It hasn’t been a good week for news about invasive species. Right on the heels of the story about the red lionfish in the Caribbean comes another story, this one of a more familiar kind to those of us in the Midwest. There’s another invader in Lake Michigan.

Scientists worry that a rapidly reproducing, tiny invasive snail recently found in Lake Michigan could hurt the lake’s ecosystem.

The New Zealand mud snail joins a long and growing list of nonnative species moving into the Great Lakes, threatening to disrupt the food chain and change the local environment.

Good thing the the EPA fought against regulating ballast water discharges in the Great lakes for so long. This kind of thing might be happening all the time.

If any one animal is the symbol for the lake country of northern Minnesota, it’s the loon. Travel in the area and you’ll see loons in paintings, loons on t-shirts, and carved wooden loons in gift shops. In recent years, loons have been dying in great numbers around Lake Michigan, and in poarts of Pennsylvanis and New York. Now there’s reason to believe the die-off is about to hit Minnesota.

The culprit is a form of botulism that grows at the bottom of lakes and then works its way into the food-chain through being ingested by quagga mussels.

Remember quagga mussels? They’re another invasive species making its way through the Great Lakes and Rocky Mountains. This is a prime example of the kinds of unforeseen problems that can occur when an invasive species is introduced into a new environment. One year you’re looking at what seems to be a nuisance more than anytrhing else, a decade later your favorite bird is dying in large numbers from a threat they never should have been exposed to, and no one is sure how to solve the problem.

Uh-Oh, looks like we might have concluded too quickly that BP was going to do the right thing and pull back from it’s plans to increase the amount of pollution it dumps into Lake Michigan.

This blog post by Great Lakes Gal indicates that what BP is really doing is building more plants than the one in Whiting, Indiana that has provoked so much public discussion and outrage. They’re doing their best to keep those other construction plans out of the public eye, so that while the public is focused on the expansion of the Whiting refinery, and happy about BP’s decision to not increase pollution there, BP is just going to go ahead and pollute somewhere else.

There’s a lesson to be learned here. Next time a big energy corporation seems to be giving in to public pressure and deciding to actually act responsibly, I, for one, will be a lot less willing to believe it.

The Indianapolis Star reports that BP America has cancelled plans to increase the amount of ammonia and sludge it dumps into Lake Michigan. Instead, it will abide by the limits put in place by its current license, and give up the increases allowed under a new permit issued by Indiana and the federal EPA.

Amid growing public outcry over a recently issued state permit that allowed the refinery to significantly boost the amounts of ammonia and pollutants dumped into the lake, BP said Thursday the refinery will continue to comply with limits of its previous permit.
BP America Chairman and President Bob Malone said in a statement that the company decided not to operate under terms of the more lenient permit because opposition to the increased discharges “creates an unacceptable level of business risk.”

Yes, you read that right. BP has concluded that polluting is bad for business. Congratulations to everyone who spoke up and put pressure on the politicians and government officials in order to put a stop to this. It wouldn’t have happened unless the public made their feelings known.

Nice to have some good news to start off the week.

Well, perhaps this story is going to have a happy ending after all. British Petroleum and Indiana regulators have agreed to re-examine BP’s permit to increase the amount of ammonia, sludge, and mercury it dumps into Lake Michigan. There was a public meeting at the Environmental Protection Agency’s office in Chicago and it sounds like people were pretty vocal about their opposition to the project. Let’s hope the message really got through and a better deal, one that protects Lake Michigan instead of polluting it, gets made.

Note towards the end of the article it says that when Chicago officials asked a BP executive about why BP wasn’t using technology that is already in use at other refineries that drastically reduces ammonia and sludge waste, the BP executive “said he could not answer.”

For those of you following the decision made by both the federal and Indiana state Environmental Protection Agencies to allow British Petroleum to increase the amount of ammonia and sludge it dumps into Lake Michigan, there’s a new development. Governor Mitch Daniels has ordered an investigation into how and why BP’s permit was issued by the state of Indiana. The man appointed to head the investigation, James Barnes, helped form the original EPA, so there’s a pretty good chance this is a legitimate investigation, and not just a cover-your-but political manuever,

This article in the Indioanapolis Star makes it pretty clear that thi is happening because of public pressure. If anything good comes out of it, it will be that a lot of people in Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan will have had a good look at how the officials supposedly working to protect and clean up the environment are doing their jobs. If you enjoy the outdoors in any way, it’s hard to like what you see.

One other thing about the Indianopolis Star article. A side bar includes a list of facts about the British Petroleum plant. Basically, it’s presented this way. BP increases production by 650 million gallons of gasoline each year. Construction of the needed addition to nthe plant would employ 2500 workers for three or four years, there would be 80 new permanent jobs. In return, the permits issued to BP increase the amount of ammonia discharged into Lake Michigan by 54 per cent, and the amout of sludge by 35 per cent. It looks like a simple, straight-forward pay-off.

But there’s a side to this that’s being left out. What if British Petroleum increased production and also built the kind of on-site waste treatment facilities they would need to avoid dumping their garbage in Lake Michigan? That would employ people for construction, and add more permanent staff, possibly more than the current expansion plan. So the trade-off is not really in jobs, but more a matter of how much it would cost to avoid polluting the lake. That’s the price BP doesn’t want to pay. And goodness knows things have been tough lately for the oil industry.

Instead, that price gets passed on to the public in the form of more pollution in Lake Michigan. For some reason, that’s a price that never seems to be included in corporate financial statements.