This winter, areas downwind of the Great Lakes have received enormous amounts of lake effect snow. Can climate change be occurring when storms are piling up record snow?
Yes – in fact, this phenomenon is entirely consistent with climate change models.
Lake-effect snow develops when cold air moves over a relatively warm large body of water. In response to increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, Great Lakes temperatures have been slowly rising in recent decades, and last autumn’s Great Lakes water temperatures were among the highest recorded for that time of year.
As cold air passes over the lakes, it absorbs warmth and moisture from the water, transferring these elements to the lower atmosphere. This air rises and condenses into clouds, which can develop into narrow bands that may produce intense snowfall rates of two to three inches per hour. Areas within these bands can be buried in snow, while little to no snow may fall just a few miles away.
Some spots in the lake-effect zones, downwind of the Great Lakes, have seen more than five feet of snow already this winter. This is the result of unusually high lake surface water temperatures, which set up sharper contrasts with Arctic winds rushing over the lakes.
A November lake effect outbreak dumped 23 inches of snow on Sault Ste. Marie. The same outbreak brought 40 inches of snow to parts of the state of New York. Lake effect snow has contributed significantly to much higher snowfall totals compared to last year in northern Michigan.
As of Monday, January 27, Traverse City had received over 80 inches of snow this season, compared to approximately 60 at the same time last year. Gaylord’s snowfall total had risen from approximately 130 inches compared to approximately 95 at the same time last year. Houghton, in the Keweenaw Peninsula, is a bullseye for lake effect snow. It had received 147 inches of snow compared to 97 at the same time a year ago.
“Warmer Great Lakes surface water temperatures and declining Great Lakes ice cover have likely driven the observed increases in lake-effect snow,” says a climate change adaptation team of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which predicts further increases in such snow. And areas in the southern Great Lakes region may experience increased lake-effect rain.
By the way, lake-effect snow does not raise Great Lakes water levels. It is essentially recycled water, because the moisture comes from the Great Lakes and then returns to the lakes as it melts. The remainder will evaporate or percolate into groundwater.
The current chair of Michigan’s Natural Resources Commission (NRC), Tom Baird is a retired attorney who was born and raised in Grand Rapids, practiced law in Lansing, and currently lives in Elk Rapids. Throughout life his passions have been conservation and the environment. This led to various roles as board member of FLOW and in Anglers of the Au Sable, Trout Unlimited, the Michigan League of Conservation Voters, and other grassroots groups. In addition to chairing the NRC, Tom is a member of the board of the Hal and Jean Glassed memorial Foundation.
We asked Tom several questions about the NRC and his views on key issues:
How do you see climate change affecting the DNR’s mission?
Climate change is impacting almost every aspect of the DNR’s work. Whether it involves our forests, fisheries or wildlife, all are being impacted right now. Immediate concerns include the expansion of invasive species from warmer climes, warming of our coldwater resource, and changes in wildlife habitat. Efforts are now underway to make our natural resources more resilient to climate change.
Tom Baird poses with his dog.
Do you find the public to be very engaged or not so engaged in the NRC’s work?
The majority of the public is not engaged with the NRC, and even our hunters and anglers know very little about what the NRC does and how it works. There are basically two reasons. First, the scope of the NRC’s authority has been severely limited over the years by a variety of laws and executive orders. Where the NRC used to run the DNR, including hiring the director and setting all department policy, the role of the current NRC is to set regulations for hunting and recreational fishing and provide advice to the department on other natural resource issues. Second, the number of hunters in Michigan is declining, both in absolute terms and as a percentage of the population, so less people have a direct stake in what the NRC does.
What has surprised you the most during your service on the NRC?
I was surprised by the sheer number of things I didn’t know about the DNR, its staff, and the various species of fish and game which we regulate. Our fisheries and wildlife biologists are some of the best in the world, and others around the country always want to know “what’s Michigan doing” about common problems.
In what way does the public trust doctrine interact with the department’s work?
The public trust doctrine is an interesting concept when applied to hunting and fishing. Except when dealing with public surface waters, the public trust doctrine is rarely mentioned. Yet, our fish and wildlife are held in trust by the state for the benefit and enjoyment of all the people. This is an area which deserves further exploration.
What are you most hopeful about in terms of Michigan’s natural resource status?
