Chesapeake Bay Journal

By Rona Kobell

Good morning.

I’ll be on WYPR’s Midday news roundup today at 12:15 to talk about fracking and O’Malley’s latest announcement.

By Rona Kobell

In May, the National Academy of Sciences released a report that said it was nearly impossible to estimate whether Bay cleanup efforts were working because of poor efforts to track their implementation.

Bay Journal Editor Karl Blankenship did a story on it for our latest issue. Here it is if you want a refresher.

Today, the report’s author, Kenneth Reckhow, came before the Bay Program’s Science and Technical Advisory Committee to further address the findings. (Well, actually, he was on speaker phone, but his thoughts were there.)

Among his statements: that we (municipalities, farmers, citizens, etc.) are going to have to sacrifice more than we think we will to get a clean Bay. That adaptive management – a buzzword that simply means learning and changing what you do as you go – is a lot harder to do within a regulatory framework like a TMDL. And, finally, that we will eventually need to address the higher-hanging fruit of Bay pollution, which will lead to unpopular choices, like limiting growth in certain places.

By Rona Kobell

The Hoover Institution’s Richard Epstein has issued an opinion on fracking. And what he says may surprise you.

The Conservative-leaning institute’s Epstein is not exactly a “drill baby drill” kind of guy. He acknowledges some risks with the technology, and says we should proceed with caution. But he says that, if we ban the practice altogether, we won’t innovate enough to reduce the risks in the future. Here’s an excerpt from his report:

The question that remains is what should be done with the residual risks of pollution? The question is of the utmost importance because at this point in time, much evidence points to serious risks of substantial water pollution from fracking. It would make little or no sense at all to encourage the willy-nilly use of new sources of energy, if they only aggravate the serious problems associated with fossil fuels.

Now, the discussion turns less on shared social goals and more on sound regulatory technique. On this score, we must beware of any solution that simply condemns the new fracking technology on the ground that it will, without question, generate new forms of pollution. Of course it will, but so will other energy technologies, which is a point that most environmentalists refuse to grasp. The last people to trust on the regulatory front therefore are the committed environmental groups, whose one-dimensional view of the world can lead to the wrong conclusions.

Epstein goes on to say we should practice and refine these techniques in sparsely populated places like Wyoming and Texas, which sounds suspiciously like the “sacrifice zones” that some of the early Marcellus drilling enthusiasts talked about when problems surfaced in areas like Dimock. But having said that, the paper’s interesting, and some of his conclusions surprised me.

By Rona Kobell

Today, Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley signed an executive order establishing the Marcellus Shale Safe Drilling Initiative.

This move does not mean drilling is imminent. It just sets out a blueprint for how, when and who will be able to access the vast reserves of natural gas in Western Maryland. Maryland’s natural resources secretary, John griffin, and its environment secretary, Robert Summers, have been working on such a plan for months, since long before a bill in the General Assembly failed that would have seen the industry footing the bill for a study of this nature.

Per the release, the study will be conducted in three parts:

• A presentation of findings and related recommendations regarding the desirability of legislation to establish revenue sources, such as a State-level severance tax, and the desirability of legislation to establish standards of liability for damages caused by gas exploration and production.  These findings and recommendations will be made by December 31, 2011.

• Recommendations for best practices for all aspects of natural gas exploration and production in the Marcellus Shale in Maryland by August 1, 2012.

• A final report which will include findings and recommendations relating to the impact of Marcellus Shale drilling including possible contamination of groundwater, handling and disposal of wastewater, environmental impacts, impacts to forests and important habitats, greenhouse gas emissions and economic impact.  This report will be issued no later than August 1, 2014.

The governor’s office still hasn’t decided who will be on the committee to determine these three important questions: Will Maryland tax shale drilling, as every state but Pennsylvania does? Will it sufficiently regulate the practice? And will it codify these regulations so there’s no gray area, and that every company knows what’s expected of them before drilling begins?

MDE spokeswoman Dawn Stoltzfus told me today that Griffin and Summers will be recommending committee members. These are likely to be people with some knowledge and interest in the shale drilling process: Geologists, people who live in Western Maryland, legislators who represent the area, at least one environmentalist, and representatives of the gas companies.

Staffers at MDE have been to Pennsylvania in hopes of learning from mistakes made there. While drilling in the Keystone State continues apace, New York has a moratorium, not to mention a lawsuit from the New York AG contending that no drilling should have been allowed in the Delaware River’s watershed without an environmental review.

