Author: getwetprojectblog

The Rundown

• EPA publishes a report on drinking water affordability and a status update on the health of the nation’s wetlands.
• Congress funds the federal government and includes $100 billion for disaster relief.
• White House report highlights federal opportunities to help communities who decide they want to move people away from climate risks or contaminated sites.
• President Biden signs a bill to allow “Good Samaritans” to clean up abandoned hardrock mines without legal liability for the pollutants.
• GAO assesses cloud seeding technology.
• Federal judge orders Washington state dairies to address nitrate pollution of groundwater.

And lastly, the White House updates the country’s climate goals under the Paris climate agreement.

“The Biden-Harris administration may be about to leave office, but we’re confident in America’s ability to rally around this new climate goal, because while the United States federal government under President Trump may put climate action on the back burner, the work to contain climate change is going to continue in the United States with commitment and passion and belief. That’s not wishful thinking; it’s happened before.” – John Podesta, senior adviser to the president for international climate policy, announcing the country’s updated greenhouse gas emissions target.

By the Numbers

61 to 66 Percent: Range of greenhouse gas emissions reductions, compared to 2005 levels, that the United States intends to achieve by 2035. The pledge counts as the country’s “nationally determined contribution” under the Paris climate agreement. The White House believes the lower end of the range can be achieved without additional effort from the Trump administration. A senior administration official described the pledge as “ambitious…but realistic.”

News Briefs

Congress’s Last Acts
The House and Senate avoided the hard decisions, passing a stop-gap bill to keep government operations funded through March 14, 2025, by maintaining current spending levels.

Avoiding a government shutdown was the main goal, but the bill contains other sweeteners, namely disaster relief and a one-year farm bill extension.

For disaster relief, some $100 billion will be distributed to various agencies to continue the federal response to drought, hurricane, and wildfire calamities from the last three years.

That amounts to $29 billion for FEMA’s disaster fund, and $20.8 billion for the U.S. Department of Agriculture to compensate farmers who incurred losses in 2023 and 2024. That includes Texas farmers who were hurt by Mexico’s insufficient deliveries of water to the Rio Grande. Farmers will be eligible for an additional $10 billion in economic aid.

In other action, Congress passed the Water Resources Development Act, the bill that authorizes Army Corps water projects like dams, ports, and environmental restoration.

A program to help endangered and threatened fish in the Upper Colorado and San Juan river basins was reauthorized as part of a defense spending bill.

And President Biden signed a bill to quicken the pace of abandoned hardrock mine cleanups by allowing “Good Samaritans” to do so without incurring legal liability for the pollutants.

Nitrate Contamination of Groundwater in Washington State
A federal judge ruled in favor of the EPA in the agency’s legal battle with Washington state farmers over nitrate contamination of groundwater in the Yakima Valley.

The valley, a high-value agricultural region, is home to numerous dairies. Thomas Rice, a judge from the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Washington, granted the EPA’s preliminary injunction.

The injunction orders dairy operators to test household well water in the affected area and provide alternative water to those whose wells are polluted with nitrate above the federal standard; monitor groundwater for nitrate; and prevent manure lagoons from leaking pollutants.

Fourteen dairy operations or people who own property where manure is spread are named in the lawsuit.

Stored in lagoons and spread on fields, these animal wastes contain nitrogen that seeps into shallow groundwater that is used as a drinking water source by homes with private wells. Water with high concentrations of nitrate can be deadly to infants. Recent research has connected lower levels of nitrate with a risk of certain cancers and babies born prematurely.

The EPA first took action against some of these dairies in 2013, after the agency found nitrate levels in household wells in the Yakima Valley above the federal drinking water standard. The lawsuit alleges that the dairies failed to stop polluting and that nitrate “hot spots” persist near farm fields and manure lagoons.

In context: Regulators Battle Oregon and Washington Farmers over Limits to Farm Contamination

Studies and Reports

Water Affordability
Between 12.1 million and 19.2 million U.S. households do not have affordable water services, according to an EPA report. It is the agency’s first national assessment of drinking water and wastewater affordability.

Ordered by Congress, the report also estimated the amount of household water bills that are unaffordable. The national total for that is between $5.1 billion and $8.8 billion.

The report notes various factors that influence water service affordability – how rates are set, how utilities are funded, infrastructure needs and operations costs – but it points out that a national water affordability program funded by taxpayers is one tool for addressing the problem.

In context: Millions of Americans Are in Water Debt

Wetland Health
The EPA’s latest report card on the nation’s 81 million acres of wetlands showed mixed results for the biological, physical, and chemical health of these essential water bodies.