I am hopeful that future sportsmen and women will remember their role in the protection of our fish and wildlife and the places they live. Our society today is, in many ways, very self-centered and “entitled.” That perspective keeps us from seeing the big picture and doing what is right for our children and grandchildren. We need to do a much better job remembering that it’s about the resource, not just about our fishing and hunting success next season. It appears that our younger generations are beginning to understand these things and are ready to step up now that it’s their turn.
A disastrous growing season for northwestern Lower Michigan’s cherry crop is resulting in calls for federal aid and a growing sense that climate change is warping the health of this iconic fruit.
The sweet cherry crop has been deemed a failure, and similar conditions have affected tart cherries. It’s estimated that cherry growers lost 30% to 75% of their crop this year. Governor Gretchen Whitmer has called for federal assistance to cherry growers, including low-interest loans and funds to rehabilitate or replant affected trees.
Tim Boring, the director of the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development (MDARD), says weather patterns related to climate change are damaging the agriculture industry. “Climate resiliency is one of our highest priorities at MDARD. We know the long-term prosperity and viability of Michigan agriculture, especially our specialty crops, depends on our ability to adapt to shifting climate conditions,” said Boring.
Weather is becoming more erratic and less predictable, experts say. One of the culprits is a steadily warming Lake Michigan, which in springtime means a higher risk of premature blossoming of cherry trees.
This year’s problems were caused by weather variability. A mild 2023-2024 winter led to higher insect populations. A warm, wet and humid spring and early summer resulted in skyrocketing populations of spotted wing drosophila and rapid development of fungi, including cherry leaf spot and American brown rot.
Emily Miezio of Suttons Bay, a Leelanau County farmer who sits on the Michigan Cherry Committee, said cherry growers in the business for many years have told her they’ve never seen a growing season like it. A premature warm spell followed by a hard freeze wiped out 90% of the 2012 crop, but this year’s borderline conditions forced growers to make a season-long effort that nonetheless resulted in a significant reduction in crop yields.
“With my Grandma I like to walk along the beach and find Petoskey stones. With my Grandpa I like to go in Lake Michigan and body surf the waves,” my 11-year-old granddaughter Ava Bachmann reflected in late August when she stood with me along the shores of West Grand Traverse Bay. We were ruminating together about the bond that grandparents and grandchildren share, and the responsibility that we elders have to leave behind a healthy legacy for our descendants.
“I just hope the waters can stay clean as long as they can possibly be clean,” Ava added. “It’s really fun to be spending time on Lake Michigan with your grandparents.”
Several recent events have prompted me to think about the urgency for those of us who are grandparents—whether by ancestry or the passing years—of wanting to do more for our grandchildren in the next decade. This urgency led to the idea of a new campaign that FLOW will launch that enables grandparents in the Great Lakes region to respond to this urgency to care and act for our grandchildren while we can. While we help out parents and care for our grandchildren day-to-day, what better way to care for them for a lifetime than increasing our awareness, support, and work to protect the integrity of water, communities, health, ecosystem, and quality of life right here in the Great Lakes Basin? “Grandparents for Grandchildren and the Great Lakes” is the name of our new campaign. We intend to form a continuing, engaged network of grandparents who are committed toward doing more to mitigate and improve the lives our grandchildren will experience in 20 to 30 years. To do this, we can form a network to increase our effectiveness by forming a network to work together.
I write “urgency” because I’m feeling a greater urge to care, act, and do what I can for grandchildren who in the coming decades will face tumultuous change—climate, pollution, flooding, droughts, collapsing safety nets of drinking water, health care, infrastructure, and political instability, in the midst of global upheaval and migration. Admittedly, this is made more poignant because of my age, 70-something, and the birth of my seventh grandchild (two more step-grandchildren will soon be added to the family tree). It seems as a grandparent I’m suddenly pressed to pay more attention to grandchildren—future generations—everywhere. To the power of the future in the present intensifies as the years pass. To the threatened if not certain cataclysmic changes to the air, water, land, forests, and life on this planet if people, states, and countries do not take sweeping action. The future is now.
In October 2018, the UN International Panel on Climate Change issued a grave warning about a narrow window for humanity to act to prevent the global temperature from rising more than another 1.5 degrees Celsius. The range of effects will unravel life as we know it if we do nothing; our grandchildren have a chance to experience the planet we know and love—if we do all we can in the next 10 years. Otherwise, the effects will whipsaw as extreme heat, flooding, drought. Here in the Great Lakes region, according to a recent scientific report published by Environmental Law and Policy Center in Chicago, the next decade could bring as much as a 30-percent increase in precipitation—translate that as flooding, infrastructure damage to coastal areas, erosion, property loss, and the loss of tillable land for food, plants and wildlife. If we think water levels and damage to ecosystems, wetlands, shoreline property, and public infrastructure are high this year, “we ain’t seen nothing yet.” And, of course, it’s not just the increase in precipitation. The other extreme, drought and low water levels, are just as real. Two billion people could be without water, portending death, suffering, and mass movements of people from one region to another for water, food, and survival.
