineers and the utter failure to plan for the growth of metro Atlanta."

Worth noting: that decision by the Karl Rove/ Bush 11th Circuit Court of Appeals located in Atlanta sealed the fate of fishermen in Apalachicola who mainly vote Republican.

The EPA and Miami-Dade County fumble on climate change ... by gimleteye

On climate change adaptation, the rubber meets the road in the most highly developed areas of Florida that are also flood prone and virtually at sea level. Consider, the following.

The EPA is the chief federal agency advancing policy agendas related to climate change. In critical ways, EPA is failing the true test of both its commitment and authority, under federal laws. Granted, Congress has proven notoriously unwilling to use federal legislation to mandate steps that could have avoided climate change's cascading effects. The rationales offered to the public; everything from outright denial to pollution from China and India.

In Florida, it has taken a series of Clean Water Act lawsuits by environmental groups to bring EPA to confront violations of law by local government on water quality. Absent federal lawsuits and despite favorable rulings by the federal judiciary, the EPA is a grudging enforcer of laws passed by Congress and approved by presidents.

As the impacts of climate change accelerate, laws governing water and air quality -- under the regulatory responsibilities of the EPA -- are inevitably colliding with rising seas. Put another way: accommodating, adapting, and mitigating the costs of climate change are running straight in the buzz saw of local politics. That level of government in the United States proves, every day, it is least capable of adjusting horizons beyond the requirements for re-election.

Yesterday, Chief Judge of the Federal Court for the Southern District of Florida, Frederico Moreno, ruled in favor of Biscayne Bay Waterkeeper’s motion for unrestricted intervention in the EPA’s Clean Water Act pollution enforcement case against Miami-Dade County. The issue involves wastewater infrastructure that serves more than 2 million residents and visitors, including cruise ship passengers who pass through Miami without giving a second thought that Miami-Dade is the most populous and the state's most politically influential.

If it is true that we can't do without water -- no one disputes that -- , then it is also true that civilized society can't do without efficient, non-polluting wastewater disposal. It far from a sexy subject, but not a single benefit of industrial society would be available without a wastewater system that protects people's health and the environment.

In 1994, after a prolonged federal Clean Water Act lawsuit by Sierra Club, Friends of the Everglades and other environmentalists, Miami-Dade county entered into a consent agreement with the US EPA to clean up its act; an act that included using pipes to flush sewage into nearby ocean waters. In 2012, nearly twenty years later, environmentalists sued again when EPA's analysis showed the county wastewater infrastructure to be in a state of decrepit, alarming decline. The manifestations that finally attracted EPA's intervention included frequent sewer line breaks and treatment plants whose conditions were nothing short of disgusting.

At least a billion and a half dollars were deemed necessary, through this latest "tranche" of negotiations, to simply bring the wastewater system up to codes. But there is a further problem: climate change.

Higher sea levels, certain to afflict the world's coast lines in coming decades, put special pressure on Florida's wastewater infrastructure. Here, because of the porous underlying geology, water tables rise quickly and ebb -- depending on rainfall, flooding conditions, but also salt water intrusion. The pressure of incoming seas and over-pumping aquifers has already turned some coastal well field to salt. We can't drink salt water, and under the enormous pressures of salt water intrusion, Miami-Dade's complex wastewater handling pipes and pumps will simply collapse.

While this is not an abstract threat, it is one that elected officials -- at all levels of government -- are having great difficulty grasping. The explanation is also simple. Politics flows to campaign contributions the same way water flows downhill.

Those campaign contributions reinforce a status quo that claims one of its highest priorities to be stable, predictable regulations. This turns out to be a chief complaint by business groups and special interests that dominate Tallahassee and Congress: that EPA's federal regulatory mandates impose excessive burdens because they introduce unpredictability to mortgage cycles and depreciation schedules. Those same businesses -- especially ones that profit by serving the nation's infrastructure needs -- are paradoxically resistant, to the point of investing in the crippling of environmental rules and regulations, despite science and facts pointing to sea level rise impacts within the very time decadal frames they stubbornly attach to business cycles.

Since its inception in the early 1970s, the EPA has been under withering pressure by business groups, including the US Chamber of Commerce. In recent decades, even under Democratic control of Congress and the White House, the agency has been afflicted with a kind of bipolar disorder on its most important regulatory issues. It is hard to conclude that the federal government's response to the greatest threat to civilization -- climate change -- is anything out of the ordinary.

It's website breezily offers: "The Facts: Do you have questions about climate change? Explore the answers to some of the most commonly answered questions, here." But it easier to find a needle in a haystack than political courage at EPA. Its administrators and senior officials, including those at the US Department of Justice, would respond: it is not our role to show political courage.

And so Miami-Dade County touts its fleet of hybrid cars and various green shoots. While blue ribbon panels, engineers and experts resolutely discuss rising sea levels -- even the eventual incorporation of detailed elevation maps in land use maps is treated like a state secret -- local government officials dawdle and twiddle their thumbs. EPA, on the one hand, is the nation's top communicator of climate change and, on the regulatory hand can scarcely lift a finger. If you are a small polluter, watch out. But if you are a big polluter, you are held to a different standard.