Most wetlands are in poor condition for the 13 indicators tracked in the report.

Some of those indicators are stable. There was little change over a five-year period for vegetation and non-native plants.

A few are improving. Wetlands rated in good condition for nitrogen increased by 8 percentage points.

But many are stuck in an unsatisfactory place. Detections of microcystin, a liver toxin produced by cyanobacteria, jumped. Some 82 percent of wetlands are in poor or fair condition for their physical integrity. This relates to damage from water diversions, dredging, pavement, and removal of plant cover. Such actions have been made easier following the Sackett decision, a 2023 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that reduced federal wetlands protections.

The report card is based on measurements taken in 2021 and 2022.

Climate Migration
The White House published a report on federal opportunities to assist “community-driven relocation,” which happens when a community decides it wants to move people or assets away from areas threatened by climate risks – flooding, erosion, wildfire – or contaminated sites.

The report views the federal role as one that facilitates and funds, providing technical and planning support as well as financial assistance. It aims to be proactive, responding before situations reach the crisis stage.

Traditionally, the federal government has aided relocation through property buyouts. But agencies are also being more forward-thinking. Since November they have provided $135 million to 11 Indian tribes and Alaskan Native Villages to pursue relocation of infrastructure assets and people.

Make It Rain
The federal government has little involvement in cloud seeding, the act of inducing rain from clouds typically by injecting particles of silver iodide. Nonetheless, the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, assessed the technology and offered policy options.

Nine states use cloud seeding while 10 states have banned the practice or are considering a ban, the GAO found.

The report outlines ways for the federal government to become more involved. That could be through research and development, monitoring and oversight, permitting, and education.

CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFORMATION

Federal Water Tap, December 23: EPA Reports on Water Affordability, Wetland Health

Photo courtesy of Peter Gleick

Circle of Blue director J. Carl Ganter attends a session on water stewardship at the 2013 World Water Week in Stockholm, Sweden. Click image to enlarge.

STOCKHOLM, Sweden — It’s one of the world’s greatest failings. How do we bring safe water, sanitation, and health to the billions of people around the world who live on the edge of basic survival?

Here at World Water Week, the annual summit of summits on water, the conversation is about partnership and moving toward systemic responses to the water and sanitation (WASH) crisis. But what will it take to really reach water and sanitation for all?

From Skoll World Forum, here are provocative perspectives from six preeminent do-ers in the field.

At an April press conference, the president of the World Bank, Jim Yong Kim, held up a handwritten number and announced, “2030. This is it. This is the global target to end poverty.” That historic moment also served to underscore some of the dilemmas [that] actors in the WASH sector grapple with. How do we establish audacious, yet realistic goals? How do we announce an ambitious goal, such as full water and sanitation coverage in a number of countries and have confidence that we have a reasonable chance of achieving it?

• Financial Innovation Essential to Tackling Safe Water and Sanitation Crisis
  –Gary White, Water.org
• Getting to 100: Politicians, Water, and Universal Coverage
  –John Oldfield, WASH Advocates
• How to Get to Full Water and Sanitation Coverage
  –Eduardo A. Perez, World Bank Water and Sanitation
• Marrying Ambition With Action: Everyone Forever in Water and Sanitation
  –Ned Breslin, Water for People
• The Dream: Full Water and Sanitation Coverage for India
  –Joe Madiath, Gram Vikas
• The Global Sanitation Crisis: Together We Can Solve It
  –Sanjay Wijesekera, UNICEF

Did you attend World Water Week? Do you work in the WASH field? I’d love to hear your thoughts. Send a tweet to @jcganter or comment below.

–J. Carl Ganter, director

CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFORMATION

WASH: Talking the Water, Sanitation, and Health Dilemma at World Water Week

The agency will evaluate the hazards from agriculture’s primary water pollutant.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, reversing a Trump-era decision, is restarting a human health assessment of nitrate and nitrite, a move that has potentially far-reaching regulatory implications for one of the country’s most pervasive drinking water contaminants.

The EPA suspended its nitrate assessment in December 2018. It was one of nine chemicals that the Trump administration deemed no longer a priority for evaluation by the agency’s health assessment division known as the Integrated Risk Information System, or IRIS.

That changed in June when the EPA quietly reinserted the nitrate assessment into the IRIS agenda “to address an agency priority.”

The decision to take a closer look at the chemical comes at a time of increased scrutiny and public concern over nitrate exposure and human health. Nitrate forms when nitrogen is exposed to oxygen in the air. An exponential increase in the use of synthetic, nitrogen-based fertilizers since 1950 supercharged the production of corn and soybeans. The number of large livestock feeding operations — and the amount of manure they produce — also increased rapidly.