Grandparents are the solution
I don’t write this blog as another “doom and gloom” threat with no solution. We have one—grandparents everywhere. Most of us grandparents want to do something for our grandchildren; it is human nature. We can all do something. If we do this together, the benefits to our grandchildren will multiply.
In June, this urgency must have been in the back of my mind when I walked by Ed Roth’s hat and t-shirt design store on Front Street in Traverse City before I reached the FLOW office. I noticed a hat with the words “crazy grandpa,” and a rush of emotions about grandchildren and the coming decades screamed, “Buy it.” So, I did.
In August, FLOW filmed a short clip of three of my grandchildren standing with me on the shore of West Grand Traverse Bay. The interview is a prelude to FLOW’s new “Grandparents for Grandchildren and the Great Lakes” campaign. My granddaughter Ava described her passion for swimming, searching for Petoskey stones, kayaking, and fishing, her voice joyful and clear as water. Then her voice turned more serious when she said how uncertain she was about the future of water in her lifetime. The words from a Leonard Cohen poem flashed through my mind: “Oh, and one more thing/ you aren’t going to like/ what comes after America.” And, these triggered lines of Fan-Chih from a collection of Cold Mountain Poems: “A hungry bird will gorge itself to death/like a man who’ll die to get his hands on property/ Money’s the thing that ruins humans/ the wise will keep it at a distance.”
The next day FLOW’s board chair Micheal Vickery sent me an email with a terse note: “What you think about this?” sharing the poem “Questionnaire,” by Wendell Berry — from his book Leavings(Counter Point, 2009). A few days later FLOW’s former chair Mike Dettmer sent me the same email.
How much poison are you willing to eat for the success of the free market and global trade? Please name your preferred poisons.
For the sake of goodness, how much
evil are you willing to do? Fill in the following blanks with the names of
your favorite evils and acts of hatred.
What sacrifices are you prepared to make for culture and civilization? Please list the monuments, shrines, and works of art you would most willingly destroy.
In the name of patriotism and the flag, how much of our beloved land are you willing to desecrate? List in the following spaces the mountains, rivers, towns, farms you could most readily do without.
State briefly the ideas, ideals, or hopes, the energy sources, the kinds of security, for which you would kill a child. Name, please, the children
whom you would be willing to kill.
Disturbing. How did we turn life and nature upside down? When did we start sacrificing life, natural spaces, water and health for gods of progress, money, and patriotism? Strange how reason can hide desire and excess, how the mind can slip into sophism—fallacious reasoning that covers up disastrous ends with supposed benefits—to justify our actions or apathy as sacrifice for money, markets, and nationalism.
We must sacrifice profit
The answer to Berry’s question is to turn sacrifice right-side up. How can we grandparents sacrifice our grandchildren and the planet with untold suffering in the face of the reality that we have a decade to prevent this suffering? Ironically, the traditional notion that we accumulate wealth to pass on to our children or grandchildren has become sophistry. What good is the accumulation of wealth or materialism in the name of legacy, when that legacy destroys the planet and the lives of our grandchildren? This has become a sophism, a falsehood. The truth is we cannot continue to slide into apathy when it comes to our grandchildren’s future, when it comes to climate change, water, human dignity, and, yes, the Great Lakes.
We are hundreds, thousands, millions of grandparents. The answer for us grandparents to protect and gift our grandchildren with life is to reverse Wendell Berry’s “Questionnaire.” How much world trade and free markets are we willing to sacrifice for our grandchildren’s health? How much land and water are we willing to preserve for their food and thirst? What blanks would you fill in for acts of goodness and love? What energy source, security, financial investment are you willing to sacrifice, give, to prevent flooding, drought, landslides, massive fires, or cause that kills a grandchild?
This is why we at FLOW have decided to announce our new campaign to build and sustain a widespread coalition of Grandparents for Grandchildren and the Great Lakes—a wave of grandparents and businesses whose single mission is to reverse the culturally perverse sacrifices we’ve made in the past. A new culture, one with the deepest roots of all, that chooses to sacrifice, give, and support all those acts of love, care, protection of our grandchildren and the water, hydrosphere, land, liberty, life, and civilization that they inherit. What better stewards, what better way to establish a trust for your grandchildren, a public trust ethic that protects what is essential for the quality of their lives across generations.
