In their rush to exploit recovery efforts from Tropical Storm Irene, ideologues who perpetually fight against regulation and science and who posture as the defenders of traditional “Yankee” values are forgetting two important rock-ribbed principles.

The first is frugality. There has been a lot of loose talk about how much money was supposedly saved by largely ignoring environmental review and permitting as bulldozers, excavators and dump trucks rushed into rivers across Vermont in dozens of places. Understandably, given the dire situation facing the state at the time, these claims are based on initial, back-of-the-envelope cost estimates made with little or no analysis. However, using those alleged savings to argue for a change in policy is irresponsible as a matter of policy, and discourteous to basic math.

The accounting trick the deregulation folks are trying to pull off ignores the near-term and future public and private costs that Vermonters will inevitably incur and in some cases are already incurring to fix the problems caused by hasty “restoration” that did more harm than good. The overall restoration effort was extraordinary, and the state’s road system has been rebuilt quickly. But as any old hill farmer can tell you, a quick repair is rarely the last fix you need, and haste, even when necessary, makes waste.

Camp Brook in Bethel is a prime example where "restoration" work done hastily in the throw-the-law-and-science-out-the-window free-for-all that followed Tropical Storm Irene is now being redone, at additional cost to taxpayers, to minimize new flooding risks caused by the hasty Post-Irene stream alteration

The second Yankee principle ignored by those who don’t want to let modern understandings of river physics, science-based laws and common sense stand in the way of their crusade against regulation is that we don’t solve our problems by pushing them on to our neighbors.

One of the purposes of the science-based river alteration regulations that have evolved in Vermont during the last few decades is to minimize and prevent flooding altogether rather than simply transfer problems onto neighboring properties. Mining gravel from the stream next to your house might prevent – for a time – your fields from flooding. But it increases the likelihood of your neighbor’s house getting washed away. Striking the balance calls for smart regulation such as Vermont has developed. To do river work right, is to do right by your neighbors.

And, although some would not have it so, those principles of true frugality, quality workmanship, and true community remain in Vermont, and must be restored along with our roads, homes, and towns.

Take for example the case of Camp Brook in hard-hit Bethel.  As reported in Sunday’s Times Argus and Rutland Herald (sorry I can’t link to the story it is behind a paywall), the bulldozers are back in the river.  But this time scientists from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Vermont Agency of Natural Resources, and volunteers from nonprofit White River Partnership are guiding their work closely.  You see, the bulldozers are there trying to fix the mess (likely made with the best of intentions) that the early recovery efforts made of the Brook; a mess that, according to the news report, actually increased the risk of flash flooding and threatens upstream and downstream bridges along Rt. 12 with erosion around their abutments and more intense flows from a river artificially straightened after Irene.  Here is an excerpt that sums up the status of the Brook as a result of the rush job:

“[N]o one in the excavators really knew what the brook had looked like before.  The valley was flattened.  Berms stood mid-slope.  Where the lawn had once been, the river now braided over dirt and rocks, with no banks to direct its flow.  There were no boulders or even large rocks to add burbles to its sound or prevent flash flooding.”

After weeks of careful remediation, the new science-guided effort is restoring Camp Brook to a healthy functioning stream with natural structures that will help prevent future flooding and restore habitat for fish.  Even though it’s buried in the back pages of the paper, it’s good news for people who care about protecting property and maintaining healthy streams.  It’s bad news for the deregulation crowd because it directly contradicts the claim that we can save money by gutting environmental regulations that require recovery work to be done carefully in a manner that is consistent with science-based state and federal laws. In the long run it is cheaper for us and for those downstream to do a job right the first time lest we keep having to relearn the lesson that haste makes waste.

A study released today documents the powerful benefits of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) – the nation-leading effort by Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic states to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from power plants while building up energy efficiency and clean energy efforts in the states.

