Lawsuit filed over Chesapeake Cap-and-trade water pollution policy

The Food and Water Watch and the Friends of the Earth filed a lawsuit this week against the cap-and-trade policy that is being proposed for the Chesapeake Bay watershed. The cap-and-trade approach uses market-based forces to buy and trade pollution credits among point and non-point sources, which proponents believe will lower the overall amount of pollution entering the Chesapeake Bay.

However those who oppose the policy say that it creates a "right to pollute" and that all pollutants entering the waterways of the United States should be illegal according to the Clean Water Act.

The difficulty, of course, is implementing any kind of policy that would address nonpoint sources. The Clean Water Act has been immensely successful in addressing point source pollution over the last three decades. The challenge for water managers today is nonpoint sources such as runoff coming from farms and ranches, and even urban runoff from yards and parks. The Clean Water Act introduced TMDLs (Total Maximum Daily Load) for waterways, which is a total maximum volume of a pollutant that a waterway can tolerate before it becomes harmful. However, the CWA does not introduce any rigorous federal policy to fund or enforce the states' implementation of TMDLs. As a result, the majority of pollutants entering waterways of United States today are from of nonpoint sources.

A cap-and-trade policy would allow non-point sources like farmers or ranchers to sell pollution credits to point sources if they implement BMPs, or best management practices, to limit their inputs, thus providing an incentive for non-point sources to mitigate pollution. This is an incentive-based approach, like conservation easement programs, which have been implemented with some success across the United States.

One inherent weakness of a cap-and-trade policy is that it focuses on endpoints (certain points a long a waterway where pollutants are measured), so upstream polluters have less of a motivation to limit inputs then polluters close to an endpoint. Another difficulty is that best management practices implemented on farms and ranches often are unpredictable in terms of limiting pollution inputs in a certain timeframe. This will make any trade difficult and hard to implement, and potentially make point source polluters less interested in facilitating trades. And finally, the volume of pollutants entering a waterway from individual farms and ranches is usually a very small amount, and so compensation for BMPs would likely be correspondingly tiny.

So far, very few cap-and-trade policies have been implemented at any significant scale, and even fewer have been successful. It remains to be seen whether the Chesapeake Bay cap-and-trade plan will succeed.

I personally would be interested in hearing what policy solutions the Food and Water Watch and other organizations opposing cap-and-trade policies have to address non-point sources.

Source: HuffPost (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mobileweb/wenonah-hauter/fighting-pollution-tradin_b_1941188.html)