It is time for us grandparents to join together, compress time, give, sacrifice, conserve, support the ethical increase in taxes required for rapid actions to reverse or mitigate the harsh realities of climate change and impacts. It is time to become sensitized to the realities of the future our grandchildren face here in the Great Lakes Basin, really, grandchildren and generations everywhere. Stay tuned for the launch of this new campaign for grandparents in the Great Lakes region, grandparents everywhere, who want to do what we can for the Great Lakes, our communities, and future of our grandchildren and future generations. FLOW and I welcome your emails, texts, posts, comments and ideas as we launch Grandparents for Grandchildren and the Great Lakes. The time is now.
Jim Olson is the founder and President of FLOW. He and his wife Judy have seven grandchildren.
How grandparents can help:
• Join our “Grandparents for Grandchildren and the Great Lakes” campaign and pledge to pass along a healthy Great Lakes to your descendants. Click here to support FLOW’s work.
• Talk to your grandchildren about water protection, and about issues that affect the health of our Great Lakes and groundwater, such as Line 5, PFAS, and the lack of septic protections.
• Enjoy the Great Lakes with your grandchildren. Swim with them, look for Petoskey stones with them, bodysurf with them, fish with them.
Attorney, Olson, Bzdok & Howard, P.C., Traverse City
When I look back over the past year, I can’t help but feel hope in the common goodness of people and communities.
I say this not without heart felt and serious concern about events in the world that point in the opposite direction – despair: increasing violence from guns, war, and sweeping droughts and floods, causing death and dislocation of millions of people and children, global warming and the push-back from unprecedented storms and extreme weather that compound drought, floods, landslides, which in turn destabilize countries like Syria fomenting conflict and conditions for ISIS. To paraphrase Circle of Blue senior journalist Keith Schneider, “The earth is angry and she’s fighting back.”
Closer to home, Detroit water shut-offs continue despite the devastating impact on the poor who can’t afford to pay a normal water bill, let alone the $100 a month or more claimed by the Detroit Water Board. State leaders finally stop denying the Flint water-crisis more than a year after residents demanded help, that its children and residents were exposed to high levels of lead from the city’s public water system. The problem is more endemic than Detroit or Flint, since both crises grew out of the unbridled power of Governor Snyder’s emergency manager law to usurp the power of city assets and revenues to pay debts regardless of the impacts to citizens. Flint’s emergency manager thought only of economic expediency in turning off water supplied from Detroit, and tapping into the filthy, polluted Flint River. Then there is the continual threat from the flow of oil in the aging, nearly 63-year old Line 5 pipeline under the Straits; the harm from a release or leak would be so catastrophic, the risk is unacceptable to everyone; yet the flow of oil continues without immediate temporary measures while state officials continue to study it as if it was an “issue,” and not the clear and imminent endangerment of the Great Lakes and the Straits of Mackinac – the fact is there is enough capacity within the pipeline system in the Great Lakes without Line 5 endangering the Straits.
So why the hope? Other events have happened this past year that point to a new way of understanding and, perhaps, solving many of the threats that we face in the world and our communities.
First, Pope Francis issued his encyclical on climate change and the environment, connecting the reality of our excessive consumptive materialism, global inequality, poverty, ecological and community devastation, and violence that follows. He carefully documented that our way of seeing and doing, our post-modern god of the law of free markets and legally justified greed, our fragmented attempts at dishing out money to help the poor are not working. He says this because we are living a material, market place illusion, and not in harmony with the reality that the earth is our “common home,” and that if we do not share its gifts and respect its inherent natural limits, earth’s water, weather, soil, and the biological diversity on which all life depends will continue to worsen to even greater extremes. He points to a new paradigm, a framework in which we work and live with the understanding that a body of water, whether ocean, Grand Traverse Bay, or Lake Chad, are a commons, part of the gift of earth as commons to all. If we do this, not only with water, but the ridge lines and forests, the beauty and land that are home to our relationships, our cities, the neighborhoods within our towns, the soils beneath our feet, the air we breathe, then we will begin to reshape our life around truth and the given limits of nature, and this will guide our living, our way of life, or economy, full and rich with newly directed creative and sustainable opportunities and entrepreneur ship.
