News by Nature this week: In Waste Water Woes and Wonders we ponder why Sarah Palin was shilling for soda companies at the recent CPAC convention yet not a word about billions in federal sewer improvement mandates being foisted on cash-strapped communities across the country. 

For fans of temperate estuaries and watersheds as they once were New Hampshire’s Great Bay is a rare example of same. Here, eel grass still thrives. It’s home to one of just a handful of successful oyster reef reintroduction efforts nationwide. It’s also fed by one of New England’s cleanest watersheds in one of the most developed regions of the country. Great Bay is an estuary that discharges into what was once one of the country’s most productive open-ocean fisheries: the Gulf of Maine. The Great Bay is also an excellent example of how local decisions have national impact. Right now, Great Bay community residents and government agencies are wrestling with how much sewage to discharge into that estuary. They are among several hundred communities that discharge wastewater into the Gulf of Maine. In the Great Bay city of Dover, residents must pony up $1,200 to reduce by some 275%, or roughly 2/3, the amount of sewage—technically nitrogen—being discharged from its water treatment plant. The EPA is demanding a 733% reduction, from 22 milligrams per liter of nitrogen in Dover’s wastewater discharge to three. That lower level will cost property owners an extra $2,000 each annually. Dover elected officials are asking for an appeal of the EPA mandate as are officials in similar communities across the country also facing similarly sharp federal mandates to clean-up their wastewater treatment systems. The reason these government regulations have not been decried on Tea Party rally posters or discussed at the recent CPAC convention is that no special-interests other than everyday tax payers are affected. So there is no special-interest money funneling into the campaigns of politicians purporting to defend the interests of the everyday taxpayers. Yet the cost of these sewer plant improvements to the every-day taxpayer is right up there with the reviled carbon tax proposals special-interests killed before it could even be seriously considered. Many folks feel a carbon tax is the best and quickest solution to an environmental problem even bigger than coastal pollution: global warming. Toward that end in Waste Water Woes and Wonders this week we ask: Is our free spending political system the single biggest environmental problem facing this country? BTW, what CPAC and Tea Party disciples call the “Failed Stimulus Bill,” funneled billions nationwide into wastewater plant improvements. You never hear about that either. Look it up in Recovery.gov. Have a great week.

After a Powerful Lobbyist Intervenes, EPA Reverses Stance on Polluting Texas County’s Water These days about the only thing nonpartisan in this country is campaign finance corruption. Hence the complete lack of movement on both sides of the isle on efforts to rein it in. Despite that, the Obama administration certainly has been a sad affirmation that our two party system is ruled by one and the same master, cash. The article above saying Obama’s EPA turned a blind eye toward pollution from a uranium mine that helped finance his election, certainly suggests he’s for sale. His signature healthcare overhaul legislation included a $19 billion gift to electronic health records companies that have since stymied innovation and competition in what’s arguably the single most inefficient area of the industry. One would have thought or hoped that Obama’s very inexperience, like another clearly more moral president who preceded him, would make egregious violations of the public trust—particularly where matter’s of the country’s future are concerned—less likely. NBN loves Obama’s spirit of compromise and is still willing to give him the benefit. That said, this guy’s clear embrace of “the-ends-justify-the-means” and “delegate-and-the-devil-be-damned” is going to have him saying “Oh well,” four years from now.

An eponymous twitter account called @honorinoffice started following NBN a while back. Perfect fodder, we figured, for this issue dedicated to the lack of honor in office. These folks, @honorinoffice, are undertaking the admirable but questionable effort on their website to foster a new sense of integrity in the industry of holding U.S. public office. News flash folks: elected office in this country has been ethically challenged since Jefferson and Adams. Still, can anyone doubt that US politics of late has been the least honorable as in any time in this country’s existence? Accordingly, if we want to have honor in office, this country has to change its very constitution, and all the high court action toward that end has been in the opposite direction. The electoral college has to end. Campaign’s must be publically financed. Political parties need to be abolished. Winner-take-all elections need to change to multiple run-off elections that cull also-rans, kind of like college basketball’s March Madness which 8 million Americans seem take more seriously than our elections. Perhaps penalties, in some form, should be assessed for not voting. Perhaps you could lose you eligibility to apply for student loans, or certain government benefits. As it stands now we suffer through two years of madness every four years and those asked to act on our behalf spend half their terms grubbing money and half their terms passing laws at the behest of those providing it. Honor cannot be restored to a system that never had it. The system has to change.

