Whether it's rafting down the Connecticut River, vowing to protect the Florida Everglades or announcing to Iowa farmers $2 billion in new federal subsidies for biomass technologies (i.e. ethanol), Vice President Al Gore's has distinguished himself as the nation's number-one green. But he has also been at pains to say that good environmentalism need not come at the expense of good business.
We now have a test case that will let us judge just how serious he is about this. At the moment environmental activists are reneging on a hard-won three-year-old agreement, brokered by none other than Al Gore, over dredging operations at the Port of New York and New Jersey. The 1996 deal allowed the port to renew vital dredging that had been held up for years by environmental concerns about the dumping of dredged material into the ocean. At the time Mr. Gore saluted the agreement as "good for the environment, good for business, and good for the nation's future." And it would not have been possible, he stressed, without the willingness of affected groups to "work together."
Presumably "working together" implies abiding by the agreement's terms. But that's just what's at issue here. Some of those at the center of the last accord-primarily a group calling itself Clean Ocean Action and Rep. Frank Pallone (D, NJ)-want to raise the bar on the EPA standards that were the basis of the Gore agreement. They hope to browbeat the EPA and Army Corps of Engineers into calling a public hearing-the public comment period ended Monday--the first step in an effort to rewrite not only what Mr. Gore himself recognized was a perfectly good agreement but the EPA's own standards.
The precipitating event is the federal government's plan to grant a dredging permit to Castle Astoria, a heating oil company with a berth in Queens.
Dredging is a fact of life for this port, because it is a river port and river harbors silt up if not maintained. Thus Castle Astoria wants to dredge to 35 feet so that it can accommodate the tankers that bring in its oil.
The problem, as always, is how to get rid of the stuff. Since at least 1920 dredged material was simply towed out and dropped in an area in the Atlantic off the New Jersey coast called the Mud Dump. The 1996 agreement agreed to close the dump to contaminated materials after 1997. What it allowed for, however, was the dumping of clean material over the site, to serve as a cap for the contaminated stuff that has been there for the better part of this century.
The dispute today is whether the Castle Astoria material can be dumped there or not. The government tested and checked and rechecked the material from the Castle Astoria berth and found it met Category I standards for the cleanest material. But Clean Ocean Action and Congressman Pallone don't like those standards, and so they throw around words such as "toxic," playing on the fears of a New Jersey public that still has nightmarish memories of hypodermic needles washing up on its beaches. The truth is that what they are calling toxic is based on the most minute measurements-x parts of contaminants per trillion parts dredged material-that weren't even technologically possible until a few years ago. What we have here is a dispute about whose measurements to use: the old EPA standards or the new Clean Ocean Action standards.
The cost implications is significant: while disposing the material in the ocean costs from $5-$10 per cubic yard, getting rid of it upland sees the price jump to between $35-$50 per cubic yard. With maintenance dredging alone running at four or five million cubic yards a year, that adds up. And in addition to this routine dredging, the port is looking at plans to dredge to 50 feet, to accommodate the biggest ships being built today and anticipating for the future. All of which helps explain why business and the Teamsters find themselves on the same side of this dispute. They recognize all too clearly that if environmentalist extremists are allowed to tear up a perfectly good deal on the basis of fear-mongering and pseudo-science, the port's future viability becomes a huge question mark.
The 1993 agreement was a good one, recognizing the real trade-offs involved, imposing reasonable standards and providing for the ultimate closing and capping of the Mud Dump. How this is now resolved will tell us much about whether the environmental movement is genuinely interested in arrangements that actually improve the environment-or regard them as a mere tactical concession in an ongoing religious war of scare-mongering and extortion. Al Gore told us three years ago the New York harbor agreement was a good one; where is he now? He's campaigned on holding business accountable for its actions, and this case will show whether he intends to hold environmentalists accountable for theirs.
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