Vox clamantis in deserto
When it warms up
“Take Me Sailing in Maine and Tell Me You Love Me” (mixed media on canvas), by Rick Hamilton, at Portland Art Gallery.
Chris Powell: Forget the ‘‘nips,’’ it’s the balloon-litter crisis
Balloon litter
— Photo by Robbie Morrison (RobbieIanMorrison)
High-end “nip’’ bottle
Photo by Andy Mabbett
MANCHESTER, Conn.
State legislators think that they have found a new way to protect Connecticut's environment. They are about to criminalize releasing party balloons into the air, subject to a $20 fine. The pending legislation would replace the current law that imposes a $500 fine on anyone who releases 10 or more balloons within 24 hours, as if anyone is really counting.
Of course the legislation will turn out to be an idle gesture. Who is going to call the police about balloon releases and litter? Which departments will hurry to dispatch officers to investigate such complaints? Which prosecutors will put aside plea-bargaining felonies to handle party-balloon cases?
The bill takes the wrong approach to the problem even as a better approach is practically staring legislators in the face: the approach they have taken to the extensive litter caused by the sale of tiny liquor bottles, "nip" bottles.
Rather than impose a return deposit on the bottles, which liquor stores don't want to take responsibility for and which are not recyclable, Connecticut has imposed a 5-cent-per-bottle wholesale tax on "nips" with the revenue distributed to municipalities in accordance with the number of "nips" sold in each. Municipalities can use the money for environmental purposes of their choosing, and most spend it on anything except collecting the "nip" litter that continues to deface roadsides and parks.
So why not a wholesale tax on party balloons too? It might not raise much but it would raise far more than any fines collected from balloon-release scofflaws.
If legislators really cared about the environment more than they care about feeding the insatiable pension and benefit society that is state government, they wouldn't bother with party-balloon legislation. They would impose on "nip" bottles a deposit fee large enough to incentivize people to return their bottles or to collect them from roadsides and parks -- say, a dollar a bottle -- and require liquor stores to refund the deposits and dispose properly of the litter they have generated.
Or else legislators should just outlaw sale of "nip" bottles. A hefty deposit fee would probably have the same effect, since liquor stores would stop selling them if state government stopped letting liquor stores profit from covering the state in trash.
But the legislature won't even impose a special fine on anyone caught improperly discarding a "nip" bottle, a fine like the one about to be imposed -- in theory -- on party balloon scofflaws.
Why the disparate treatment of these two littering industries?
It's because while the litter caused by party balloons is nothing compared to the litter caused by "nip" bottles, balloon sellers are few, while "nip" bottle sellers have outlets -- sometimes dozens -- in every legislator's district, fiercely defend their privileges, and finance a trade association that has controlled liquor legislation for decades, trampling the public interest by inducing the legislature to forbid price competition in liquor.
The liquor industry in Connecticut is a fat target for reducing both consumer prices and litter. But no legislator dares to pop that industry's balloons.
CLEAN SLATE, DIRTY RESULT: A near-disaster has just inaugurated Connecticut's ill-conceived "clean slate" law.
The law conceals court records of misdemeanor and lesser felony convictions on the premise that such records prevent people from getting jobs and housing. Of course criminal records don't help, but people have far more trouble getting jobs and housing because they lack work skills. In any case the "clean slate" law denies employers and landlords their right to know about the people they may assume responsibility for.
The near-disaster was the plan of the Republican Party in an eastern Connecticut district to nominate for state representative Michael Carroll, who nine years ago was convicted of vandalism for spray-painting Nazi swastikas on buildings and traffic signs. While his conviction was recently removed from court records, some people remembered and called attention to it, so he ended his candidacy.
State law now says people shouldn't be able to know such things about candidates for public office.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net)
They’ll drink it up
These pools that, though in forests, still reflect
The total sky almost without defect,
And like the flowers beside them, chill and shiver,
Will like the flowers beside them soon be gone,
And yet not out by any brook or river,
But up by roots to bring dark foliage on.