If a report isn’t going to come out until 2014, one might assume there will be no drilling for at least three years. But that is not a guarantee. Summers has already raised the possibility of a limited amount of drilling while the study continues. How much and how soon? Stay tuned to this space and we’ll let you know when we do.

By Rona Kobell

On my recent trip to the Great Lakes, I asked my friend, Dave Spratt, if he ever ate a shad.

“What do I look like, a salmon?” he replied.

Dave is the consummate outdoorsman. He recently left the Detroit News to start a website, Great Northern Outdoors.

Every year, he hunts a couple of bucks and he and his family eat venison all winter, saving a lot of money on chicken and the like. He has fished all the Great Lakes, camped out all over Michigan and endured some winters that would surely be my undoing. And he cooks everything. So it’s not as though he’s squeamish about his food.

I asked another friend, an avid bay fisherman. He told me that, in Virginia, they roast the shad on a plank. And you can’t tell the difference between the fish and its wooden base. Ouch!

As it turns out, Spratt’s reaction was not that uncommon. The Bay is one of the only places where human beings eat shad, a favorite meal of stripers, hardhead, and, yes, salmon. There’s good reason for that, as Michelle Gienow explains in her Urbanite article this month.

Shad, she writes, can have as many as 1300 bones in them. Their roe, she says, taste like beef liver and styrofoam – and this is coming from a gal who actually likes our Founding Fish.

To find a fan of shad, you’d have to go to one of those old-school restaurants frequented by the over-65 crowd – Gienow chose Lutherville’s The Peppermill – or a retirement home.

And not for much longer, either. The article says that the Atlantic States Maine Fisheries Commission is getting ready to ban harvest of shad in most places.

Before it’s gone, I’d like to try it – plank or no plank.

By Rona Kobell

The great Leslie Kaufman of the New York Times offers this story on flooding in the Mississippi and how all that fertilizer runoff is going to creat the biggest dead zone ever in the Gulf of Mexico.

It’s hard to believe they spelled phosphorus wrong in the first version – maybe that’s because I write the word so often. But on the bright side, at least they spelled Mississippi right. And the stats are pretty alarming.

By Rona Kobell

If you, like I do, have an extra roll of carpet in your house and are wondering what to do with it, you have some choices.

You can put it in your attic and figure out what to do with it later. (This was my particular option.)

You can take it to Carpetland or a similar place and see if they can turn it into a rug.

You can use it in a workshop area to cover the floor.

You can haul it to the Salvation Army and a creative, crafty type may pick it up.

You could call bulk trash to haul it away.

But what you shouldn’t do, clearly, is shove it down a storm drain.

Someone did that, according to The Sun’s Tim Wheeler. The result? 10,000 gallons of sewage is now spewing into Herring Run. And there will be more as city public works officials try to find ways around the carpet.

These beleaguered city officials have enough to deal with as they upgrade an outmoded sewage system and try to minimize problems from storm drains. Really, we’re going to tax them even more? Shove a carpet down there and see what they’ve got? Test their mettle? And while we’re at it, further pollute an urban stream showing some signs of life?

This shouldn’t surprise me. This news comes on the heels of hundreds of tons of trash hauled out of the Potomac River as well as the back River and several other streams in the six-state watershed.

Littering is bad enough, and I’ve seen people do it right in front of me walking down the street. But jamming large waste products down a storm drain is a step beyond.

Kudos to Tim for uncovering this!

By Rona Kobell

The Susquehanna River tops the list of the nation’s most endangered rivers, according to the American Rivers group.

The reason? Natural gas drilling and fracking.

Now is the time of year that the shad run spectacularly through Chesapeake rivers and streams.

And it is also perhaps the historical fish’s best hope of getting a break.

Darryl Fears of the Washington Post has this story about the unlikely savior of one of America’s first fish_ the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. The commission will be deciding the fate of two of the four dams currently blocking shad’s passage through the mighty Susquehanna River at Conowingo.

Yes, there’s an elevator, and an expensive one, but most shad aren’t getting through.

While they’re at it, FERC might try to find a way to protect the American eel, which also get stuck in the dam. Eel can’t make it to the fish ladder because they migrate up the sides of rivers, and the fish elevator is closer to the middle.

By Rona Kobell

Columbia Journalism Review just published an article about the Bay Journal on the eve of our 20th anniversary.

The article is not online, but the writer, Curtis Brainard, took a lot of the best bits and put them into a Q and A with Bay Journal editor Karl Blankenship. You can read it here.

We’re hoping to post the whole story online shortly.