The study found that RGGI created $1.6 Billion in net economic benefits across the region ($888 million in New England alone).  The program saved electricity customers $1.3 Billion on their energy bills region-wide due to investment by the program in energy efficiency and created 16,000 Job Years (a standard measure of employment) during the first 3 years of the program (including temporary and permanent positions).   The cost of the program was minimal, creating an imperceptible 0.7% electricity price increase on customer bills across the region that was more than offset by the benefits of the program.

CLF has been deeply involved with the RGGI program from its inception. We strongly believe that this is solid proof that RGGI, while first and foremost an effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, is also a win for the economy, consumers and business, as well as the environment.

We must apply the lessons of RGGI to date and move beyond this pilot phase, scaling up the program to further reduce pollution, create even more jobs and reduce energy bills on a much greater scale, and take this effort into other parts of the nation.

RGGI has proved that a well-designed greenhouse gas reduction policy is a win for just about everybody.  The complaints (amplified by their well-financed megaphone) from the filthy few companies who make their money by extracting and selling coal and oil, at great cost in lives and environmental damage, should not distract us from hearing that very positive story.

Zak Griefen

CLF is pleased to welcome Zak Griefen, a Vermont native and former litigator for Cheney, Brock and Saudek, in the newly created role of environmental enforcement litigator. Based in CLF’s Vermont office, but working on cases throughout New England, Zak will be focused initially on cleaning up our region’s inland and coastal waters by ensuring that polluters are aware of their Clean Water Act permitting requirements and bringing federal litigation when necessary. The environmental enforcement litigator position was created to hold polluters accountable for the violations of environmental regulations—Clean Water Act and others—that are rampant across New England, compromising our region’s health and the health and safety of our citizens.

Zak has a BA from the University of New Mexico, and earned his JD, cum laude, and Master of Studies in Environmental Law, magna cum laude, from Vermont Law School in 2005, where he was an editor of the Vermont Law Review. Admitted to practice in VT and MA, he served for two years as clerk to the judges of the Vermont Environmental Court, and then practiced civil litigation in Montpelier, where he lives with his wife and two children. Zak, who served as a summer intern at CLF in 2004, is an avid angler and is particularly interested in protecting healthy streams and promoting sustainable land use.

Leaves are falling, autumn has arrived – and so has a new look for CLF Ventures, CLF’s non-profit strategy-consulting arm. CLF Ventures bridges the public and private sectors to advance innovative, market-based solutions that benefit the environment, society, and our clients’ bottom line. With a new logo and a newly redesigned website, CLF Ventures is taking our message of “Environmental Gain – Economic Advantage” to the next level.

The new CLF Ventures logo was designed to complement the CLF logo while capturing the unique mission and value that CLF Ventures brings to our clients. The two overlapping leaves in the new CLF Ventures logo embody our message that the environment and the economy are interconnected, not mutually exclusive, and that we need to pay attention to both to have a truly thriving and sustainable economy. “If you really look closely,” says CLF Ventures CEO Jo Anne Shatkin, “you see the “V” inside the leaves – that’s the “V” for Ventures, but it’s also a check mark, which says ‘yes, we know how to make things happen.’ CLF Ventures is like those two overlapping leaves. We’re uniquely positioned to help our clients because we’re part of the environmental community and we understand what businesses and innovators need to operate and thrive.”

The redesigned CLF Ventures website highlights the breadth of our services and the wide variety of partners we help. Our new homepage features a revolving showcase of the “Four I’s” – Innovate, Incubate, Integrate, and Initiate – which captures CLF Ventures’ mission to bring about positive environmental change through the marketplace. Many people are familiar with CLF Ventures’ work to help facilities integrate their operations with sound environmental principles and operate both sustainably and profitably. But CLF Ventures also helps entrepreneurs and clean technology leaders innovate their products and technologies and bring them to market. We incubate replicable, new businesses that create shared value and improve the environment. And we initiate opportunities that propel new investment models toward the triple bottom line. Our redesigned website allows us to share our story – and our mission – with a broader audience. We hope you’ll check out www.clfventures.org and let us know what you think.