The trees that have it in their pent-up buds
To darken nature and be summer woods -
Let them think twice before they use their powers
To blot out and drink up and sweep away
These flowery waters and these watery flowers
From snow that melted only yesterday.
“Spring Pools,’’ by Robert Frost (1874-1963)
National Guard to help police Boston in this very busy summer
This article is slightly edited from a Boston Guardian article by Jules Roscoe
(Robert Whitcomb, New England Diary’s editor, is chairman of The Boston Guardian.)
The city has a busy summer planned this year. Between the FIFA World Cup, the Tall Ships celebration, and the country’s 250th anniversary, Boston’s public-safety teams have their work cut out for them. To help ensure staffing coverage, the Boston Police will be relying on mandatory overtime and such external partners as the state’s National Guard.
In a city council hearing on March 26, the police assured councilors that there would be no change in regular police coverage to accommodate the swath of summer events.
“Communities will not be impacted regarding any staffing reductions or any response during these activities,” Deputy Supt. Sean Martin, of the department’s Bureau of Field Services, said at the hearing. “We will have a significant amount of resources, internal and external with our partners and outside assets. However, that will not impact the community’s response on a nightly basis.”
Those resources include local police officers from other regions and state National Guard members that are teamed up with both the police and fire departments. Martin said the major events would be staffed on an individual basis.
But the city also has big plans for its police generally this summer. Mayor Michelle Wu’s Warm Weather plan, released early this month and designed to combat open-air drug use concentrated in places like the South End and Roxbury, involves substantial police support of the healthcare-focused Critical Response Team. Despite the many big events this summer, the police’s focus is going to stay on those neighborhood initiatives and regular patrol.
“Obviously, their priority is always in the neighborhood, so they’re going to have to maintain the proper strength in the neighborhood,” said Bill Evans, who served as the city’s police commissioner from 2014 to 2018. “That’s your bread and butter. Anytime we have a special event, you don’t want it to cost the coverage of patrolling neighborhoods around the city. It’s going to cost the city overtime. It’s a busy vacation season for the policemen, too. Officers in the city do a super job, but they’re going to have their hands full trying to squeeze in a vacation as well as police all these events.”
To cover that additional staffing, Martin confirmed that officers would be required to work overtime, even with outside resources.
And, in a tight budget year with the city council budget still unfinalized, it’s not clear how much that staffing will cost. There is no money set aside specifically in the city budget to cover public safety for major events this year; the budget in fact states that, “New classes and management initiatives have begun to reduce the use of mandatory overtime.”
The Boston Police and the mayor’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Martin said at the hearing that the department was applying to various federal and state grants in order to help offset some costs.
“There are grants that will cover some training that’s going to be handed to our officers,” City Councilor Henry Santana, who chairs the council’s committee on public safety and ran the hearing, said in a phone call. “There are grants that do cover some overtime fees, and there are grants for some equipment that the city’s going to be receiving.”
Officers will also be allowed to take planned vacation blocks to help avoid burnout.
‘Vessel for memory’
“The Escapist” (wood, steel, acrylic, paper, brass, polystyrene), by Seth Clark, in the show “Home Sweet, Somewhere,’’ at the Lamont Gallery, Exeter, N.H., Sept. 1-Nov. 21.
The gallery explains that this is a “contemporary exploration of the spaces we call home.’’ The architecture around us becomes a “vessel for memory, emotion, and our subconscious.’’ The nuanced layers of the spaces we occupy “create a sense of being lived in as they simultaneously mirror and extend into our identities over time. While everyone understands ‘home’ differently, the feelings we invest in our surroundings are something we can all connect with.’’
Llewellyn King: Looking at New England’s electricity future with some trepidation
Offshore-wind projects will be a growing source of regional electricity.
