Spitting In The Ocean
How You Can Help Maryland Achieve the Chesapeake Bay TMDL
Maryland has recently been told by federal agencies how much nutrient and sediment pollution can flow annually into the Chesapeake Bay from activities on its land. This remarkable event is part of a process that developed under the Clean Water Act called total maximum daily loads, or, TMDLs (a.k.a., the "pollution diet"). Under this process, it is left up to states to figure out how to achieve the pollution reductions needed to meet their load allocation. There are meant to be consequences, if they don't.
Faced with pollution reduction goals more challenging than the self-imposed ones that they have failed to achieve over the years, Maryland's agencies have been hustling to create a plan that explains how they will comply. This is actually a requirement under the TMDL process. Each of the Chesapeake Bay drainage states needs to specify a set of pollution reduction practices in a Watershed Implementation Plan (WIP). That plan, if fully implemented, is expected to land them under the nutrient load cap.
Maryland has an on-going program of public meetings to explain all of this to interested citizens and stakeholders. I went to the one in Denton several weeks ago. As that meeting unfolded, it became clear that the state does not yet have a fully formed plan for meeting the TMDL. In fact, they canvassed the attendees for any ideas that they might have.
This is pretty amusing, if you think about it. An undertaking as serious as restoring the Chesapeake Bay, subject of many millions of dollars of scientific research, an undertaking that already consumes many tens of millions of state and federal dollars aimed at mitigating nutrient pollution - and the state is asking interested on-lookers if they have any ideas?
One would need to have a very good grasp of their subject to present a technical idea for achieving the state's TMDL obligations at a meeting like that. You would have to describe the fix, explain why it works, show some evidence that it does work, and then explain why it should be expected to work at larger scales. That would be a difficult thing to do in the time available in a public meeting. Then, even if a technical fix could be described clearly enough for state agency staff to understand it, it is hard to imagine them being able to take it back to their offices to advocate with the people who actually make policy.
Because of all that, I saved my big idea for you here and now. This is it. When you use public money - or any money for that matter - to buy pollution mitigation, price the thing that you want, which is fewer pounds of nutrient pollution in our waterways. We don't do that now. We buy acres of cover crops and riparian buffers. On some acres those practices reduce a lot of nutrient pollution, on others not so much. Since there is no price signal going to the high-performing acres, they are no more likely to be adopted than the low performing acres. It is a random draw.
When you price nutrient pollution reduction by the pound, you give a signal to owners of acres with high pollution reduction potential that adopting load mitigation practices is worth a lot there. And, just as bakers have learned over the years that it is better to buy their wheat by the bushel, and not by the acre, it would be worthwhile for the state to consider what might happen if they bought nutrient pollution reduction by the pound.
Using the same Chesapeake Bay Model outputs that inform the TMDL, it can be shown that if Maryland priced cover crop implementation by the pounds of Nitrogen reduced, it could achieve twice as much Nitrogen pollution reduction without increasing its current budget. Similar outcomes are predicted from making payments for riparian buffers on a "pounds of nutrient reduced" basis.
I believe that about covers my requirements for presenting a technical fix for meeting Maryland's pollution loading cap. The fix is changing how some pollution mitigation practices are paid. Evidence that price signals influence producer behavior can be found in the record of the past 250 years of free market supply of commodities in America. Will it work for nutrient pollution reduction? Why wouldn't it?
There are, of course, reasons why this idea might not work. The science might be wrong. It could motivate adverse consequences. But, more likely, it could be buried for years under bureaucratic inertia. I have been trying to find someone in Maryland's TMDL planning process who thinks that cost efficiency in pollution reduction is an interesting idea, and, except for a friend who doesn't really count, I have drawn a blank.
One would think that doubling your product without increasing your spending would be of interest to a group of people who are trying to figure out how the State of Maryland is going to achieve more challenging pollution reduction goals. But, so far that does not appear to be the case. So, if you know somebody who knows somebody, and if you understand the five preceding paragraphs, try to convince them that this is something Maryland's environmental policy planners may want to look into.