A federal commission is about to recommend a new plan for finding final resting places for spent nuclear fuel, and they want to hear from us.

The Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future is a fifteen-member group established by the Secretary of Energy pursuant to an executive order from President Obama. The commission’s goal is to conduct a comprehensive review of policies for managing the back end of the nuclear fuel cycle, including all alternatives for the storage, processing, and disposal of civilian and defense used nuclear fuel and nuclear waste.

The problem with spent nuclear fuel is that it requires long-term storage, and the federal government has continued to delay acting on a centralized long-term plan. To complicate matters further, the Department of Energy ended a project at Yucca Mountain in Nevada last year that was supposed to be the government’s long-term solution. To fix the problem, the Obama administration created the Commission, which in turn developed draft recommendations including: 1) a new approach to siting disposal facilities; 2) a new organization focused exclusively on transportation, storage, and disposal of nuclear waste; and 3) efforts to develop a new permanent deep geological facility for the safe disposal of spent fuel and high-level nuclear waste.

Last week in Boston, CLF provided recommendations to the Commission as part of a panel addressing the consent-based radioactive waste siting process. CLF’s comments (see below) focused primarily on inequities in the current process, suggesting that decision-making process is too centralized in the federal government and out of public view, which cuts out many environmental and health interests and breeds distrust in the outcome.

The process of dealing with spent nuclear fuel is crucial for everyone’s safety and health. The comment period for the Commission’s Draft Report to the Secretary of Energy ends October 31.

You can comment on the Commission’s web site where you can also see the draft report.

Here are a few ideas to offer the Commission:

• Expand responsibility and oversight.  Amend the Atomic Energy Act, and narrow the scope of federal preemption to give states, local governments and other agencies their traditional oversight role for the environment.
• Give people who will be affected by the outcome of siting and other decisions a voice. States, citizens, communities, and environmental and health interests need to be an integral part of the decision-making process.
• Provide funding and independent technical expertise to level the playing field among participants. This is an issue in any siting decision, but the stakes are considerably higher with nuclear facilities.

After taking the bar exam, I decided the best thing to do was head north for a multi-day wilderness trip on the West Magpie River. The Magpie flows through Québec’s Côte-Nord region a couple drainages away from the Romaine and Petit Mecatina rivers. For the majority of the trip, we remained many (sometimes hundreds) of miles from any semblance of civilization. The only way to get there is by floatplane.

After five days, countless rapids, and many miles of flatwater, I had a new appreciation for the Côte-Nord region and one of the last truly wild places left in the East. The Magpie, Romaine, and Petit Mecatina are all either being dammed or have the potential to be dammed. Some of our friends had run the Romaine a few weeks earlier and described it as “not a wilderness trip.” Hydro-Québec’s Romaine Complex of dams has essentially devastated the river. There is already one dam at the very end of the Magpie, and the river is listed on Hydro-Québec’s 2009-2013 strategic plan as a potential dam site. The Petit Mecatina is listed as well.

The situation in Québec, in general, presents an important set of choices. Hydropower is generally considered “renewable” and a lower-carbon source of electricity than fossil fuels, especially at existing dams that have been in place for many years. There is a reasonable argument for transmitting more hydropower from the far North to southern Québec and New England, instead of getting our energy from sources like coal fired power plants or Vermont Yankee—our aging and polluting nuclear power facility. But there is also a compelling case that Québec should preserve some of the last, best wilderness areas in the world by curtailing its aggressive dam-building campaign, which could limit the power available for export to New England. We also need to decide how to bring the power south and whether there are better options than traditional overhead high-voltage lines through beautiful, now-unfragmented rural areas.