Today, thirteen members of the Miami-Dade County Commission are racing to vote on May 21st, on what the Waterkeeper calls its "zero sea level rise consent decree" with EPA. The County has not heeded any of Biscayne Bay Waterkeeper’s nationally-recognized experts, who counsel against parts of the plan and in favor of much more rigorous sea level rise and storm impact studies to inform the BOCC’s multi-billion dollar capital decisions on its wastewater treatment plants.

EPA says it would not be doing anything to support climate readiness in the Miami-Dade consent decree. It is deploying a fig leaf of a disguise, arguing that the BBWK’s sewer case is really a NIMBY (“not in my backyard”) case brought forward by local Key Biscayne residents who want to move the county's major sewage treatment plant away from its neighbor, Virginia Key.

Recently, 16 national and local environmental groups stated otherwise in a letter to Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez. The groups implored the mayor to take into account the taxpayer interest in protecting billions of dollars of investment in infrastructure from destruction by implacable rising seas.

BBWK says, "This fight is about sound science and engineering and proper planning in light of future climate change impacts on Miami-Dade County – not NIMBY. If EPA as an Agency really believes that this is a NIMBY case to get a wastewater treatment plant relocated off of Virginia Key, then its staff has fundamental problems with both reading and listening... BBWK is advocating sound science and engineering in the County’s planning process for the required sewer system fix.

The collapse of EPA in Miami-Dade County is a dismal predictor of what climate change adaptation really means. If this is the best the wealthiest nation in the world can do, imagine the prospects for change in other rapidly developing nations. The forecast: it will take many and even repetitive Superstorm Sandy's -- like the one that devastated parts of the New York and New Jersey coast -- before the objectors melt away.

Environmental Groups Appeal To Mayor Carlos Gimenez and EPA Regional Chief Gwen Keyes Fleming: Don't spend $1.5 billion to be washed away by rising seas

In a May 13th letter, a coalition of environmental groups including Biscayne Water Keeper and prominent leaders urged both the County and the US EPA to consider a "reasoned, sound science approach to re-building the County's sewage system, to make the massive taxpayer investment 'climate ready' and resilient."

The experts retained by environmental organizations have reviewed the County's proposed settlement with EPA, forced by their lawsuit in federal court, and determined "it will not survive sea level rise and climate impacts such as increased storm surge and erosion." According to FAU's Dr. Leonard Berry and Professor Ricardo Alvarez, "... proper re-build will stop the widespread violations of the Clean Water Act and make the Miami-Dade County sewer system "climate ready" and resilient for the current and next generation of residents, businesses and visitors."

The antiquated and illegal waste water system will be among the first infrastructure malfunctions to jeopardize the south Florida economy, even before higher water levels impede what we take for granted as normal economic activities. That is why decisions today bear so heavily on a future within sight.

EPA CAVES TO POLITICAL PRESSURE FROM POLLUTERS AND STATE ON NUMERIC NUTRIENT POLLUTION STANDARDS FOR FLORIDA!

NOTE: The EPA's decision to let Florida off the hook for establishing tough nutrient pollution standards was just the latest evidence that President Obama, in his final term, is unwilling to confront the special interests who dominate Florida despite the fact that they are his sworn political enemies. It is a profound disappointment that there is no federal authority willing to stand up to the gerry-mandering that constitutes environmental protection in Florida. Baselines constantly shift. Diversionary tactics are trotted out as "progress".

For those curious to know some of the fact underlying the massive nutrient pollution of Florida, tune into the NPR Diane Rehm Show podcast from today: "The Science of Sinkholes".  I'd venture that Governor Rick Scott had never heard of karst geology before becoming governor, and that 90 percent of the Florida legislature could care less. The Rehm podcast provides an illuminating view of the facts -- indirectly addressing how and why is our water in Florida so polluted and regulatory failure of government agencies.

So far is policy is concerned, the following press statement was issued today by the Conservancy of Southwest Florida.

"Last Friday, the US Environmental Protection Agency and the Florida Department of Environmental Protection announced an “agreement in principle”. Below is a synopsis of how that action affects the ongoing effort for developing and implementing numeric nutrient pollution criteria for all fresh and estuarine Class I & Class III waters, as well as in-stream numeric downstream protective values for all Class III flowing waters flowing to freshwater lakes or estuaries/coastal waters.

What was supposed to be covered per the Clean Water Act and 2009 Consent Decree?

U.S. ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY, FLORIDA DEPARTMENT OF ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION SELL OUT FLORIDIANS

March 15, 2013
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT: David Guest, Earthjustice Attorney (850) 228-3337
Monica Reimer, Earthjustice attorney (850) 681-0031

TAMPA – Florida’s waterways will be covered with more slimy algae outbreaks if a deeply flawed plan announced today between the Florida Department of Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is allowed to go forward.

- The plan must be reviewed in federal court to ensure that it complies with the Clean Water Act.

- The public was cut out of the back-room dealings which led to the flawed plan.

“We have record numbers of dead manatees washing up on southwest Florida right now, in the prime of our tourist season,” said Earthjustice attorney David Guest. “Where is the leadership? This is an absolute sell out. This bogus plan gives deep-pocketed polluters even more loopholes. And what do we, the public, get? More gross, slimy algae in the water.”

