At this week’s meeting of the Humboldt Bay Harbor, Recreation and Conservation District’s Board of Commissioners, the board met with staff and consultants to hear updates on the Humboldt Bay Offshore Wind Heavy Lift Marine Terminal Project — a redevelopment project that will re-envision a significant portion of the Samoa Peninsula as a 180-acre multi-use port to support California’s offshore wind development.Among those items featured on the agenda were an update on the project’s emissions goals, a technical presentation on dredging and material removal associated with the project and an overhaul of the adjacent trail infrastructure and Woodley Island’s fishing and boating facilities to be improved with funding from the project.Achieving net zeroScott Lagueux of infrastructure consulting firm Moffatt & Nichol, presented on the project’s “Green Terminal Roadmap,” a framework that is being designed to bring the project into alignment with the goal of net zero carbon emissions.“Your desire is to achieve net zero at this port, and certainly it’s a great goal and one that we look forward to helping you achieve through this analysis and through … incremental implementation of technologies and other approaches that will help you get to that point,” Lagueux said.Lagueux presented a number of options that will be finalized over the next several months and noted several possible scenarios with regard to the cost and the timing of the project. Ultimately, he said, the roadmap would provide the district with “a series of decision-making matrices” and a “menu of technologies” that can help achieve the goal of a zero-emission project.Keep Reading
Clean water soon could join a list of issues – smog, the minimum wage, gun control – as an area where California law goes further than similar laws in the rest of the country.But here’s the rub: The most likely path for that to happen is if lawmakers approve a new bill, SB 601 that calls for California to permanently enshrine into state law the rules of what has been, until recently, the federal status quo – the Clean Water Act of 1972. The bill was introduce on Feb. 21 by state Sen. Ben Allen, D-El Segundo.The bill’s basic premise is simple. All future water pollution laws in California will have to cover the same waterways – wetlands, creeks, streams rivers and lakes – that applied to the federal Clean Water Act until the Supreme Court changed the definition of Waters of the U.S in Sackett v. EPA.Because it doesn’t create new rules, SB 601 isn’t expected to add costs or red tape for the farmers and ranchers, water agencies, builders and manufacturers most often affected by clean water laws. And, because it is enshrining long-standing federal law into the state code, it’s hard to argue that the idea is particularly liberal or conservative. The Clean Water Act was signed by a Republican president, Richard Nixon, during an era when politicians across the political spectrum often favored environmental protection.But supporters argue SB 601 will be needed because federal environmental laws – and, in some cases, the broader goals of cleaning the environment – are being gutted by the U.S. Supreme Court and President Donald Trump.“We just don’t want to see (water rules) backslide,” said Garry Brown, founder of Orange County Coastkeeper, a nonprofit that’s backing SB 601.“In the 28 years I’ve been doing this, I’ve never heard anybody say they want to see the water become dirtier. Clean water has never been a partisan issue,” Brown said.“But conditions have changed,” he added. “And, now, we’re afraid of what we’re seeing right now in Washington.“The rules we’re talking about are the rules we all basically agreed on for a long time,” Allen said.But supporters of SB 601 say the Supreme Court is only part of why they want the new law. The other issue, they say, is an era of lax environmental protection they view as likely during a second Trump administration.Read More
Uncertainty is bad for business, bad for research, bad for productivity, and terrible on morale. I am on NOAA’s Tsunami Science and Technology Advisory Panel (it is a volunteer position and I don’t get paid) and I know a number of people fairly high up in the organization. For the last few weeks, I’ve been asking what they know or expect, and the answer is a unanimous “we don’t know.”The U.S. tsunami program is a very small part of NOAA. It includes the two tsunami warning centers, tsunami research at the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, and underpins state tsunami hazards reduction programs through the National Tsunami Hazards Mitigation Program (NTHMP). Full disclosure — grants from the NTHMP have funded much of our North Coast tsunami outreach effort, including the newest edition of Living on Shaky Ground.In the first round of cuts, the tsunami program lost its administrator, the person who coordinates the different pieces of the program, several support personnel, and a newly hired forecaster at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center. Two recently approved positions at the International Tsunami Information Center were frozen.I am far more concerned about what might be happening next. Two years ago, NOAA finally recognized the need to put our two tsunami warning centers on a common operating system truly capable of backing each other up. At present, the centers in Hawaii and Alaska use different hardware and software and operate under separate administrative parts of NOAA. I am worried that budget cutting could set this project back, continuing the current inefficient system.I am even more concerned about the maintenance and support of our offshore tsunami detection system. The Deep-ocean Assessment and Reporting of Tsunamis (DART) has been a huge step forward in our ability to assess the potential of a tsunami to cause damage.Read More
The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday morning sided with San Francisco and its unusual alliance of oil companies and business groups in a case it brought against the federal Environmental Protection Agency over the city’s raw sewage.Environmentalists have raised concerns that the court’s conservative majority could use the case to roll back clean water protections on a national scale. The city, meanwhile, argued it was only seeking clarity on permit limitations and believed it was being held responsible for more than its share of water pollution.San Francisco faced the prospect of spending billions to upgrade its infrastructure to get into compliance with the Clean Water Act, a project it said was too expensive.In its 5–4 opinion, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority said that the EPA does not have the authority to require these kinds of sewage system upgrades and that the city is only responsible for what it discharges — not the water quality’s “end result.”Sean Bothwell, executive director of the California Coastkeeper Alliance, said in a statement that regulators must follow up with specific, enforceable permit terms to ensure water quality standards are met. For decades, he said, water dischargers like San Francisco have had the “freedom to decide how to meet water quality standards, and now the Supreme Court has put an end to that practice.”“The regulated community should reap what they sowed,” he said. “You cannot beg regulators for flexibility to avoid enforcement and then ask the Supreme Court to strike down vague permit standards. It is time California hold polluters to specific water quality standards.”Keep Reading
A new Supreme Court ruling widely criticized by environmentalists actually could lead to cleaner water flowing from the Inland Empire and Orange County into the ocean as soon as this year.So says the lawyer for a nonprofit environmental group, Orange County Coastkeeper, that favors tougher pollution rules as a way to protect fresh and salt water.“We’re leveraging (the ruling) as a positive thing,” said Sarah Spinuzzi, an environmental lawyer for Coastkeeper who last year wrote an amicus brief supporting what turned out to be the losing argument in the case in question, San Francisco v. the Environmental Protection Agency.In the case, the results of which were made public Monday, March 3, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that some of the regulations imposed by the EPA against the city of San Francisco were too broad. Instead, the ruling said, the Clean Water Act of 1972 – a foundational law that sets water pollution rules around the country – requires that fines or punishments imposed on a polluter must be based on a specific link to the pollution being discharged.Garry Brown, founder of Orange County Coastkeeper and a player in the current permit negotiations, believes some agencies and businesses use vague pollution rules as a way to “run out the clock” when they’re cited for violations. Instead of fixing a specific problem, Brown argued, many will hire a consultant who, in turn, will take years to craft a potential solution, a process that’s often cheaper than paying for the cleanup.Rules that might prevent that – by setting numerical limits on pollution and schedules for cleaning any discharge – are exactly what is spelled out in the new Supreme Court ruling.“I don’t agree with everything they said,” said Sarah Spinuzzi, an attorney for Orange County Coastkeeper. “But the Clean Water Act very clearly requires that you trace specific pollution to specific polluters. And, by reiterating that, the Supreme Court ruling is going to make our water cleaner.”Keep Reading
