Federal judge to rehear arguments on forcing EPA to regulate dead zone-causing nutrients
Federal judge to rehear arguments on forcing EPA to regulate dead zone-causing nutrients
By Mark Schleifstein, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune
on July 20, 2015 at 6:00 PM, updated July 20, 2015 at 6:01 PM
A federal judge in New Orleans announced Monday (July 20) that he will consider new arguments over whether the federal Environmental Protection Agency should increase its regulation of fertilizers and other nutrient pollutants that wash into the Mississippi River and cause a low-oxygen "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico every summer.
U.S. District Judge Jay Zainey issued an order Monday setting a schedule for the submission of written arguments by the 11 environmental groups who filed the suit. The order also asks for arguments from the EPA and a variety of parties that have intervened in the case, including Louisiana and other state governments and organizations representing farmers.
. . .
In filings in the original suit and as part of the appeal, EPA argued the federal Clean Water Act creates a fragile balance between the rights of individual states and the federal government to reduce pollution. The agency also argued it was correctly handling that balance by keeping to a strategy of voluntary measures aimed at reducing nutrients.
But the environmental groups point to the failure of those measures to reduce the size of the annual dead zone, which in mid-July 2014 covered 5,052 square miles - an area the size of the state of Connecticut. The five year average size of the low-oxygen zone was 5,543 square miles, almost three times larger than the goal for a reduced low-oxygen area set by the federal/state Mississippi River Gulf of Mexico Watershed Nutrient Task Force in 2001.
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