What is essential is that, if we partner with Québec to meet our energy needs, we need to do so responsibly, with as little environmental damage as possible. A good place to start is by taking a close look at the carbon emissions that could result from Québec’s ambitious plans, including how the proposed Northern Pass project through New Hampshire may contribute to those emissions. CLF has also partnered with Canadian environmental groups to look into the impacts of hydropower development within Québec’s new northern boreal forest management plan and advocated for improvements in Vermont’s contract with Hydro-Québec.

If we do it right and limit our reliance on fossil fuels and focus on not building new dams, Québec and Vermont could find a way to move toward a cleaner energy future.  If not, there is a lot to lose.

It had been more than a month since Tropical Storm Irene when I returned to kayak my favorite whitewater rivers in Vermont: the Middlebury and the New Haven. The massive flows from Irene moved some small rocks around, but in most places the overall character of the these rustic rivers remained the same, even after the storm. Sadly that is not true about sections of the rivers near roads where in the name of “repair” bulldozers literally flattened the rivers, excavating giant boulders, dredging gravel, and leaving the once vibrant river an unrecognizable shell. Rapids that used to be complex, multi-tiered stretches, supporting important habitat had transformed into homogeneous flat spots.

The untouched segments of river far from the road looked very different from the dredged and flattened stretches that destroyed not only a magical recreation space but crucial fish habitat as well. The contrast was stark and disturbing.  The river tamed unwillingly and transformed into little more than a pipe, losing its resilience, beauty, and health.  I thought again how important it is to protect these valuable and magical places.

Returning to these spots reminded me of the beatings we continue to inflict on our local waters: from stormwater and nutrient pollution to the destruction of fish habitat as we recover from Irene.  Our precious river ecosystems deserve better.  We can learn from their ability to heal after a hurricane.  We can stop treating our rivers like pipes and sewers and tell our friends, neighbors, and elected officials “enough is enough.” It is crucial that we do not ignore science and continue to reverse decades of recovery in our rivers.  We can contact our local town officials and request that they take a step back and seek expert advice before digging into your local river. The more actions we take as individuals, the more we can collectively do the work that will allow our rivers to heal.

Starting tomorrow, those concerned about Lake Champlain and interested in helping outline how to deal with nutrient pollution threatening its future will have a chance to make their opinions heard.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, with the help of Vermont’s Department of Environmental Conservation, is in the process of re-writing the Lake Champlain Phosphorous Total Maximum Daily Load. This effort must be successful if we are to reduce phosphorous pollution to our great lake and keep one of Vermont’s most important resources swimmable, fishable and drinkable.

As you may know, the TMDL is an important technical document which acts as a phosphorous pollution budget so Vermonters can plan for reducing how much phosphorous we ask Lake Champlain to handle. We currently add much more phosphorous – well over twice as much in some years – than is safe for the lake ecosystem. The result, excess weed growth, potentially toxic blue-green algae blooms and low dissolved oxygen, makes the lake less usable. And those problems are likely to become more widespread, particularly with two floods of historic proportion this year.

Thanks to the work of Conservation Law Foundation, the EPA ruled earlier this year that the TMDL approved in 2002 was not adequate to truly protect and restore Lake Champlain. Now federal and state authorities have organized a set of public meetings to help in reworking the TMDL which will take place over the next week and will be focused on the northern portion of the Lake Champlain basin. A second set of meetings focused on the southern portion of the lake is scheduled for November 14th through November 18thand I will send you more details when they are finalized.

As you can see from the schedule below, the first set of meetings are roughly organized by sector of interest. Given that a draft of the new TMDL is still in the works, I expect the topics covered during these conversations will be quite broad and include questions of funding, how to structure the TMDL and possible barriers to implementing it. I encourage you to attend one of them if you are at all interested in learning more, and especially if you have concerns or thoughts about the way this issue has been addressed and how it will be addressed in the future.

I plan on going to most of these meetings and will be taking notes, so if you are interested in the subject but cannot attend one of the meetings I am happy to provide you with my unofficial minutes of those I have attended (lporter@clf.org).