Second, amidst a world of conflicts, from Syria to the Ukraine, from our own cities, to Nigeria, Sudan, and Afghanistan, and in the aftermath of the mass murders from extreme terrorists in Parrs, the nations of the world cooperated: leaders of large and small, developed and developing, or undeveloped countries, recognized the responsibility to each other, agreed to something, the world temperature will not rise more 2 degrees, and maybe less. While it is not law yet, if taken implemented, it will help stave off global calamity greater than two world wars last century, by reducing the irreparable damage we face from climate change and global warming. There is hope in the agreement that we stop denying and see the mounting harm and set a goal that through hard-work and common sacrifice offers a way out of an unthinkable alternative for people everywhere.
Third, we witnessed the bridging of differences by our Supreme Court in precedent setting cases that demand human dignity for marriage between two people, human rights to housing and water for the poor without access, as wells as the genuine search for a common goal to address wasteful and harmful water rights in the middle of the historical California droughts.
Fourth, our political debate heating up even before the 2016 presidential election has pointed to something more than the old, increasingly polarized beliefs in market economy, through money at wars and problems, rather than considering the root of the problem might be the way we are looking at them. Regardless of my own or others’ political persuasion, there is a fresh voice in Bernie Sanders, laying out the case for a community based on sharing of wealth, taking care of neighbors, and our neighborhood, what Pope Francis calls our “common home,” and at the same time helping with services to the poor, respecting and honoring diversity, and encouraging new business innovation. We have been trapped in this country in a red and blue, right and left, straight-jacket of false ideology, rather than identifying those things that are essential to every one of us and providing for them as principle of our country—the common good.
Fifth, then Michael Moore comes out with his latest film Where to Invade Next? Good God, here we have the message that we here in the USA had the idea, come up with the ideas, of common good, yet go in the opposite direction of individualized competition based on a law of the jungle called free markets. Everything is about profit and money and bottom line. The world is not a corporation, it is a commons in which corporations organizations are simply a means, not an end.
Do we really have a choice? Our common home and communities are simultaneously local and global. It’s not just act locally, think globally, or act globally, think locally. It’s all of this and more. If we don’t act, for example, on climate change, or understand that climate change is not just an energy issue but about water and food, if we don’t move toward a renewable economy within a few years, small island countries will literally disappear, rainforests and biodiversity will disappear, coastal cities and other areas will increasingly flood and fail from even more extreme storm events or the day-to-day failure to change, adapt and embrace resilient cooperation—the common good. All one has to do is read through “4 Degrees Turn Down the Heat: Climate Extremes, Regional Impacts, and the Case for Resilience,” a report published by renown scientists and even sponsored by the more conservative World Bank. The picture is not pretty, and it would it is ignorant, even immoral, at this time in history not to act, even out of self-interest, for this common good.
So I end this year and start the next with hope. At FLOW, the Great Lakes and Water Policy Center, here in Traverse City, and other organizations throughout the region, we have chosen as a mission and goal to protect the waters of the Great Lakes basin as a commons with principles, known as the public trust doctrine, that require government as trustee and people as beneficiaries, to work together to respect and protect water and community that depend on it from impairment. Private control of public waters and other public commons has always been prohibited; this is because some things essential to all of us are common to all of us. If we don’t protect the commons, we undermine the air, water, community and neighborhoods where we live. To work and live toward the common good is to work for the commons and at the same time work for yourself, family and friends. To not work for the common good, is to continue the long, slow, or perhaps not so slow, disintegration that leads to destruction of the earth, water, air, community, people, and leads to a world violent and unsafe.
It is hopeful and reassuring to see positive events pointing toward this new way of seeing, understanding and doing – living and working for the protection and sustainability of our common home and the common good. They are one and the same. Here’s to another hopeful New Year.
Aquatic species, including fish, rely on ice for protecting eggs and young. Plankton, an important part of the food chain, are more resilient when protected by ice. Whitefish and lake trout will be forced to compete with warm-water species migrating north with rising temperatures. Declining ice cover could also stress whitefish reproduction in Lake Superior where ice protects eggs from winter storm disturbance.
Reduced ice cover leads to increased evaporation, which in turn could lead to drastic reductions in Great Lakes water levels.
Nearshore ice sheets buffer coastal structures and infrastructure from winter’s punishing winds and waves. Less ice leaves them more vulnerable to costly damage.
Low ice cover fosters increased resuspension of sediments and may contribute to summer algae blooms.
Reduced ice cover leads to extreme weather, including increasing intensity and frequency of heavy rainfall and snowfall, including record lake effect snows.