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
These days, in terms of resources, New England is poorly positioned to make electricity. As Gregg Cornett, president of Rhode Island Energy, told me in an interview, it doesn’t sit on abundant coal reserves and natural gas — the latter the critical fuel in today’s electricity-generating mix — or hide beneath the surface, waiting for the gasman’s drill.
Going forward the prognosis is that New England will make it through without electricity disruption unless there is severe cold, in which case the system will be stretched and blackouts could result.
The North American Electric Reliability Corporation, the industry-supported, not-for-profit authority that studies electricity supply and predicts problems, says New England is at “moderate risk” this summer, but sees changes and stress in consumption patterns as the region shifts from summer peaking to winter peaking. This will put further pressure on the delivery of gas into the region.
Winters are going to be tough for the New England electric grid and the collective transmission organization that distributes power from and between the region's utilities, the New England Independent System Operator (ISO-NE).
Rhode Island Energy’s Cornett points out that the area has continued to grow, but the infrastructure to support that growth — especially of pipelines bringing in natural gas — has languished.
In part, environmentalists have been responsible because of their desire to restrict all fossil fuels. Times of crisis, though, lead to the burning of oil — a much greater environmental challenge.
Also, because of the lack of pipeline capacity, New England imports liquified natural gas (LNG) from as far away as Norway, adding to the cost of electricity throughout the region. It also imports electricity from Canada.
This means that New England has some of the highest electricity rates in the country. Inaction has consequences.
The bright spots for the future are renewables, wind and solar.
At present they contribute only 12 to 15 percent of the total New England mix, but they represent the one resource that the region has aplenty, especially offshore wind. Currently, this is hamstrung by opposition from President Trump, but there are hopes that these sources will play much bigger roles in coming years.
Cornett says that Rhode Island Energy is enthusiastic about solar and expects this to grow, although power from rooftop installations now represents a decided challenge for the utility. It is by law obliged to pay top dollar for this electricity, and that is more than the power is worth in the market.
The law guaranteeing the high rate was passed by the Rhode Island General Assembly in 2014 to encourage solar installations, not to hobble Rhode Island Energy with high costs. Cornett says the utility, which is the dominant one in the state, gets no gain from the solar power which it has to buy under this arrangement.
There is irony in the energy shortage in New England because twice in its history, it has led the nation in energy production.
According to the 1840 U.S. Census, there were 5,000 water-powered log mills in the region and many other mills, making cloth and grinding corn. New England had dominance in milling of all kinds, thanks to its abundance of rivers on which mills were granted “privileges.”
Rhode Island — with five rivers that had sufficient flow for mills — was a beneficiary of the boom. Most of the mills that survived were converted to steam and those that survived after that, mostly textile mills, turned to electricity.
In the 1990s, there were six operational nuclear-power plants with eight reactors. Today there are just two: Millstone, in Waterford, Conn., with two reactors, and Seabrook,in Seabrook, N.H. with one reactor.
All six New England governors have signed a commitment to investigate the deployment of small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs), but at present there are no commitments to build. This may reflect a national uncertainty about which of the many competing SMR designs with their various technologies will eventually be market-dominant and lead the way to a nuclear renaissance.
Meantime, power executives across the region are grateful they aren’t feeling pressure from data center developers and are hoping for mild winters ahead.
Electric-utility executives used to list cybersecurity as their No. 1 worry. Now they say it is the weather.
You can engineer defenses against cyberattack, but when it comes to the weather, the answer is to hope for the best and respond quickly if there is an outage. The supply future is cloudy.
On X: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS, and an international energy consultant. He’s based in Rhode Island.
A potter’s sense of Vermont
Work by potter Ann Joppe-Mercure, at Catamount Arts, St. Johnsbury, Vt.
Deeply contradictory New England
“Ah, New England. An amalgam of picket fences and crumbling bricks; Ivy League schools and dropped Rs; social tolerance and the Salem witch trials, Henry David Thoreau and Stephen King, P-town rainbows and mill-town rust; Norman Rockwell and Aerosmith; lobster and Moxie; plus the simmering aromas of a million melting pot cuisines originally brought here by immigrants from everywhere else searching for new ways to live.