Nutrients are essential to crop production. But the convergence of high rates of chemical fertilizer use and immense manure production led to well-documented risks to human health and the environment. In addition to generating heat-trapping greenhouse gases, over-application of nitrogen-rich fertilizer and manure contributed to steadily rising levels of nitrate in streams and groundwater, particularly in the 11 Corn Belt states across the Great Lakes and Midwest, California’s Central Valley, North Carolina, and Washington’s Yakima Valley.

The federal environmental agency’s attention to the hazards of exposure to nitrate has been historically feeble. Evidence of widespread nitrate contamination in surface waters, and in groundwater used as a source for drinking, has been documented for decades by the U.S. Geological Survey, and many state health and environmental departments. The federal environmental agency has left it up to the states to oversee nitrate contamination, which is growing steadily worse.

One of the primary sources of nitrate pollution is large livestock feeding operations, which produce some 1.4 billion tons of liquid and solid manure annually, according to the most recent accounting by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Nitrogen-rich feces and urine, untreated, is spread across 19 million acres of farmland annually, where it drains into streams, rivers, lakes, and groundwater.

The EPA last proposed to strengthen regulations on livestock operations and waste management practices in 2008. Those rules were challenged by the American Farm Bureau Federation and other big agriculture trade associations and struck down by the federal Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in 2011.

In 2017, and again in 2022, state and national environmental and health organizations petitioned the EPA to more carefully regulate large livestock feeding operations to limit water contamination. In August, the agency denied the petition but pledged to form a federal advisory committee next year. The advisory group will be charged to study pollution generated by large animal feeding operations, and is expected to take 12 to 18 months to conclude its work.

The risks from exposure to nitrate are real. Studies conducted in Denmark and the United States have shown nitrate in drinking water to be associated with higher rates of birth defects, pre-term birth, and low birth weight, as well as a number of cancers and thyroid disease in adults. Those associations are present at nitrate concentrations both above and, in some cases, below the federal health standard for nitrate in drinking water of 10 parts per million that was set in 1962 by the Public Health Service and later codified under the Safe Drinking Water Act in 1991.

The restarted IRIS nitrate assessment, last updated more than three decades ago, is a direct result of this accumulated evidence of harm. IRIS initially agreed to re-evaluate nitrate in 2015 at the request of EPA Region 5 and the Office of Water, which wanted updated health information to inform its periodic reviews of federal drinking water regulations. IRIS reports provide the scientific foundation for federal regulation. Nitrate and nitrite will be evaluated together because they are chemically and metabolically related.

Last year, the Office of Water, Region 5, and the Office of Children’s Health Protection re-nominated nitrate for an IRIS assessment, the agency’s press office told Circle of Blue.

Though important, don’t expect the assessment to arrive quickly, says Ila Cote, a former EPA senior science adviser in the office that oversees IRIS. Under a fast track, the process of drafting, reviewing, responding to comments, and finalizing an assessment can take four years, Cote told Circle of Blue. Controversial assessments, as the nitrate assessment will be because it affects such a powerful industry, can take longer.

“It’s so laborious you can’t hardly believe it,” she said.

IRIS is currently in the early stages of the nitrate assessment. The agency expects to release a “systematic review protocol” by the end of the year. Cote said this is an outline of methods and key studies that will be considered. The agency has not set a date for completing the assessment, which will focus on five nitrate compounds that represent main sources of exposure through drinking water and food.

A Broader Analysis

IRIS last reviewed nitrate toxicity in 1991. That assessment resulted in an “oral reference dose,” or the amount of a substance that a person can ingest without harm. The oral reference dose was based only on blue baby syndrome in infants, not on other health problems.

The updated assessment will widen the scope. It will examine both the cancer risk of nitrate and the effects on the reproductive system, metabolism, development, thyroid, and blood.

Cote said that new data generally results in more conservative estimates of how much of a chemical a person can be exposed to before being harmed.

In its study plan, the EPA noted challenges with conducting the assessment. Nitrate is a complex contaminant to evaluate because exposure comes not just from drinking water but from food, especially green, leafy vegetables. What’s more, the damage from nitrate is indirect. It is converted in the body to nitrite, which can then react to form harmful nitroso compounds. These conversions are affected by an individual’s diet.

Another obstacle is that relatively few nitrate studies have been published, said Leslie Stayner, a professor emeritus of epidemiology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Researchers prefer to have a large sample from which to draw conclusions about causality.

