After more than two years of self-imposed delay and thousands of good-faith comments from the public expressing concerns about the project’s impacts and offering a wide range of potential alternatives, project developer Northern Pass Transmission LLC (NPT) has had ample opportunity to right the wrongs in its original, incomplete permit application by fully describing the practical alternatives to the project and its important environmental impacts, including at the project’s power sources in Canada. Instead, as we say in our comments, NPT’s 80-page amended application amounts to a poorly cited legal brief. It fails to include much of the detailed technical and environmental information in NPT’s possession and seeks to avoid thorough and rigorous review of the project and alternatives by dismissively branding each and every alternative to the current proposal unreasonable and impractical.

Enough is enough: no more bites at the apple for Northern Pass (photo credit: flickr/shane o mac)

Why is what’s in NPT’s application so important? For one, the content of the application provides the crucial starting point for DOE’s review of the project and its alternatives. And the application also should provide a set of sound technical and environmental information about the project and its alternatives that the public can reference, evaluate, and hold NPT accountable for. This is especially important in the wake of a saturation public relations campaign that superficially touts the project’s supposed benefits, including a series of “open houses” where project officials control the agenda and won’t answer key questions.

CLF and its partners agree: NPT had its chance to present a revised project, an amended permit application, and a new approach that respected host communities, acknowledged the feasible alternatives to overhead transmission technology outside the original corridor, and made a credible environmental and economic case for increasing imports in the context of the region’s overall energy future and in the face of its affiliate PSNH’s stubborn insistence on continuing to operate uneconomic, dirty coal plants. With its barely changed ”new route” and unwavering adversarial stance, NPT blew it.

As CLF’s President John Kassel made clear this summer, the region should pursue a robust regional discussion of the right approach to importing more power from eastern Canada. But without even the solid ground of a complete federal permit application, NPT’s proposal should stop here.

Don’t forget: next week, Show Up and Speak Out at the Final Round of Public Scoping Meetings for Northern Pass, and tomorrow is the deadline for intervening or filing specific comments on NPT’s amended Presidential Permit application.

The post Egregiously Incomplete: DOE Should Reject Northern Pass’s New Presidential Permit Application appeared first on Conservation Law Foundation.

September 12 - The Bottom Line: Rebuilding Plans Work for U.S. Fisheries - By Lee Crockett, The Pew Charitable Trusts. A congressional hearing this week on the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act examined a new report from the National Academies on the law’s effectiveness in rebuilding depleted fish populations. As a member of the peer-review panel for the report, I can attest to the amount of work that went into this study, which clearly recognizes our nation’s overall success in restoring fish stocks.

September 13 - Fish Talk in the News – Friday, September 13 - In this week’s Fish Talk in the News, fishing stakeholders respond to a report and hearing on Magnuson-Stevens reauthorization and rebuilding requirements; a seasonal lobster closure begins in Long Island Sound; Serious Eats highlights Maine lobstering; New Bedford’s Working Waterfront Festival will take place September 28-29; GMRI’s Out of the Blue campaign continues with a focus on whiting; new research shows changes in marine life distribution follow the direction and speed of climate change.

The post This Week on TalkingFish.org – September 9-13 appeared first on Conservation Law Foundation.

For over ten years, CLF has been actively showing that Vermont Yankee is not a good deal for Vermont. The state has been saddled with this poorly managed, uneconomic dinosaur for far too long, enduring environmental damage and the persistent threats to public health and safety that come with operating a nuclear power plant well beyond its planned life.

Image Credit: Tim Newcomb

With no place to put the waste that will remain dangerous for thousands of years, no power contract that would provide reliable and low cost power to Vermonters, and rapidly escalating costs to shut down and clean up the site—and little money available to make that happen—the numbers just never added up. The plant has been a pig in a poke for some time. The schemes from the plant’s wily owners to eke out a profit and keep the plant running, finally failed.