The DEP and EPA’s faulty plan fails to set enforceable limits on the amount of sewage, manure, and fertilizer allowed in Florida waters – especially in South Florida and the ailing Everglades. These pollutants spark slimy outbreaks which are harming Florida’s tourism business, contaminating drinking water, killing wildlife, and threatening public health. Red tide and algae outbreaks are worsened by runoff containing sewage, manure and fertilizer – so-called “nutrient pollution.”
“Obviously, the environmental regulators are bending to politically powerful polluters instead of protecting the public’s right to have clean water to drink and healthy places to fish, boat and swim,” Guest added.

The flawed plan also comes at a time when Gov. Rick Scott’s Administration is firing experienced DEP staffers and replacing them with people who come from polluting industries.

The EPA first began working to set pollution limits for Florida in 2009 – part of a settlement in a 2008 Clean Water Act suit filed by Earthjustice in the Northern District of Florida on behalf of the Florida Wildlife Federation, the Conservancy of Southwest Florida, the Environmental Confederation of Southwest Florida, St. John’s Riverkeeper, and the Sierra Club. The suit challenged the decade-long delay by the state and federal governments in setting limits for the pollution.

The public supports the EPA pollution limits. In response to a call for action, more than 40,000 citizens wrote the White House in 2012, urging the Obama Administration to stand firm on imposing effective federal standards for Florida waters. More than 18,000 people wrote the EPA this year, urging enforceable limits.

A victory for Florida's environment, finally ... by gimleteye

On election eve, there was a crisis at Boston's Logan International Airport: so many private jets had landed to celebrate Romney's victory, there was no space left to fit them all. Of the owners, it is safe to guess that a high percentage of them were ready to celebrate the immediate impact on the one agency they had set out to destroy: the US Environmental Protection Agency.

Despite the fact the EPA has been whittled to the bone -- its daily operations comprise less than one percent of federal expenditures -- the federal agency is charged with regulations that could, if implemented and enforced, crack down on polluters who dominate state legislatures and local governments like ours, in Miami-Dade.

Over the course of decades Florida's polluters, including the ubiquitous Big Sugar billionaires, had succeeded in rebranding their destructive activities as economic necessities; deploying stand-ins like the Florida Chamber of Commerce and Associated Industries and the various components of the Growth Machine as fig leafs to mask their profit motives. Under this long-term pressure, the Florida Department of Community Affairs and the state Department of Environmental Regulation disintegrated into quasi-advance troops for polluters.

The inability of Florida regulators to insulate against take-over by special interests is the reason Florida environmental groups (including Friends of the Everglades, where I serve as volunteer president -- you can make your end of year contributions here) sued the EPA repeatedly in federal court -- to force the feds to crack down on recalcitrant states -- , where the chances are ever so slightly better for complying with laws meant to protect public health, water, and wildlife.

The AP reported yesterday: "The federal government ordered tough water pollution rules for Florida on Friday in a victory for environmental groups after a lengthy court battle. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson filed a notice in federal court in Tallahassee saying she has complied with a consent decree requiring adoption of the rules. They are designed to curtail pollution from such sources as fertilizer, animal waste and, sewage effluent that have been blamed for causing toxic, slimy algae blooms that have choked Florida's waterways. The blooms can kill fish and make people sick. State officials as well as agriculture, business and utility interests opposed the rules, arguing they'd be too expensive to implement."

That is the understatement of the 2012. What is less well known is that the EPA, under pressure from big campaign funders/antagonists, has also shirked its responsibility for regulating water pollution for so long, that the state of Florida is plunged in dirty water. For example, if the EPA had been doing its job, Miami-Dade County would not be on the brink of a multi-billion dollar plan to fix its aged, decrepit wastewater system.

My parents taught me, when cooking in the kitchen, always clean up as you go. Don't let the sink pile up with filthy, unwashed dishes. By analogy, Florida's kitchen is so filled with the filthy remains of past meals, you can't even see the sink.

"This is absolutely everything we hoped for," said Earthjustice lawyer David Guest, who represented environmental groups in the court case. "This is the reddest letter day of them all."

Florida's GOP state legislature, Gov. Rick Scott, and a host of billionaire polluters had fiercely resisted the imposition of federal rules for water pollution. What they wanted was to stick with "narrative standards" instead of hard numbers. Along the earlier analogy; instead of telling Florida you can only have ten dirty dishes in the sink at a time, what the polluters wanted was to have a standard that said, "The kitchen will be generally clean from the hours of two to three in the morning."

"Our diverse coalition of agriculture, employers, local government, utilities and others supports clean water and believes Florida knows what's best for Florida," spokesman Ryan Banfill wrote in an email (to the AP). "That's why the coalition has always supported Florida-specific standards developed by Florida scientists and proposed by the state DEP as a more cost effective way to promote water quality in our state."

That "diverse coalition" was well represented on election eve at Boston's airport. They never got to celebrate the chance to eviscerate a federal agency that just may grow back its sense of mission to protect public health and the environment.