“It’s a place where rapidly-growing progressive cities full of the ‘wicked smaaht’ coexist alongside blight-inflicted Industrial Revolution landscapes full of the ‘wicked poor’. A place of forested mountains, roaring rivers, crystalline lakes, urban sprawl, and a trillion dollar stores. A place of seasonal tourism beach towns where the wild, rank scent of squishy seaweed casts its cryptic spell along the vast and spindrift-misted seacoast, while the polished yachts of the elite glisten like rare jewels on the horizon, just out of reach.
“Where there are fiery autumn hues and leaves that need raking. Powder snow ski slopes and icy windshields that need scraping. Crisp daffodil mornings and mud season. Beach cottage bliss and endless miles of soul-sucking summer traffic .
“Perceived together, the dissonant nuances of New England stir the imagination in compelling and chromatic whorls.”
― Eric J. Taubert
‘‘No such thing as ‘anti-aging’’’?
“Mr. Bennett, East Jamaica, Vermont” (1943, gelatin silver print (vintage), on paper), by Paul Strand (1890-1976), in the show “With Time,’’ at the Middlebury (Vt.) College Museum of Art, May 23-Aug. 9
The museum says:
“When it comes to aging, we are living in strange times.
“We are bombarded by advertisements for ‘anti-aging’ products—quick fixes for smoothing wrinkles, revitalizing weary bodies, and returning us to younger versions of ourselves. Elixirs of youth fill store shelves and infiltrate social-media feeds. Countering these efforts is an alternate chorus, one that reminds us that there is no such thing as ‘anti-aging,’ and that we should celebrate every age and stage with gratitude and grace.’’
New effort to boost quahog crop
Small quahogs
Excepted and edited from an article in ecoRI news
Three wire bins containing about 20 quahogs each sit inside a giant tank burbling with rust-colored water in a basement marine laboratory at Roger Williams University, in Bristol, R.I.
Although they may look as if they aren’t doing anything special besides existing, these quahogs are part of an innovative effort to study and boost the population of the iconic, native hard clam in Narragansett Bay.
Funded through a Partnership for Research Excellence in Sustainable Seafood (PRESS) grant from the University of Rhode Island supported by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the initiative will help expand hatchery production, strengthen disease monitoring, and accelerate quahog restoration in Rhode Island.
Small-college implosion
Hampshire College viewed from Bare Mountain in October 2017. Amherst College (top right) and The University of Massachusetts Amherst (top left) are both visible.
— Photo by MonsieurNapoléon
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary, in GoLocal24.com
Hampshire College, founded in Amherst, Mass., in 1965 during the heyday of the creation of such “experimental’’ institutions, and as the college-bound hordes of the Baby Boom were coming on, is closing. Small private liberal-arts colleges in New England and elsewhere in America have been shutting their doors at an accelerating clip, amidst a shrinking pool of applicants and the sense that a college has become less economically worth it.
That it is culturally, psychologically and emotionally worth it is another matter; teaching critical thinking would seem to me pretty valuable. And AI will never abolish the value of in-person social skills, some of which can be developed by being at a physical college.
In any event, the closing of all these college campuses may well substantially expand New England’s housing stock. Consider all those dorms….
Hampshire is in the Connecticut River Valley, one of America’s great collegiate corridors, as a reminder that New England has always been America’s most literate region.
‘Between imagination and reality’
“Healing Each Other Under the Moonlight” (oil on canvas), by Alexandra Rozenman, in her show “Luftmensch”, at Kingston Gallery, Boston, April 30-May 30.
She says:
“‘Luftmensch’ is a series of narrative paintings that developed from the “Kind Monsters’’, exploring storytelling, artistic lineage, and the fragile nature of identity. The Yiddish word luftmensch—literally ‘air person’—describes someone who lives between imagination and reality.
