Echo

Dredging near Great Lakes OK for now: panel

By |

(ON) CBC – Navigational dredging along the St. Clair River in southwestern Ontario has contributed to a drop in water levels in the upper Great Lakes basin, but it’s not an ongoing problem and doesn’t require immediate action, a panel of U.S. and Canadian experts has found. Water levels between Lake Michigan and Lake Erie have dropped an average of 23 centimetres between 1963 and 2006, according to a report by the International Upper Great Lakes Study Board. More

Echo

Look to objective facts with climate tax

By |

(MI) Detroit Free Press – Sooner or later, Mother Nature is going to pick sides. Temperatures will rise, fall or remain relatively stable. Ocean levels either will rise precipitously, swamping coastal areas worldwide, or they won’t. Changing weather patterns will render vast swaths of currently arable land uninhabitable, or not. Alarmists like Al Gore and denialists like Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe may not live long enough to know which of their long-range climate forecasts was closer to the mark, but their great-grandchildren will know with some certainty.

Echo

Editorial: Idea for 10-cent water bottle tax is all wet

By |

(MI) The Detroit News – Lt. Gov. John Cherry has launched a new tax trial balloon. Cherry, for now the top Democratic contender to succeed Jennifer Granholm as governor, wants to tax water bottlers in Michigan to fund higher education scholarships. Creating this new tax is a bad idea in a state desperate for new jobs. No matter how well-intentioned their purpose, tax increases on job providers hurt employment. More

Echo

Panel: St. Clair River not draining Great Lakes

By |

(MI) Detroit Free Press – In blunt terms, members of an international study panel said the idea that a widened St. Clair River is losing billions of gallons of water each day, causing the levels of Michigan and Huron lakes to drop, is bunk. A Canadian group put forth that idea five years ago after an expert it hired concluded that the river was acting like a bathtub drain that had been enlarged by dredging, allowing billions of gallons of water to escape too quickly into Lake Erie. More

Echo

Editorial: Act now before invader hits Great Lakes

By |

(WI) Green Bay Press Gazette – The latest invasive species to threaten the Great Lakes is a brute called the Asian carp. The Wisconsin Legislature should take an opportunity today to act swiftly against the threat. Capable of growing to 4 feet long and 100 pounds, the Asian carp has starved out native species by scooping up plankton as it slowly migrated north up the Mississippi River since the 1970s. The fish originally was imported from Asia to cleanse fish ponds and sewage lagoons in the deep South, but they escaped into the river. More

Water

Full steam ahead

By |

(WI) Milwaukee Journal Sentinel – A Milwaukee Common Council committee took a welcome step forward this week when it recommended that the city declare an interest in selling Lake Michigan water to the city of Waukesha. That doesn’t mean the city will sell the water, but – if the full council follows suit Dec. 22 – declaring its interest in a letter to Waukesha allows discussion and the process to move ahead, and that is a good thing. The letter is a necessary part of Waukesha’s application for lake water under the Great Lakes compact, which would require, among other things, the approval of the eight Great Lakes states governors. There is still a long road ahead for Waukesha and many details to be worked out.

Echo

To guard Great Lakes, give fence a chance

By |

(VA) USA Today – It sounds like science fiction: an alien invasion of Lake Michigan by toddler-sized scum suckers. But around Chicago, the fear is so real that governments have already spent more than $11 million building electronic defenses to zap the invaders and trying to poison them. The alien is a fish, the Asian carp. The fear is that the voracious plant-eaters could migrate from the Mississippi River basin through a Chicago canal and into the Great Lakes, threatening the habitat of lake fish. The risk, however, is that a going-overboard solution (walling off the canal) will be adopted before the costly new defenses (electrical barriers) are given a chance to work.

Echo

Is truck pollution causing asthma in Detroit?

By |

(MI) The Associated Press – A town-hall meeting in Detroit is taking a look at the effect of diesel pollution in the city. The Alliance for Healthy Air coalition is hosting the Monday evening gathering at St. Stephens Church. Organizers plan to discuss the effects of pollution on health and quality of life of Detroiters. More

Echo

EPA to spend $13 million to help stop Asian carp

By |

(WI) Milwaukee Journal Sentinel – Less than two weeks after fishery experts spent about $3 million to poison the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal in a desperate attempt to beat back an Asian carp invasion of Lake Michigan, the federal government has announced it will throw another $13 million at the problem. That money will come from the recently passed $475 million Great Lakes Restoration Initiative and much of it will go to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers so the agency can build emergency berms and plug various waterways in the Chicago area to keep the carp from riding floodwaters into the lake. More

Echo

Great Lakes need to be protected: Close the canal

By |

(MI) Detroit Free Press – The Great Lakes are the absolute crown jewels of Michigan and the Midwest (“Capitol Hill joins in carp assault,” Dec. 13). Michigan has by far more Great Lakes shoreline than any other state. We must protect the Great Lakes at all costs, for the sake of our environmental and economic futures. Our relatively clean, massive freshwater supply is the envy of the country, especially our brethren in the sun-parched Southwest.