You can file written comments if you are unable to attend and the state has asked that, if possible, you let them know if you are planning on going to one of the meetings so they can make sure the rooms are large enough. Both can be sent to Michaela Stickney, VTDEC Lake Champlain Basin Coordinator, michaela.stickney@state.vt.us.

The EPA’s disapproval decision finding that the 2002 TMDL is inadequate can be found here:

http://www.epa.gov/region1/eco/tmdl/pdfs/vt/LakeChamplainTMDLDisapprovalDecision.pdf

Vermont’s revised implementation plan for the TMDL can be found here:

http://www.anr.state.vt.us/cleanandclear/news/TMDL%20impl%20plan%20final%20-%20011510.pdf

The Lake Champlain Basin Program’s State of the Lake Report, which includes information on Phosphorous loads, can be found here:

http://www.lcbp.org/lcstate.htm

1.       Tuesday October 4, 10am – 12pm
Agricultural Sector
Winooski Natural Resources Conservation District (NRCD)

617 Comstock Rd, Suite 1
Berlin, VT

Phone: (802) 828-4493 Ext. 113
► (meet in the UVM Extension conference room in the complex)

 2.       Tuesday October 4, 3-5pm
Northern Municipality Sector
Northwest Regional Planning Commission (NRPC)

155 Lake Street
St. Albans, VT

(802) 524-5958
► (meet at NRPC offices)

3.       Wednesday October 5, 11:30am-1:30pm 
Business Sector
Lake Champlain Regional Chamber of Commerce & Greater Burlington Industrial Corporation

60 Main Street, #100
Burlington, VT
(802) 863-3489

► (meet at LCRCOC offices)
4.       Wednesday October 5, 5:30-7:30pm
Nonprofit/Mid-lake Watershed Group Sector
ECHO/Leahy Center

1 College St.
Burlington, VT

(802) 864-1848
► (meet in Alcove upstairs)

5.       Thursday October 6, 10am-12pm
Northern Lake Committee Sector
Lake Champlain Basin Program
54 West Shore Rd.

Grand Isle, VT

(802) 372-3213
► (meet at LCBP offices)

6.       Thursday October 6, 2-4pm
Stormwater/Urban Sector
Shelburne Town Offices

5420 Shelburne Road

Shelburne, VT

(802) 985-5110
► (meet at Shelburne Town Offices)

Camp Brook

The very severe damage in Vermont caused by Tropical Storm Irene led to an impressive and encouraging recovery effort both by state government and residents, many of whom volunteered to help their neighbors salvage and rebuild.

Unfortunately, however, the storm – the second flood of historic proportions in the state this year – also seems to have washed away much of what we have learned about the dangers of digging gravel from streams and rivers.

In recent weeks there have been dozens of excavators and bulldozers in rivers across the state digging gravel, channelizing streams and armoring banks with stone, not only at great ecological cost, but – particularly in the many cases in which a true emergency did not exist – greatly increasing the risk of future flood damage.

Meanwhile, the state, by not setting and enforcing clear limits on that work in the rivers, has done little – at least so far – to prevent the damage.

Knowledge gained by the scientific study of these river systems, also known as fluvial geomorphology, leaves little doubt that increasing the speed of water by turning streams that meander over rocky beds into straight chutes with little structure not only destroys vital habitat for fish and other creatures, it also increases the potential destructive power of floods. It was advances in this physics-based science which led to significant limitations on gravel removal from Vermont rivers during the last two decades.

Rock River

However, the recent flooding (and statements by Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin) has given new life to an outdated and inaccurate idea that removing gravel from the rivers is what prevented flooding in the past. This notion ignores the fact that restricting rivers into a man-made channel, cutting off the access to flood plains and jarring mature streams back into instability the risk of flood damage is significantly increased, particularly for neighbors downstream.

More on this subject can be found in a Burlington Free Press column here and in a Vermont Public Radio news story here.