“Born in Moscow and trained among underground dissident artists during the late Soviet Union, when modernist art was restricted, I developed a practice shaped by resistance, memory, and personal mythology. After immigrating to the United States, my work evolved into narrative paintings that weave together personal history, art history, and cultural memory.’’
Litigating light
“The Night Cries To Be Dusk” (acrylic, charcoal, gouache, oil, oil stick and spray paint on canvas), by Patrick Alston, at Heather Gaudio Fine Art, Greenwich, Conn.
More money eyed to battle outdoor drug use in Boston
From The Boston Guardian. (This has been edited by New England Diary.)
(Robert Whitcomb, editor of New England Diary, is chairman of The Guardian)
The Massachusetts House recently committed $4 million to help fund Boston’s fight against outdoor drug use.
State Rep. Aaron Michlewitz, who serves the Downtown and is chairman of the Ways and Means committee, which sets the state budget, announced that the House would pledge $4 million to various groups in the city combating drug in Boston. The city itself is investing just as much money.
“I’d say there’s probably about an equivalent amount from the city that is actually used as part of their budget,” said Steve Fox, a neighborhood leader in the South End and a member of the South End/Roxbury/Newmarket Working Group on Addiction and Recovery, which has spearheaded planning efforts around fixing the city’s drug problem for the past 10 years.
“That’s police personnel, Coordinated Response Team personnel. So, figure that the total budget for us doing this is actually $8 million.”
The Working Group has been leading efforts to fight addiction for the past decade. After last summer, which Fox said was “the worst that anyone can remember” for prolific drug use, the group spent the rest of the year putting together and testing a framework for getting people off the street and into treatment. It focused on public health and public safety, and putting aside harm-reduction strategies in favor of moving people into recovery.
That framework has so far been successful. Fox said that in the first five months of implementing and testing the group’s recommendations, the Coordinated Response Team and the police-based Neighborhood Engagement Safety Team had helped 550 people get into recovery. It’s that framework that the state wants to fund. And it’s on those teams that the city is spending its money, even though there’s no dedicated funding package for them.
“What we’ve asked for is the number of personnel that are needed in order to meet the ongoing requirements. We’re grabbing people from a bunch of different locations based upon the qualities that we need, and putting them together into a team,” Fox said. “The NEST team came about as a result of the reassignment of existing officers from other locations. Look at the big picture. The city is funding this, whether it comes out of [police district] A-1’s budget or D-4’s budget.”
The state’s funding, in contrast, must be approved by the state Senate and the governor before it actually goes into effect. Michlewitz said that the goal would be July, when the new fiscal year begins.
From that state funding, the city itself would receive $2.24 million to give as grants to supportive- recovery housing projects, $650,000 for clinical support staff, such as nurse practitioners and addiction specialists, and $500,000 for the Suffolk County district attorney’s office to design a “pre-arraignment diversionary session” that would guide users towards recovery pathways instead of funneling them into the justice system.
There would also be $460,000 to the Boston Public Health Commission, for an additional 30 beds, and $150,000 to the Coordinated Response Team to begin operating a mobile response center.
There’s no guarantee that this funding would be repeated year after year if approved. “We’re going to take this one step at a time, one year at a time, one season at a time, in essence,” Michlewitz said. “We’ll hopefully get this through for July, and then we’ll see where we are, and reevaluate and see how it worked. Hopefully it could be something that we do on a regular basis, if the funding allows it to be.”
Fox said members of the Working Group had begun talking to senators to gather support for getting the $4 million passed.
It only looks ominous
“Mountain Landscape” {in Vermont},(oil on canvas), by Frederic Edwin Church, circa 1849.
