Sunshine State News is like a state affiliate of Fox News. The paper has tried to calm the waters of public opinion, pouring from coastal communities and voters sick of toxic water flooding into the estuaries from Lake Okeechobee. While the solution to Lake Okeechobee pollution is to treat all sources of pollution around the lake at their sources, the obvious "fix" -- to acquire vastly more acres of land around the lake for water treatment puts the focus exactly where the profits of Florida's most powerful campaign contributors are located: the Everglades Agricultural Area owned by Big Sugar billionaires.
In the mid-1990's, when the Lawton Chiles initiative called the Governor's Commission for A Sustainable South Florida called together a blue ribbon panel to move state Everglades' policies beyond the litigation that had been settled in the courtroom of Judge William Hoeveler, the experts and policy advisors helped focus public attention -- and later, Congress, federal agencies and the US Army Corps of Engineers -- on how to fix pollution, including Lake Okeechobee, without taking land through eminent domain in sugarcane production south of the lake.
The "fix" was a technology that proposed substituting underground storage "reservoirs" to stack unwanted water in huge quantities called ASR, or, aquifer storage and recovery. To most scientists and environmentalists, ASR was never more than a trick. Like pulling a rabbit out of a hat. Nevertheless, nearly twenty years ago it was clear -- abundantly clear -- that decision makers in Florida were ready to adopt a technology that was barely feasible but scalable, a feat of engineering that would scatter profits and campaign contributions out of the application of industry, a trick that would avoid the political problem of a land war with Big Sugar billionaires.
A true history of this era would explore the investments made by Big Sugar in other diversionary tactics. Campaign money flowed during these decades from Big Sugar into virtually every initiative to repel and obstruct government regulations; from the Sagebrush Rebellion that sought to mire the Florida Keys to development schemes at the edges of the Everglades. Environmental groups, during this time, were very successful in elevating the Everglades as a status symbol for a nation concerned about clean air and water but largely powerless to influence the political outcomes; especially the one that depended on an untried technology -- in Florida -- to obviate the need to confront the inadequate volume of surface storage to treat all the pollution fouling Florida's rivers, bays and estuaries.
Due to an extraordinarily wet year, Florida's estuaries attached by canals and river waterways to Lake Okeechobee are back in focus. There ought to be a law, but there is none. There is none, because state government and Florida legislators are all poised to shift the costs of pollution to taxpayers and benefit polluters. And because there is none, now conservative opinion is shifting back to that old war horse, that lame dog: aquifer storage and recovery.
One of Big Sugar's megaphones at Sunshine State News, opinion writer Nancy Smith, picks up the aquifer storage and recovery theme and shakes it like a wet rag. "(Water management) officials say that after dealing with damaging freshwater discharges from Lake Okeechobee, what should catch everybody's attention is the technology itself, making it possible to store more water than a typical above-ground reservoir." Smith might have examined the copious evidence that the costs of ASR can overwhelm any possible benefits. Like the 2003 report from the USGS, "As alternative approaches to increasing water supply and availability in southern California, such as injecting and storing treated water underground are explored, water managers need to be aware of potential impacts on water quality, according to a new study by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). The USGS study of a test site in the Antelope Valley of southern California, near Lancaster, found that when treated surface water was used to recharge the aquifer, by-products of the water disinfection process accumulated in the aquifer. These by products include trihalomethanes (THMs), which have been listed as carcinogenic by U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)."
The premise of aquifer storage and recovery is that you can use wells drilled through the aquifer to lower geological layers to "store" water when it is not needed. Later, it can be withdrawn, like nickels in a piggy bank, when it is needed. The problem with ASR is that the water that is sent underground through multi-million dollar wells is dirty and when it is retrieved by industrial pumps it is dirtier still; carrying trace chemicals that can be even more deadly to people and to wildlife. So why are water managers playing the ASR card, through Sunshine State News? Because they have been urged in that direction, to deflect attention from Big Sugar.
Big Sugar has always been extraordinarily skillful in forging alliances. It used the Farm Bill, for instance, to tie the price support for cane sugar to corn fructose and beet sugar -- ensuring an enduring political alliance with members of Congress from the farm belt and Rocky Mountain states. In cultivating its relationships with well drillers and engineering firms, Big Sugar has tapped into another powerful political constituency in Florida.
So when you read about ASR as a possible solution to the Lake Okeechobee crisis, your Bullshit Meter should be registered, on high. Read on:
