In March, Gov. Markell announced an ambitious “Clean Water for Delaware’s Future” plan to accelerate water cleanup for Delaware’s bays, rivers and streams, “within a generation.” The plan touts the many public health and economic and job creation benefits associated with clean water and aims to solve problems with toxic pollution, aging infrastructure, pollution from farming, and the need to protect and conserve forests and wetlands. Delaware’s industries must be “upgraded” to reduce their pollution impacts on water, the Governor says.
The Environmental Protection Agency is taking public comments on whether to close the loopholes that allow corporations and big polluters to dump unlimited amounts of carbon pollution from power plants into our air. This same pollution is already having devastating effects on water from Chesapeake Bay to the Great Lakes to the Colorado River and is putting our agricultural and tourism industries at risk.
In 1983, 1987 and 2000, Maryland Governors and their counterparts in Virginia, the District of Columbia and other jurisdictions in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed signed formal agreements that set timelines for cleaning up the Bay. The most recent agreement called for deadlines that were to be met by 2010. That deadline will not be met. Clean Water Action supported the strongest possible version of this latest agreement, understanding that we would continue fighting for the enforcement of the Clean Water Act as the likeliest means restoring the Bay.