Chris Powell: Raising taxes on Connecticut’s rich just an excuse for plunder
Copper Beech Farm, formerly the Lauder Greenway Estate, is a private property in Greenwich, Conn.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Connecticut is already nearly the highest-taxed state in the country, as well as nearly the most expensive (in part because its taxes are so high), but on April 15 -- the deadline for submission of state and federal tax returns -- a hundred people from what calls itself the Connecticut for All coalition gathered at the state Capitol to urge state government to raise taxes on the rich.
When it showed up at the Capitol in March, the Connecticut for All coalition was supporting legislation to increase state government's obstruction of federal immigration-law enforcement. That's what Connecticut for All means by "all" -- open borders admitting all illegal immigrants -- as if the state doesn't already have a desperate shortage of housing and expensive schools whose costs are rising in part because they must enroll so many illegal immigrant students who don't speak English.
Connecticut for All's arguments for higher taxes on the rich are as flawed as its arguments for open borders -- especially its argument that taxes should be raised on the rich because some lower-income people pay a higher share of their income in state and local taxes than rich people do.
As is the case with federal taxes, the rich also already pay the overwhelming majority of state and local taxes in Connecticut.
Poor people pay no income taxes and often get various income supports from the government, like earned-income tax credits, medical insurance, and food and housing stipends, which help refund the taxes they pay indirectly -- sales taxes, municipal property taxes (paid through their rents), and federal and state energy taxes.
Besides, the percentage-of-income argument doesn't accurately indicate the practical burden of taxes.
Twenty percent of the annual income of someone earning minimum wage in Connecticut -- $16.94 per hour or $35,000 per year -- is $7,000.
But just 19 percent of the annual income of someone earning $350,000, who is subject not just to sales and property taxes, as the poor are, but also to state and federal income taxes, is $66,500, more than nine times as much.
Who really bears more of the burden of government?
Yes, inflation -- currency devaluation -- benefits the wealthy, since they own property and stocks, whose value rises even as inflation ravages the poor, who own little property. But then why do Democrats, supposedly the tribunes of the poor, like and perpetuate inflation even more than Republicans do?
Maybe what is most disgraceful about the clamor for raising taxes on the wealthy is its sense of entitlement, as was expressed by a college instructor at the Connecticut for All rally at the Capitol. . "It's time to tax the wealthy and the ultra-wealthy and redistribute those funds to the hard-working people of Connecticut," she said.
Of course many wealthy people are not "hard-working" at all but mere beneficiaries of inherited wealth or government patronage. But many poor people aren't so "hard-working" either but collectors of welfare benefits, people who are already beneficiaries of much income redistribution. Poverty is not virtue.
Yes, taxation is always a mechanism of income redistribution, but its original objective in this country was the maintenance of a decent government and a prosperous society. Contrary to the suggestion of that college instructor who spoke at the Capitol, the tax system was not originally meant for plunder, and it should not be regarded as a device for making one's living from the sweat of others. That attitude has produced vast waste and corruption in government.
Raising taxes on the rich in Connecticut isn't yet a matter of fairness; the people advocating it are not trying to calculate mathematically what tax rates are fair. They just want government to control and spend more money.
All able-bodied people, no matter how poor, should share and feel the burden of government, for as was said by a great liberal authority from a century ago, Theodore Roosevelt, the first duty of a citizen is not to vote himself more government subsidies but to pull his own weight.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Robots no longer suicidal?
— Photo by Daimler und Benz Stiftung
“One of my fondest robot memories is of a gorgeous 1971 hydraulic arm at Marvin Minsky’s MIT AI lab at Technology Square {in Cambridge, Mass.} that reached back under computer control and ripped out its own shoulder. Since then Massachusetts robots have overcome their suicidal tendencies and developed caring personalities, military and industrial applications, online avatars, and are even vacuuming rugs.’’
— Bob Metcalfe\ (born 1946), American engineer, Internet pioneer and entrepreneur
Probably a challenge for most of us
“Balancing Act’’ (clay with encaustic paint, balancing a gold wire ball on one end and mixed media "pile" at the other end), by Sarah Springer, a member of New England Wax. She is now showing some of her pieces at Gallery Twist, in Lexington, Mass.