Exclusive: Billionaires secretly fund attacks on climate science Speaking of the Koch Brothers, NBN actually thought a while back that they might be changing their tune about global warming, but it turns out they are as self serving as ever with all their tax deductable contributions. These guys have used the U.S. charitable tax deduction to pervert an entire political system, not just a few feckless politicians. Perhaps there’s no greater measure of how this country is ruled by money than the fact we so readily allowed our electoral system to be hijacked by these two clowns. We’d be happy to proclaim these two evil incarnate, but they do an awful lot of good with their charitable contributions at the same time. These enigmatic siblings are emblematic of the worst in the Democratic Party they so revile: systematic corruption in the name of public service. Which has NBN thinking that the first government regulation this country should strip is the charitable tax deduction.

How to Force Ethics on the Food Industry In this op-ed a former a food corporation executive concludes that “I could no longer accept a business model that put profits over public health — and no one else should have to, either.” We got news for ya Mr. Michael Mudd, former EVP of global corporate affairs for Kraft Foods, the entire country is being told that putting profit over public health, and pretty much every other public interest, is in American’s best interest. Matter of fact, the highest court in the land has codified the concept and is now moving toward laminating that principal with yet another decision paving the way for purchasing political power in this country. What pisses us off, Mr. Mudd, is the decades Kraft has dedicated to enhancing obesity in this country, and the fact that almost all of its products are almost always preceded with the word “processed.” It's all well and good that Mr. Mudd is seeing the error of his ways, but a lot of damage has already been done. How many corporate executives, not so conscious-bitten have quietly slipped into well heeled obscurity financed by the damage they’ve done, ignorantly or otherwise. And just how much money did Mr. Mudd make, and is now presumably enjoying, while hospital emergency rooms tend to the wards of the state diabetics his company has helped create? Is it such an absurd idea to hold such folks responsible for the damage they’ve caused in their corporate careers after they’ve left that corporation? Maybe we can start with the subprime Wall Street weasels kicking back in their Greenwich, CT, condos. For that matter what about the gold fortunes that were salted away a century ago from hydraulic mining that ruined San Francisco Bay for what’s likely to be centuries. Who inherited that money and should they now be allowed to keep it? Whether or not the heirs to those fortunes actually caused the damage, why should they have a right to money that came, and continues to come at the expense of all other tax payers?

Fine for not finishing what’s on your plate Japanese Restaurant Fines Diners For Not Finishing Their Meals When NBN read this we nearly dropped our chopsticks. In the U.S. not finishing what is on your plate is what eating out is all about. Yet, when we’re eating at a restaurant, we’re also eating food that often comes at the highest cost to the environment. Who in their right mind really orders a salad or oatmeal at a restaurant. You order a steak, fish and chips, or froie gras. Yet, it takes some 30 pounds of grain and a few hundred gallons of clean water to produce a pound of hamburger. That fillet-o-fish was produced by raking nets across the ocean floor ruining for years ocean-floor ecosystems that the fish being caught depend on. And you don’t want to know what it takes to produce froie gras. There should be a cost for throwing food away. Years ago it was your mother’s disapproving frown and the vague awareness of starving kids in some place called China. Today mothers put out a buffet in hopes that the little darlin’s pound down enough macaroni and cheese and/or Captain Crunch to send the pancreas into overdrive for another three hours. Still, charging folks for not finishing what’s on their plates does sound a little 1960s Americana. Perhaps we should just provide the environmental controls needed to require production of these environmentally costly foods be in sustainable ways.

Cape Wind: Regulation, Litigation And The Struggle To Develop Offshore Wind Power In The U.S.  Renewable Energy Magazine did a nice retrospective on the largest and only US offshore wind energy project, Cape Wind. The author threshes out 12 years of machinations by those for and against the project leaving readers with a balanced perspective of why the project has gone nowhere. Today, there are more than 1,600 offshore wind turbines at 55 different facilities representing more than 3,800 megawatts of capacity connected to the European grid, according to the European Wind Energy Association. Several that would dwarf Cape Wind in size and output are already being planned. China, a gluttonous consumer of coal-fired electricity, nonetheless has at least one commercial-scale offshore wind farm of its own, and several more are in the works. There are still no offshore wind farms in the United States, and the most serious effort to create one has been stalled for 10 years. And how is it the rest of the world is embracing this technology why the U.S. throws one bureaucratic obstacle after another in the path of the only serious effort out there to create it? NBN is not going to do the research on this one, we’re just going to speculate. Question 1: What is the primary energy source supplying the North East and who owns it? Question 2: What is the only conceivable energy source that can compete with those owners in the North East. Need a clue. Who has financed the fight against Cape Wind and how good are these folks at bending political policy in this country in their favor?