Logic and Passion and the Chesapeake Bay
By David Schnare • Oct 28th, 2009 • Category: Environment, FeatureEvery once in a while we get a peek at someone who goes beyond the headlines and offers up something more like sense and sensibility.
No, I’m not writing Jane Austen visits Virginia. More like Austen meets de Tocqueville in Tappahannock – in other words, logic and passion and the Chesapeake Bay.
Last month, Molly Pugh offered testimony about how to protect the Chesapeake Bay from the perspective of the Virginia grain producers. Sounds dreadfully dusty and dry, I suppose, but behind the husk we find a grain of truth. Indeed a whole bushel of truths.
Molly Pugh is the Executive Director of the Virginia Grain Producers Association. Speaking before the U.S. House Transportation and Infrastructure Subcommittee on Water Resources and Environment, Pugh’s testimony laid out facts and principles that, had they been the keystone of prior decades of Chesapeake Bay policy, would have resulted in a Bay much further along in its recovery.
One of the great mysteries surrounding Bay policy is its over-reliance on a big, complex and ultimately inaccurate computer model run by EPA’s Chesapeake Bay Program. This model is not only supposed to identify who is polluting, how much they pollute and how that affects the Bay, but also explain who should stop polluting and how that will improve the Bay. From this the government establishes the Total Maximum Daily Limit for the Bay, a policy decision that determines how much pollution can enter the Bay from Virginia. Thereafter, the Commonwealth is expected, (some would incorrectly say ‘is required’) to sets enforceable limits on pollutors.
But what if the computer model is wrong? What if enforceable limits are disconnected from reality? Those are the problems Ms. Pugh pointed out, and with considerable intellectual force.
At present, the model assumes that between one-third and one-half of the Bay’s pollution comes from agriculture. Maybe – although actual water quality analysis is fairly sparse and EPA acknowledges the model relies on very old data. But, let’s start with that assumption – agriculture is a big contributor. The question then arises, how much more pollution control can farmers offer. One would begin with knowing how much pollution control already exists. Then one could estimate how much more there is to get. And, therein lies the rub.
In her testimony, Pugh said: “We are highly concerned that the obvious lack of complete data about current implementation of conservation practices significantly skews water quality reports and publishes misleading pollution load reduction assignments for any one sector.” She based her statement on facts that explain why the computer model results cannot possibly be correct.
In Virginia there are about 1.1 million acres of land in small grain and corn production. Virginia Tech examined the leading conservation farming pollution control practice, continuous no-till agriculture, an approach capable of reducing pollution run-off by over 90 percent. Virginia Tech reported that 40 percent of the 1.1 million acres used continuous no-till practices in 2007, but the model used by EPA does not take all 40 percent into account.
Pugh explains how EPA uses this data. Tech’s 2003 survey showed that out of 75,630 cropland acres in conservation practices that year, only 5,630 were supported through an incentive based government program. In other words, 70,000 acres in Virginia’s Coastal Plain region alone were neither counted nor reported in the Chesapeake Bay Program Model. Because EPA only counts subsidized conservation practices, the computer model failed to account for 92 percent of the pollution controls in place in 2003. There is every reason to believe that the model continues to significantly under-count pollution control from agricultural land and does so statewide.
Today, well in excess of 90 percent of Virginia’s cropland east of Route 95 is in continuous no-till planting, leaving little left to control on half of all Commonwealth crop land. There are some additional benefits that can come from still more advanced farming techniques – techniques that, like no-till, can increase profitability to the farmer. But with each advance, the amount of pollution prevention you can squeeze out of a crop farmer becomes less and less.
Clearly, as Ms. Pugh points out, it is time to make the computer model reflect reality. It is time to base decisions on actual observations. It is time to rely on science. It is time for honest peer review of the EPA computer model. It is time to limit EPA’s authority to arbitrarily change a state’s comprehensive plan. It’s time for both sense and sensibility. You can read the entire Pugh tesimony here. It’s a good read because it is Amercian Exceptualism incarnate. de Tocqueville would have been proud of Ms. Pugh’s contribution. So should Virginians.
David Schnare serves (pro bono) as the Director of the Center for Environmental Stewardship at the Thomas Jefferson Institute, Virginia’s premier independent public policy foundation. He is a Senior Attorney and Environmental Scientist in the Office of Regulatory Compliance at the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). He holds an appointment to the Environmental Quality Advisory Council of Fairfax County, the largest urban county in the nation. He is CEO of Schnare and Associates, Inc., a professional corporation providing legal representation, legal and policy analysis and is Chairman of the Environmental and Land Use Committee of the Occoquan Watershed Coalition, an organization of 143 homeowners associations in western Fairfax County, Virginia.
Bringing his “balanced” environmental views to his community, Dr. Schnare Co-Chaired the Occoquan Watershed Task Force, a group appointed by the Chairman of the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors to make a thorough assessment on the status of the watershed and to make recommendation on how to ensure its continued protection.
Dr. Schnare’s honors include: Two Gold and four Bronze Medals from the Administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Vice President’s Hammer Award and multiple U.S. Department of Justice Certificates of Commendation. His academic achievements include Law Review at George Mason University School of Law; Inns of Court (GMUSL); Sigma Xi (Science Honorary); Delta Omega Service Award (Public Health Honorary); National Science Foundation Research Fellowship; LEGIS Fellowship; and the U.S. Public Health Fellowship. He is an Honorary Member of the Water Quality Association.