Vermont Yankee’s closure is good news for Vermont and the region’s economy and energy future. It heralds a transition away from older and polluting power supplies. Old technology, whether nuclear or coal-fired, cannot compete with newer, more efficient resources, renewable energy and energy efficiency. As New England undergoes a massive technology transition that hastens the demise of old polluting power plants throughout the region, we can begin investing in cleaner supplies that will meet our energy needs and create good, green jobs, instead of propping up polluting old plants and paying too much for their power.

Throughout the past decade, CLF added a strong oar pulling to move away from Vermont Yankee. We explained to state regulators, courts, legislatures, federal agencies and blue ribbon commissions the problems with water pollution, management and poor economics of the plant operation. Our advocacy built on a history of holding states and power plant owners responsible for acting in the best interest of ratepayers.

In the 1980s, we led a successful campaign to prevent a second reactor from being built at the Seabrook Station nuclear power plant in New Hampshire because the economics didn’t make sense. In 2000, we helped avert a fire sale of Vermont Yankee that was a bad deal for Vermont ratepayers. And in 2006, CLF showed how cleaner energy efficiency could help meet our power needs and reduce the need for massive transmission that would prop up older plants.

Throughout New England, whether it’s these old nukes, or old coal-fired power plants, we and our allies—the people who have paid and continue to pay with their health, their wallets and their children’s futures to keep them running—are shaking the region from simply accepting business as usual. The demise of Vermont Yankee—and the Salem Harbor and Somerset Station coal plants—was the result a changing energy landscape brought about by  advocates like CLF, who held  plant owners to account year after year, and  built legal, political and popular support for a better deal for New Englanders. Who knows how much more life their owners may have tried to wring out of these old plants at our expense if CLF and others had not been there to keep the pressure on for them to move aside?

Economics and advocacy are closely intertwined. Regardless of which straw finally broke Yankee’s back, the end of these old, polluting power plants is clearing the way to a cleaner energy future in our region. Thanks to the persistence and dedication of many, that is now within our reach.

The post Vermont Yankee Closing: Advocacy and Activism Kept Pressure on Aging Plant appeared first on Conservation Law Foundation.

Jeff Barnum, Conservation Law Foundation’s Great Bay-Piscataqua WATERKEEPER

Until recently, Peter Wellenberger served as the Great Bay-Piscataqua Waterkeeper. The program, with a full-time water advocate dedicated solely to protecting Great Bay, Little Bay, the Piscataqua River and all the waters comprising the Great Bay estuary, was an important new undertaking for Conservation Law Foundation. Realizing that the estuary really needed a visible clean water advocate, CLF created the position, which is affiliated with the international Waterkeeper Alliance, an association of folks dedicated to protecting and improving the health of waterbodies worldwide. In early 2012, Peter jumped in, energized people, networked, and created a coalition of local non-profit, business and municipal stakeholders called Rescue Great Bay in an effort to bring the pollution and nutrient issues to the fore. Peter retired earlier this summer.

I have assumed the Great Bay-Piscataqua Waterkeeper role and feel that I have found my calling. My association with the Coastal Conservation Association of New Hampshire and the Great Bay chapter of Trout Unlimited has galvanized my belief that we all deserve clean water to live, work, and play, and that everybody and everything downstream deserves the same. How elementary!

Great Bay, the Piscataqua River, and the estuary as a whole have not been so great of late. The City of Portsmouth operates an antiquated sewage treatment plant that provides only the most basic level of treatment (“primary treatment”) – a level that fails to meet the standards of the Clean Water Act and Portsmouth’s 2007 permit. In fact, Portsmouth’s plant is one the few remaining facilities in the country to provide such minimal treatment. Another five sewage treatment plants discharge into tidal rivers within the estuary. Two require total rehab and all, including Portsmouth, do not yet have the ability to remove adequate nitrogen, a key culprit in the estuary’s decline. In total, there are 18 sewage treatment facilities affecting the estuary, which drains 52 communities, including ten in Maine.

