Senate should not strip EPA of Great Lakes work
Let’s get one thing straight: The U.S. Coast Guard isn’t equipped to combat biological pollution in the Great Lakes.
And yet that is exactly what an illconceived bill up for a vote in the U.S. Senate this week would have it do. This legislation, one of the worst ideas involving the Great Lakes to emerge from Congress in years, could lead to significantly loosened environmental rules on ballast water discharges for oceangoing freighters using the lakes.
Ballast water has allowed dozens of interlopers to infiltrate the lakes, including zebra and quagga mussels, species that have fundamentally changed the ecology of the world’s largest source of freshwater.
Tighter rules are needed, not looser ones — rules that require thorough cleansing of ballast tanks, or even better, that would close the St. Lawrence Seaway to “salties” for good. The idea of protecting a small number of shippers and putting the Great Lakes at greater risk is a cost-benefit analysis no thinking business person would ever agree to.
The Senate must stop this nonsense and insist that the Environmental Protection Agency continue to oversee ballast water. Sens. Tammy Baldwin and Ron Johnson should vote against this bill.
The legislation, which is attached to the U.S. Coast Guard Authorization Act, would give the Coast Guard exclusive authority to regulate the shipping business, including the ballast water that is pumped into ships to keep them steady as they sail. It’s that contaminated water (up to 10 Olympic-sized swimming pools’ worth per ship) that’s the problem.
At the moment, the EPA and Coast Guard share the task of keeping an eye on shippers. Shippers say that hurts their business. The reality is it’s necessary to protect the lakes.
“The objective of the EPA is to protect water quality and health. … Having them work together makes a lot of sense,” Molly Flanagan, vice president for policy for the Chicago-based Alliance for the Great Lakes, said Tuesday at a conference on Great Lakes issues at the Marquette University Law School.
“What doesn’t make a lot of sense is asking the Coast Guard to do something that it doesn’t have a lot of experience with. We risk rolling back environmental protections.”
Consider for a moment the ongoing damage from just one of the dozens of invasive species that have infiltrated the lakes: the quagga mussel.
As the Journal Sentinel’s Dan Egan has written, the mussels, which originated in the Black and Caspian seas, have no real natural predators in North America. If you could drain Lake Michigan, it would be “possible to walk the entire 100 miles between Wisconsin and Michigan on a bed of trillions upon trillions of filter-feeding quagga mussels,” Egan writes in his 2017 book “The Death and Life of the Great Lakes.”
Because of the mussels, the lakes are now among the clearest on the planet. “But this is not the sign of a healthy lake; it’s the sign of a lake having the life sucked out of it,” Egan writes.
Why risk more environmental damage — damage that also carries an enormous cost to fishing and recreational industries?
The Senate must keep the EPA on guard and let the agency do its job.
We encourage you to let Sens. Johnson and Baldwin know where you stand.
Here’s how:
Sen. Ron Johnson
328 Hart Senate Office Building Washington, DC 20510 Phone: (202) 224-5323
Email form: www.ronjohnson .senate.gov/public/index.cfm/email -the-senator
Sen. Tammy Baldwin
709 Hart Senate Office Building Washington, D.C. 20510 Phone: (202) 224-5653
Email form: www.baldwin.senate.gov/feedback