Menhaden

Rutgers Professor H. Bruce Franklin calls a small, oily, bony fish called the menhaden "The Most Important Fish in the Sea." To most people it's not of much interest except maybe as bait, but one company called Omega Protein depends on it for 230 million pounds of menhaden per year, the source of their $175 million + of annual revenue. According to this Time magazine article, 13 of 15 Atlantic states have banned harvesting of the fish because of its role as a keystone in the food chain. It scarfs algae, basically filtering 7 gallons per minute, and in doing so builds up lots of omega-3 fatty acids in its tiny body. Omega Protein uses these oils in a variety of products, including pet food and fish oil pills.

It turns out that Omega Protein, a Houston-based company, has managed to keep regulation of the Virginia menhaden fishery out of the hands of the governmental body we'd expect to have oversight: the Virginia Marine Resources Commission. This week, a couple of Virginia legislators introduced bills to allow the fishery to be regulated, but their efforts were stomped.

If someone's getting $175 million out of the little fish, that's a good thing- jobs are created in Virginia and Houston. On the other hand, fish from stripers to crabs depend on the fish both as food and for its filtering capabilities. If we want a clean bay, we'll need the menhaden's help in cleaning it up. Question is, how much is that clean bay worth?

**If anyone's looking for a paper topic, I think this is a good one. Start by reading this article and come talk to me.**

People or beetles?

It sounds too crazy to be real, but here it is, right in Calvert County: people may lose their homes to protect an endangered beetle. An interesting quote: "'I would equate the loss of the Puritan tiger beetle with the loss of the polar bear,' said Michael Raupp, an entomologist at the University of Maryland in College Park. 'If it had fur and a cute smile and were the size of a cat, people would be more concerned about the loss of this thing.'" What do you think?

Welcome!

It's the start of the new semester and this is the boundary of what this semester's students are responsible for. You can take a look at posts from the last year to see what previous students did, of course, but you're responsible for the material from this post forward, including this one.

The Maryland Department of Natural Resources is proposing a new set of regulations that will set aside a fair amount of the Chesapeake as a sanctuary, meaning that people won't be allowed to dredge for oysters there. Naturally, the workers aren't too excited about this: they protested in Annapolis last week against the proposed legislation. A counter-proposal was issued a few days later to put control of the fishery in the hands of the legislature rather than the DNR.

Last year we had a speaker from the DNR who described the difficulty of regulating the fishery. He said that the problems are caused by all of us- note that one commenter on the first article proposes that no one fertilize their lawns this year- but the solutions mostly end up on the backs of the harvesters. No one wants to see harvesters put out of business, but unless something is done to regulate the streams of effluent that are messing up the habitat, DNR thinks that the best thing is for us to put up with some hopefully short-term restrictions. It's a complicated problem with no easy solution!

Pollution from Natural Gas Drilling

Today's New York Times has this piece on the pollution being generated by natural gas production in the US. As noted below, the prospect of extracting natural gas and using that to provide energy for the country is an exciting one, not least because it gives us a chance to pollute less. (Natural gas use results in less CO2 emissions and by pulling it out of the ground and using it here at home we can be sure that the cleanest technologies are used.) However, it's not perfect. Groundwater contamination has happened in some places, ruining wells and even blowing up whole houses. It sounds like technological improvements are on the way but even then there are likely to be complications. I'm very excited to see the natural gas industry develop here in the US but I hope that environmental agencies at the state and Federal levels will be keeping a close eye on it as it does so.

Solar & wind energy under development in Maryland

Nice to see Constellation Energy, the hegemonic energy provider to us in the Baltimore area, embracing some renewable energy sources. I guess there were finally enough Federal subsidies to make it worthwhile! This article says that nothing is set, particularly with respect to the planned solar array, but it sounds like steps are being taken. I have to say that I like the natural gas portion balancing the solar array, too, with so much of the Northeast looking like it'll be producing lots of natural gas in the not-too-distant future. I just hope the extraction is relatively clean and doesn't suck down too much water....

How effective is wind energy?

Case van Kooten has an interesting working paper here showing that the impact of wind on C02 emissions is highly variable. First, the opportunity cost matters a great deal. If people are relying on hydro or nuclear power and they switch to wind, emissions decrease very little. Second, wind power tends to be intermittent, requiring other sources to be available when the wind's not blowing. If other flexible sources are going to turn out to be fossil fuels, and, worse, if those fossil fuel-burning plants are hard to start up and turn off, then again we'd expect to see only a small reduction in CO2 emissions from use of wind.

Natural Gas in Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania's Natural Gas reserves alone could power the US for 10-15 years, according to this article on the Chesapeake Bay Foundation's website. Like any kind of mining, extraction can be environmentally difficult, though it sounds like appropriate care can mitigate a lot of the problems. However nasty it might be, I'd much rather have it going on in this country where it can be carefully monitored instead of leaving it to be extracted in the Middle East or other places and then have it traveling here in tankers.