Progress is being made in New Hampshire. Durham is proactively dealing with the problem of nitrogen pollution. Newmarket and Exeter have accepted final permits from the EPA to upgrade their outdated sewage treatment plants and greatly reduce their nitrogen discharges. Portsmouth seems to be committed to upgrading to secondary sewage treatment and nitrogen controls, though I remain concerned about the time they are demanding to do so. Unfortunately, Dover and Rochester (regretfully, with help from Portsmouth) continue to aggressively oppose efforts by regulators to reduce nitrogen pollution from their sewage treatment plants. I hope time is on our side.

The sewage treatment plants are not the only causes of decline in the bay and river. Other pollution sources like dissolved nitrogen coming from lawn fertilizers, and storm runoff sweeping oil and chemicals from roads and parking lots are certainly issues of major concern, among others. The combined effect of this pollution on the bay includes a profound loss of filter-feeding oyster beds, an extraordinary loss of essential eelgrass, algae growth, inadequate oxygen to support life in some rivers, and shellfish harvest closures.

We, collectively, have a social responsibility to respond before it is too late.  I’m extremely pleased, as CLF’s Great Bay-Piscataqua Waterkeeper, to be able to do something about the major challenges facing our estuary, and I look forward to working with others who care about protecting this remarkable water resource. You can reach me at jbarnum@clf.org, or follow me on Facebook and Twitter.

The post Keeping Up the Good Work on Great Bay appeared first on Conservation Law Foundation.

Mismanagement has led to the current Cape Cod water pollution crisis.

A recent federal court decision in Conservation Law Foundation’s and Buzzards Bay Coalition’s lawsuit against EPA addressing nitrogen pollution in Cape Cod bays has major implications for the way local water pollution control projects are funded in the Commonwealth.

The impact of nutrient pollution on the streams and bays of Cape Cod was identified as a looming problem in the 1978 Areawide Wastewater Management Plan written by a predecessor to the Cape Cod Commission. Despite the Plan’s requirement of annual updates, it sat untouched for over thirty years as the looming threat of nutrient pollution became a present crisis. Spurred by a lawsuit filed by CLF and the Buzzards Bay Coalition in 2011, the 1978 Plan is finally being updated by the Cape Cod Commission.

The importance of the current planning process’s successful completion was thrown into stark relief on August 23, when Senior Judge Mark L. Wolf of the United States District Court of Massachusetts ordered that a central claim in CLF’s and BBC’s 2011 Areawide Wastewater Management Plan lawsuit could go forward.

The lawsuit contends that EPA’s annual approvals of loans and grants for local projects from the State Revolving Fund – a pool of federal and state funds dedicated to reducing water pollution—must be consistent with applicable Areawide Wastewater Management Plans. The claim states that it is not possible for EPA to make funding decisions based on the present Plan because its 35-year-old recommendations are no longer relevant to solving current water quality problems.

Judge Wolf’s order held that EPA must determine every year that Massachusetts is only providing water pollution control funding to those projects that are consistent with a current management plan for a particular area. Congress required this annual review in order to assure that water pollution control projects are planned, funded, and implemented based on an up-to-date understanding of local water pollution problems. The Judge’s ruling stemmed from the fact that the Cape Cod plan is so outdated that money is being spent haphazardly, rather than funding projects that will address the current problems.  The rampant and continuing pollution in Cape Cod’s bays is a result of this inconsistency.

Studies have indicated that the total cost of cleaning up the polluted bays will range from $3-6 billion.  In FY2012 alone, the State Revolving Fund provided $164.7 million for clean water projects in communities across the state, according the 2012 Annual Report prepared by the Commonwealth.

To get that money flowing to projects that will be effective in controlling Cape Cod water pollution, it is imperative that Areawide Plan be updated. As the Court opinion states, “If EPA determines that the state is not complying with the SRF provisions …, the agency must cease to provide SRF funding, unless the state rectifies its actions and complies with the statute.”  The real world implications of this order are clear and significant—the future of money for local governments disbursed under the State Revolving Fund program depends on an updated and approved Areawide Plan.

