Washington Insider-- Thursday

By DTN's Washington Insider

Here's a quick monitor of Washington farm and trade policy issues from DTN's well-placed observer.

Labor Situation at West Coast Ports May Become Worse

The United Steelworkers union, whose members are employed at more than 200 oil refineries, terminals and pipelines and who have walked off their jobs at several locations, is now threatening to expand the strike to include a crude oil terminal at the Port of Long Beach in California. If carried out, the action has the potential to make the movement of freight into and out of the port even more difficult.

The International Longshore and Warehouse Union has been in negotiations since last July with shippers represented by the Pacific Maritime Association. ILWU members have continued to work while talks continued, but at a pace that has resulted in dozens of ships at anchor offshore while awaiting a berth at the ports.

The worry now is that a strike called by the United Steelworkers would be honored by ILWU members who would refuse to cross picket lines, thus effectively shutting down at least the Port of Long Beach.

This is an additional complication for President Obama who last weekend dispatched Secretary of Labor Thomas Perez to California to urge the PMA and ILWU to resolve their dispute quickly at the bargaining table. However, with ships backed up, demurrage fees rising and as overseas customers for U.S. exports turning to other suppliers, invocation of the Taft-Hartley Act is beginning to be discussed to keep the transportation system running.

That law, passed in 1947, facilitates "mediation of labor disputes affecting commerce, to equalize legal responsibilities of labor organizations and employers." Taft-Hartley was last invoked by President George W. Bush in 2002 when a similar labor dispute left ships waiting at off West Coast ports for more than ten days.

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194 Countries Agree to Text of Possible Climate Change Pact

The 194 nations that comprise the United Nations Framework on Climate Change last week approved a negotiating text that will guide them towards a global climate change agreement in Paris in December 2015. The text, developed over seven days of talks in Geneva, Switzerland, will be further refined during a climate change conference in Bonn, Germany in June and at two additional sessions later in the year, also in Bonn.

If delegates can agree on a final declaration in Paris in December, it would go into effect in 2020.

The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently said that emissions must drop by between 40 and 70 percent globally between 2010 and 2050, subsequently falling to zero by 2100 in order to reach the goal of limiting the average global surface temperature rise from the pre-industrial average to 2 degrees Celsius.

It remains to be seen how actively engaged the United States will be in the climate change discussions this year, given the political opposition the subject continues to receive. Other big questions are whether Congress would approve such an agreement, and what penalty, if any, the country would pay as a consequence.

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Washington Insider: Complicated Chesapeake Bay Politics in Maryland

Last month, in its 2014 State of the Bay report, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation noted that water quality in the bay and its tidal waters continued to improve between during 2012-14 despite the growing population. However, the report also noted that the bay's overall ecosystem health grade was only "32 out of possible 100 for pristine waters" a level that is unchanged from 2012. The report said this is mainly due to declines in the population of rockfish and blue crabs. At its low point in the 1970s, the bay's health grade was 23, CBF said.

William Baker, CBF's president, told press conference at the foundation's headquarters in Annapolis, Md., that bay water quality, in spite of its improvement, is not on track to meet the water quality goals of the mandatory bay restoration program established in 2010 by the Environmental Protection Agency and the six states in in the bay's watershed.

Political leaders in Maryland, Pennsylvania and Virginia must rapidly increase their efforts to reduce nutrient and sediment loading to the estuary, he said.

The total maximum daily load program, which CBF calls the Chesapeake's Clean Water Blueprint, requires the six states to implement by 2025 all policies and practices necessary to reduce loading to levels so that the estuary can recover on its own. Sixty percent of those policies and practices are to be implemented by 2017. If TMDL implementation is successful, CBF forecasts that the bay ecosystem will be healthy, albeit not pristine, by 2040 or 2050.

The recent lack of progress is bad news for agriculture, observers note. Baker recommended the states focus their efforts on the agricultural sector, and argued that it costs much less to reduce nutrient and sediment loading from farms than it does from other sectors, and agriculture is the single largest source of nutrient and sediment loading in the watershed.

The American Farm Bureau Federation and other agricultural industry groups are challenging the legality of TMDL program, but a Pennsylvania U.S. District Court upheld the program in 2013 and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit recently took oral argument on the case.

Baker suggested that the agricultural industry is plowing so much effort into overturning the total maximum daily load program because the TMDL policy "is working." The Chesapeake Bay TMDL is the first led by EPA, rather than states.

However, the outlook for the implementation of the CBF's ambitious TMDL policy is now much less clear than it was before the election of Republican Larry Hogan as Maryland's governor. Hogan has already targeted a number of the state's environmental policies for repeal — including the highly unpopular tax on 'impervious' surfaces in selected Maryland counties that was levied in order to pay for an EPA mandate.

Maryland's politics are deeply split between the large urban areas and the more mountainous northwest, so anti-environmental efforts likely will be strongly opposed in the legislature, observers say. At the same time, it is clear that the strong support of the bay's restoration efforts could be slowed, perhaps significantly, by the strong, continuing opposition of farm groups even as the CBF attempts to increase pressure on them to reduce nutrient pollution in the bay, Washington Insider believes.

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(GH/CZ)

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