Despite the analytical complexity, the implications of the nitrate assessment point squarely at the federal drinking water standard.

The nitrate standard was set at 10 parts per million to protect infants from suffocating due to blue baby syndrome. Exposure to high levels of nitrate in the first months of life impairs the blood’s ability to carry oxygen. The skin of ill infants, deprived of oxygen, takes on a bluish pallor. The nitrate standard protects against blue baby syndrome, but it does not address chronic effects from long-term exposure or outcomes to newborns from exposure in the womb.

That’s a problem, Stayner said.

“There’s growing evidence of adverse effects in children exposed in utero and among adults,” Stayner told Circle of Blue. His research in Denmark, based on a million child births, found nitrate exposure while the mother was pregnant is associated with higher risk of reduced birth weight, preterm births, and birth defects of the eye and central nervous system. These associations are present when exposures are below the current EPA standard.

The nitrate standard remains one of the most violated federal drinking water rules. And nitrate is one of the most widespread contaminants in drinking water. An EPA analysis found that nitrate was detected in 70 percent of public drinking water systems, at a median concentration of 2 to 3 parts per million.

The updated IRIS assessment will not automatically lower the federal drinking water standard. That requires a separate rulemaking process that weighs the cost of installing equipment to remove nitrate against the potential to reduce health risks and the public health benefit of a stricter standard.

The Alicia Patterson Foundation and the Fund For Investigative Journalism awarded investigative reporting fellowships to support this project. Along with The New Lede, co-publishers include: The Guardian, Great Lakes Now, Michigan Radio, Investigate Midwest, and MinnPost.

CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFORMATION

EPA Restarts Assessment of Health Risks from Nitrate in Water

The Legislature made it practically impossible for non-millionaires to amend the state constitution

If you’re not fired up right now about Florida’s Right to Clean Water, it’s time. Today’s issue is not only about the safety and health of our water, but also the right to self-determination. 

We dare to believe that Floridians should have the legal power to protect our families, fisheries, precious wildlife, economies and future generations from government harm. With the limitations and failures of lobbying and litigation, we are blocked from being the good stewards we need to be — and that’s just not right. 

This state constitutional amendment is sponsored by an all-volunteer, grassroots citizens’ initiative and supported by members of all political parties and hundreds of nonprofits, faith groups and businesses statewide. It will enshrine a fundamental and enforceable right for all Floridians to clean and healthy waters, with important terms defined. Without this amendment, a polluter’s right to poison and destroy our water functionally reigns supreme when propped up by poor governance.

The Right to Clean Water is sea-changing, aimed at government accountability. Once in place, politicians and agencies can no longer undermine the will of voters, compromise public safety or ignore the best available science where clean water is concerned. All government actions and policies of inaction must be constitutionally compliant. 

Of course, powerful pollution interests resist any positive change to the status quo. It’s “good business” to socialize billions in costs and damages to Florida’s natural resources onto the backs of taxpayers, while receiving billions in government subsidies (also from taxpayers). This enables the high-magnitude flow of campaign donations toward pollution-friendly actions in Tallahassee. Things are working just fine for them, as designed, and our amendment posed a direct threat. 

It was therefore no surprise that the Legislature changed the law governing citizens’ initiatives, making it practically impossible for non-millionaires to amend the state constitution. This anti-people’s bill, HB 1205, came into immediate effect when the governor signed it on May 2, in the midst of a strategically important phase of our campaign. The law substantially disrupted operations and forced us to halt volunteer petitioning activities, all but cutting us off from being able to qualify for the 2026 ballot. 

How? In many ways, but here are a few examples: 

• Before, only paid petitioners had to turn in signed petitions to the supervisor of elections within 30 days. Now, all petitioners, including volunteers, have only 10 days – with $50 by-day, by-petition late fees. With regular mail taking up to five business days, this has wreaked havoc to our collection efforts due to the nature of our grassroots operation.
• It limits the number of petitions a volunteer can “collect, deliver, or otherwise physically possess” before having to register as a petition circulator, which involves disclosing personal information to the state and on the petition form itself — all public records. 
• It bans our volunteers from filling in “missing information” on a signed petition, which prevents us from correcting minor errors that would invalidate a petition form. Now, our volunteers cannot do simple things to ensure valid signatures are accepted, such as line through “U.S.A.” in the county box on the petition and fill in the correct name of the county. That act now comes with a $5,000 fine.
• If Florida property owners who are nonresidents (such as Florida’s dear “snowbirds”) wanted to protect their waterfront property rights through the circulation of this petition, and the campaign knew about it, that’s a $50,000 fine for us. The same goes for noncitizens with real connections to Florida waters, to include those who legally live, work and play in Florida.