The Cape Cod Commission is currently in the process of gathering stakeholder input for the Plan update. If you’re a Cape resident, check out the meeting schedule, or sign up to participate in the next round of their online public engagement tool. This stakeholder process, scheduled to be complete this December, will form the basis of the Commission’s new draft Plan.

The post Hidden in Judge’s Ruling on Cape Cod Water Pollution: A Slap to EPA’s Hand on the Clean Water Funding Spigot appeared first on Conservation Law Foundation.

As with the well-attended meetings more than two years ago, these new meetings are a vital opportunity to explain your concerns about the project to DOE officials. These meetings are the last in-person moments to influence DOE’s decisions on the scope and content of the draft EIS, including the environmental and social impacts of the project to be considered and the alternatives to be seriously studied. Those decisions will have lasting ramifications as the federal and state permitting processes continue. Here is the schedule:

• Monday, September 23, 2013, 6–9 p.m., Grappone Conference Center, Concord, NH (map)
• Tuesday, September 24, 2013, 5–8 p.m, Plymouth State University, Silver Center for the Arts, Hanaway Theater, Plymouth, NH (map)
• Wednesday, September 25, 2013, 5–8 p.m., Mountain View Grand Resort & Spa, Presidential Room, Whitefield, NH (map)
• Thursday, September 26, 2013, 5–8 p.m., Colebrook Elementary School, Colebrook, NH (map) (this meeting was moved from a smaller location in W. Stewartstown)

Each meeting will include both an “informal workshop” and a more formal session where the public will have the opportunity to make brief statements. In the 2011 meetings, speakers were limited to 3 minutes. If you want to speak, we advise that you reserve a slot in advance by emailing DOE’s Brian Mills at Brian.Mills@hq.doe.gov. The formal portion of the meeting will be transcribed by a stenographer, and all public testimony will be included in the official administrative record of DOE’s review of the project.

Even if you aren’t interested in making any remarks in the formal session, please attend and bring your neighbors, friends, and family. The turnout at these meetings is important to the course of the permitting process, and many will be watching to gauge the public’s reaction to Northern Pass’s revised route. Showing up matters!

(photo credit: flickr/Christchurch City Libraries)

You can also weigh in with written scoping comments on DOE’s EIS website. The deadline for these comments is November 5, 2013. (The deadline to file comments with DOE on the amended application and to ”intervene” remains September 18.)

What should you say or write? Any reasonable concern or question about the proposed Northern Pass project and alternatives is relevant to the scoping process and will help inform DOE’s decision-making. As a starting point, it may be helpful to review the maps of the project route prepared by Northern Pass Transmission LLC in its amended permit application; both the maps and the application are available at DOE’s EIS website. CLF’s Northern Pass site, our detailed 2011 scoping comments, and three years of our Northern Pass blog posts are also at your disposal. Consider submitting comments on the potential impacts of the project on communities, the White Mountain National Forest, the climate, wildlife, forest resources, wetlands, recreation areas, the renewable energy sector, the local economy, and natural resources in Canada.  And don’t hesitate to tell DOE, once again, that its review of the project needs to be more fair, transparent, and objective than it is now. Note also that Northern Pass’s many rejections of potential alternatives to the project, including in its permit application, aren’t the final word, and DOE must conduct a rigorous review of all reasonable alternatives, including not building the project, and alternative routes and project designs that may have fewer impacts. It’s well settled that an objective and comprehensive analysis of alternatives is an ironclad legal requirement and, indeed, the heart of the federal environmental review of the project.

Show up and speak out!

The post Show Up and Speak Out at the Final Round of Public Scoping Meetings for Northern Pass appeared first on Conservation Law Foundation.