Dr. Schnare earned his JD in 1999 from George Mason University School of Law. While attending law school (and working full-time at EPA) he was the Hogan (Environmental) Essay winner and served on the Law Review and the Inns of Court. He graduated Cum Laude (Order of the Coif). He holds his PhD in Environmental Management from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, a Master of Science in Public Health-Environmental Science from the University of North Carolina School of Public Health, and a Bachelor’s Degree from Cornell College in Mt. Vernon, Iowa where he majored in chemistry and mathematics.
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The “model” supported by a phalanx of public and private career folks – has not been properly validated with real world data.
this has been pointed out before. How hundreds/thousands of career professionals will believe a model without doing the necessary water quality validation is a testament to what?
I wish I could be polite but I have to ask: How can so many folks working on this problem who say they are committed to the cause of cleaning up the Bay – rely on a model that is obviously wrong – because apparently no one is willing to question why it should not be properly validated?
It boggles the mind.
You know.. one week.. they’re blaming septic tanks.. and the next week they’re blaming farms then they’re blaming 7-11s and here’s the really bad part.
If you live in a place in Virginia and you want to encourage your locality to do the things necessary to help bring the Bay back – what exactly do you advocate for and how much will it cost?
Which River in Va has the biggest problems ? Which has the least? On a given River – which segments have the most problems and which ones lesser?
We are told that this stuff is “too complicated” for the average person.
I strongly – vociferously, in fact, disagree. You cannot get the public to support the actions necessary if they do not understand where the problems are, what it will take to fix them and who the folks are that they should be pestering to act.
The Bay Program walks and talks for all the world like some kind of a scam..
There is one Guy – Congressman Rob Whitman, with a background in Fisheries Biology, has successfully enacted legislation that will require coordination (vice turf fighting) and results from monitoring…
I’m still amazed.. all the career folks working all these years and most all of them apparently okay with a model that no one has insisted be properly validated.
Another serious problem in all of this is the myopic fixation on nutrients while ignoring toxics. The heavy metals and other substances that run off vehicular surfaces are completely ignored. We’ve asked for years for this to be included, to no avail. It’s like your doctor focusing on your bad knee while ignoring your heart condition.
re: fixation and focus
without COORDINATED comprehensive water quality monitoring – we simply do not know. Worse, we don’t know the trend data.
We have IMHO – an institutional aversion to measuring specifics.
Mary H is concerned about Storm Water Runoff. I am too but I’m also concerned about the hormones and prescription drugs that are not entering the waste streams not only from the urban areas but from factor scale animal operations.
We have dozens of different agencies all conducting different but similar, sometimes redundant, and sometimes GAPs activities on behalf of the Bay -
and at the end of the day – in a town on a river – there is no specific guidance that the public can understand and advocate for their jurisdiction to address.
The average citizen – for their town, river, creek, bay cannot tell you what the priority issues are nor how they can be effectively delt with and what exactly to advocate for in terms of remedy.
The career professionals and policy people that work for the “Bay” should be embarrassed and ashamed to have spent so much time and money to have accomplished so little and to have put us in this place in time where much of their work relied on models – that they knew were questionable and faulty.
shame on them.
This is specious in the extreme. If, without accounting the load reductions that Pugh implies, the Bay is still sick and the Potomac is still loaded with hormones that give us intersex fish, what exactly is it that is not being counted? We know that there are excessive nutrient loads and we know that much of that results from nutrients imported into the watershed (commercial fertilizers, food and other stuff that people process), along with ways in which we have changed eco-system function on the land. The Bay model has been around for 20 years and it is getting better, though it clearly has a long way to go. But the issue that Pugh raises — that the benefits of continuous no-till are being under-counted — can be stood on its head with respect to what we see. If any of that was useful, then why has the Bay not recovered? Rather than declaring victory and going home, we need to look at the reduction values credited to low till and no-till and see what else has to be done to reduce nutrient loads from agricultural land. Ms Pugh’s argument is just a new version of the old song, “don’t tax you, don’t tax me, tax that fellow behind the tree”.
Robert – I think one of the important points things to consider is that if indeed farmers have reduced their load significantly then, perhaps, there are other sources that need to be considered or looked at more closely. For example, are some sectors being under represented? (And always have been?)
I don’t think you can know the benefits of “no-till” or anything else that impacts the rivers UNLESS you can MEASURE it.
It’s smoke & mirrors to advocate for or against a particular activity unless you can show it’s impact/effect.
and that’s the problem with the model.
You should be able to point that model at a river segment – generate the predicted values for that segment then go test the water and show what the actual numbers are.. and then use the discrepancies to kick off subsequent analyses that will ultimately result in a more accurate model – one that you know where is it accurate and one where you know it is not and you need the actual numbers from the water body.
Unfortunately this IS Rocket Science. This is the same process that Rocket Scientist MUST USE if they are to successfully produce fire control software that accurately guides missiles.
The current bay modelling approach is either incompetent or it’s wrong on purpose.. I prefer to believe the former but I’m out of patience with the time and money that is being spent essentially chasing our tails…
it’s time to reform the institutions involved in the Bay modelling and cleanup. The results indicate institutional ineptness – and this is not just the govt folks – we have EDUs and NGOs also doing dumb stuff.
[...] his October 22nd essay entitled Logic and Passion and the Chesapeake Bay, Dr. Schnare does a disservice to readers by ignoring the world-renowned science and extensive [...]