We joined other plaintiffs in challenging HB 1205 because it’s not only unjust, unfair and unconstitutional (especially to an all-volunteer, underway initiative like ours) — it’s also un-American. If the Florida Legislature wants to erode the individual right to amend, it should refer such a measure to the next ballot so Floridians can vote on it. State power must be legitimized by the consent of the people, not the other way around.

Stay tuned for the fate of Florida’s waters by visiting www.FloridaRightToCleanWater.org.

Mel Martin is the Florida Right to Clean Water campaign coordinator. A Florida attorney and retired U.S. Marine Corps judge advocate, Martin was co-drafter of the amendment language.

Sign up for The Invading Sea newsletter by visiting here. To support The Invading Sea, click here to make a donation. If you are interested in submitting an opinion piece to The Invading Sea, email Editor Nathan Crabbe at ncrabbe@fau.edu.

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New Florida law derails campaign to put clean water amendment on ballot

New Florida law derails campaign to put clean water amendment on ballot

An alga that threatens freshwater ecosystems and is toxic to vertebrates has a sneaky way of ensuring its success: It suppresses the growth of algal competitors by releasing chemicals that deprive them of a vital vitamin.

The finding was reported in a new study, published July 2 in the journal mBio. It describes how the cyanobacteria Microcystis aeruginosa manipulates its environment to give itself advantages to take over the water column, leading to harmful algal blooms and mats in lakes during hot summers.

“Microcystis seems to be able to dominate more and more in the changing climate,” said Beth Ahner, professor in the Department of Biological and Environmental Engineering in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS) and corresponding author of the paper.

The study shows how M. aeruginosa, a common harmful cyanobacteria, produces and releases chemicals, called antivitamins, that mimic thiamin, also known as vitamin B1. In the presence of the antivitamins, other alga species, some of which cannot synthesize their own thiamin, take up the chemicals from the water and are unable to distinguish them from the true vitamin. Inside the host, the chemicals mimic vitamin B1 and inhibit the thiamin-dependent enzymes required for growth. The study also revealed that M. aeruginosa has a specialized thiamin-biosynthesis enzyme that makes it resistant to the antivitamins that it produces.

While the frequency of these harmful algae blooms has increased, the reasons why have been unclear. People hypothesize the rise is related to watershed runoff that carries pollution and macronutrients, like phosphorus and nitrogen, Ahner said. Researchers are also perplexed about why blooms are occurring even in very clean lakes, such as Skaneateles Lake in the Finger Lakes region of New York. 

“No one’s ever really shown that this organism has an advantage in taking up those macronutrients over other algae,” Ahner said.

In addition, M. aeruginosa produces chemicals toxic to vertebrates. “If you have a dog lapping up the water on the shore and it ingests these organisms, it has the potential to cause severe illness and even death,” Ahner said. The toxins have contaminated municipal water supplies, such as in Toledo, Ohio, on the banks of Lake Erie in 2014. 

In the study, the researchers grew M. aeruginosa in a co-culture with another algae, Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, a model organism that researchers use for studies. While C. reinhardtii produces its own thiamin in the wild, the researchers used a mutant version that lacked the ability to synthesize the vitamin. In the presence of C. reinhardtii, M. aeruginosa released elevated levels of two thiamin antivitamins, bacimethrin and methoxythiamin, which inhibited C. reinhardtii. The mutant C. reinhardtii, without its own thiamin, was much more sensitive to the antivitamins than the wildtype. Additions of thiamin to the culture reversed the inhibitory effects of being exposed to the antivitamins, in both the mutant and wildtype.

Co-author Mingming Wu, professor of biological and environmental engineering in CALS, provided microfluidic devices that allowed the team to test the algae with steady, extremely low concentrations of antivitamins, similar to levels found in the environment. “We were able to show that the environmentally relevant concentrations of the chemicals are potentially toxic to organisms in the field,” Ahner said.

Using a technique called quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR), the researchers identified a few genes they believe are involved in making antivitamins, Ahner said.

Finally, co-authors from Oregon State University shared data that identified the presence of the antivitamin bacimethrin in the environment and at elevated levels when M. aeruginosa bloomed.

Mohammad Yazdani, a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Biological and Environmental Engineering, is the paper’s first author. Coauthors include Geoffrey Coates, the Tisch University Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology in the College of Arts and Sciences (CAS).

The study was supported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, and CALS and CAS at Cornell.

CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFORMATION

https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2025/07/toxic-algae-releases-chemicals-suppress-competitors