For this reason alone, it is worth celebrating the recent completion of the Baxter Boulevard storage project as noted by the Portland Press Herald. The two, million-gallon tanks, installed at a cost of $10 million, will provide critical storage during times of high volume (think the storms we had on Labor Day weekend) and literally keep at least 2 million gallons of untreated sewage and stormwater out of Casco Bay. While there is still a great deal to do to address the challenge that old infrastructure faces in light of the increasingly extreme storm events resulting from our changing climate, Portland continues to move in the right direction. CLF will continue to prod cities like Portland when necessary to clean up its act but is much happier to celebrate successes like this recent one when warranted.

The post New Baxter Boulevard System Benefits Casco Bay appeared first on Conservation Law Foundation.

Vermont Gas Systems Expansion

Tuesday evening, September 10, 2013

7:00 p.m 

Middlebury Union Middle School, 48 Deerfield Lane, Middlebury, Vermont 

At a time when climate change is upon us we must think carefully about putting in place new fossil fuel systems that will be around for a very long time. Keeping us hooked on fossil fuels for many years is a bad idea.

The Board is considering a proposal to expand the Vermont Gas Systems pipeline to Middlebury and then beyond. The proposed project would run through valuable wetlands and farmland, and expands Vermont’s reliance on fossil fuels at a time we need to be moving away from these polluting sources. This is the beginning of a bigger project to supply gas across Lake Champlain to New York. It also moves Vermont closer to being able to access gas supplies from fracking in the United States.

Come let the Board know what concerns you have. Tell the Board you want to make sure energy is used wisely and that Vermont takes steps now to reduce our addiction to fossil fuels. It is important for the Public Service Board to hear from you.

The post Public Hearing: Vermont Gas Pipeline Expansion appeared first on Conservation Law Foundation.

Mayor Menino at the 2nd year launch of Hubway. Photo Credit: City of Boston.

In a major city like Boston, the mayor plays a pivotal role in advancing transportation innovation and improvements. After all, few things show off a city better (or worse) than its transportation systems. To help the public understand where Boston’s mayoral candidates stand on this key campaign issue, CLF is co-sponsoring a free forum on Transportation and Livable Communities on Tuesday, September 17, 2013 from 6pm to 8pm at the Boston Public Library.

During Mayor Thomas Menino’s twenty years in office, the City of Boston has advanced many transportation projects, including the modernization of the Blue Line, the rehabilitation of old and opening of new stations on the Fairmount Line, the launch of the Hubway bike share system, and the completion of the Big Dig. Around the country, Antonio Villaraigosa in Los Angeles, Rahm Emanuel in Chicago, and Michael Bloomberg in New York all have successfully put new transportation ideas, policies and investments at the center of their administrations.

For CLF and everyone who lives and/or works in Boston, it matters that the next mayor of Boston, whoever it is, understands the importance of its transportation systems to the city: the ability to walk and bike safely and easily, the need to assure that public transit is affordable and accessible to all, and the foresight to consider how good transportation planning can help the city reduce greenhouse gas emissions and manage through the challenges presented by a changing climate. With the right mayor, Boston can and will continue to lead in this area.

Four Corners/Geneva Avenue Station on Fairmount Line. Photo Credit: Patrick D. Rosso, pdrosso @ flickr

The forum on Transportation and Livable Communities will give each of the candidates an opportunity to address the vital transportation issues impacting Boston’s communities. CLF is co-sponsoring the event with a group of non-profit organizations, planners, and advocates who have been working to make Boston, and other Massachusetts communities, more livable.  As a group, we have provided all of the candidates with extensive information on policies related to transportation and livable communities. Now, on Tuesday, September 17, 2013 from 6pm to 8pm,  you can learn how more about how each candidate will improve Boston’s streets and public transportation. The event is free and  open to the public and the media. Register here to get your free ticket. We hope to see you there.

The post Join us at the Boston Mayoral Candidate Forum on Transportation and Livable Communities appeared first on Conservation Law Foundation.