She says:
“‘Balancing Act' was inspired by the constant struggle to make time for the beautiful moments that we all cherish, moments that are rare but equally as weighty as all the mundane and frustrating aspects of our lives.’’
Peter Neill: Urgently asking: Where is the plan for the Maine Coast?
SEDGWICK, Maine
Recently, two ocean-related conferences unfolded here in Maine, where I live. The first was hosted by established marine-research institutes and focused on the so-called blue economy, specifically on emerging aquaculture along our Atlantic coast: shellfish, seaweed, processed by-products, and investment opportunities. The keynote speaker was an old friend, Thor Sigfusson, founder of the Iceland Ocean Cluster, proponent of the innovative utility of “100 percent of the fish” as a unifying policy and successful catalyst for proven ocean-related start-ups worldwide finding value in every element of the catch, from medical services to fashion. The attendees included research scientists, consultants, policy innovators, and investment firms with ocean interest.
The second meeting was the Maine Fishermen’s’ Forum, an annual gathering of local industry representatives, marine scientists, policymakers, support groups, commercial product representatives, and fishermen—the , the workforce behind an industry that is the second-largest revenue producer (after tourism) in Maine.
The back-to-back events caused me to ask a question relative to both: If these perspectives and activities are central to the future of an ocean-driven community, then where is the plan?
My response to both, given the sense of fulsome prospect projected, was the same: Despite the success of the developed lobster fishery, despite the optimism about further exploitation of the state’s coastal resources, the future seemed piecemeal, opportunistic, conventionally framed, and limited by past values, structures, and behaviors, inadequate to a justified investment by state government and serious blue economy investors.
What seemed absent was a larger integrated plan to justify and motivate adequate funding beyond first-round capital. There seemed to be best intent but again, there did not seem to be much of a plan.
Here are some of the forces affecting the future of the lobster industry in Maine: sea-temperature change; related species migration and relocation; inflation and the rising costs of bait, fuel, labor, and transportation; access to shifting offshore harvests; increased capital costs and interest rates; lack of adequate processing to capture full added value; loss of profits to export markets; impact of volatile tariffs; single-species focus, with limited investment in associated fisheries, byproducts, new applications and new markets; seasonal limit for equipment and on-the-water skills; reduction in next generation supply, not only of infant lobsters, but of new fishermen to react to any expanded opportunity, human capital to meet new demand.
Add to that the implications of reduced working-waterfront facilities, the certainty of more extreme weather, comparable offshore dis-opportunity by limiting wind and ocean-geothermal energy, industrial aquaculture, future desalination needs, coastal transportation, and community development, and you realize that there is no comprehensive plan. Given no plan, how can any investor assume a context for success? Rejection of offshore-wind projects, coastwise aquaculture, industrial seaweed cultivation, diminished salt-water access, and little federal or state seed-funding seems more a plan for failure, not success.
State government has reacted to the larger implications of climate change, with the multi-year effort of a commission to define adaptation and mitigation of impacts, well-documented and predictable. Slowly, specific reactions with limited funding are being legislated with specific, albeit similarly limited outcomes. As the federal government has denied the climate reality, and has worked to cancel funds for further research, development, and infrastructure preventions and improvements, the financial climate has also changed for the worse, and without economic subsidy, private capital has no interest in augmenting scale and speed of the outcome. We are dead in the water.
I came away from these conferences despondent about the subversive reality of perverse intent. The plans can be there, and they can be realized by imagination, commitment, and acceptance of blue economy interest. What is so tragically ironic is that failure to shape a future, internationally, nationally, locally, and personally, is the worst investment of them all. And the inevitable payout is only loss.
Where is the plan?
Peter Neill is founder of the World Ocean Observatory, a web-based resource for science-based and educational information committed to the health and future of climate and ocean. He is also host of World Ocean Radio, a weekly syndicated radio show and podcast that inspired this essay.