Recreational sports, including ice fishing on the Great Lakes and inland lakes, are reduced or eliminated, cutting into culturally important harvests of whitefish, panfish, bass and yellow perch.
“The Great Lakes will continue to warm over the next several decades and despite year-to-year variability, Lake Erie is trending towards an ice-free status during the winter months,” says Dr. Mike McCay, director of the University of Windsor’s Great Lakes Institute for Environmental Research. “Even though we have seen the lakes bounce back from adversity before, less ice cover will be a new normal.”
Great Lakes Ice Cover, 1973-2023 (click to play slideshow)
Originally published October 6, 2023; updated February 29, 2024
In what is among the most comprehensive clean energy initiatives in the country, Michigan has become the first industrialized swing state to enact laws requiring 100 percent of electric power to come from carbon-free sources by 2040. The ambitious legislative agenda, fulfilling Governor Whitmer’s MI Healthy Climate Plan, also increases energy efficiency standards, address energy equity in disadvantaged communities, and empowers the Michigan Public Service Commission to consider climate change, affordability, and equity in its decision-making. The passage of the bills will save Michigan ratepayers an estimated $5.5 billion through 2050.
These benefits to Michigan are on top of the energy investments flowing from the federal Inflation Reduction Act that have catalyzed an estimated over $21 billion in new investment in Michigan, helped create almost 16,000 good-paying clean energy jobs, and brought twenty-four major new clean energy manufacturing projects to Michigan – more than any other state.
But these are not the only measurable benefits that the energy transition brings to Michigan. As we celebrate Michigan’s newfound leadership in clean energy, it’s vitally important to underscore the positive impact the energy transition will have on Michigan’s water resources.
Decarbonizing Michigan’s Economy Will Dramatically Improve Water Quality
Governor Whitmer’s MI Healthy Climate Plan will not only accelerate Michigan’s clean energy transition and decarbonize our economy, it will provide long-term benefits to Michigan’s water resources.
As we retire fossil fuel-based energy sources and replace them with clean energy technologies – wind and solar power, green hydrogen, electric vehicles, and energy storage devices – we will markedly and measurably reduce the harmful impacts that producing and burning fossil fuels have on our Great Lakes, rivers and streams, and groundwater.
Wind and solar energy are infinite sources of free, clean power. Unlike fossil fuels which are finite, costly, inherently dirty, and cause billions of dollars of negative environmental and health impacts, wind and solar energy are free, clean, and with far fewer impacts to the environment and human health.
Impacts from Thermoelectric Generation
Water and energy have always been highly interdependent. Producing power uses tremendous amounts of water. From the first water wheels used to ground grain 6,000 years ago, through the Roman age of invention where water was moved great distances to irrigate crops and provide drinking water, to the production of energy from hydropower, fossil-fuel, and nuclear power plants, water has always been an essential component of energy
production.
Electricity generated by steam from burning coal or natural gas, and nuclear fission – called thermoelectric generation – accounts for 68 percent of water use in the Great Lakes Region and 74 percent of all water use in Michigan. Thermoelectric generation causes significant, harmful, and destructive direct impacts on our water resources.
Power plants need massive amounts of cooling water to operate. Water pumped from the Great Lakes and their tributary rivers “entrain” or kills millions of fish and aquatic organisms, including early-life-stage fish, eggs, and larvae. Once heated, water released from power plants causes thermal impacts that stress and kill fish and other aquatic organisms. Warm water also can change fish populations, decrease dissolved oxygen levels, propagate algae, and alter “benthic communities” – the broad ecological biome of animals (including crustaceans and mussels), plants, and bacteria that live in the water and the lake bottom.
Impacts from Coal
Michigan’s coal plants are also responsible for the widespread pollution of our Great Lakes. Available data show that Michigan-based coal-fired plants emit approximately 3000 lbs. of mercury – a powerful neurotoxin every year. Coal plants are responsible for 57 percent of all mercury present in the Great Lakes, resulting in official health advisories cautioning the public to limit consumption of Great Lakes fish. In 2021 alone, thermoelectric power plants in Michigan also emitted 64,301 tons of sulfur dioxide, 58,284 tons of nitrogen oxide, and 55,450,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide.
In addition to these contaminants, coal combustion produces air emissions that contain lead, particulates, and various other heavy metals that are deposited in our lakes, rivers , and streams. Coal combustion also produces fly ash and slag, which have been deposited in unlined landfills for many decades. Recent research has revealed that of the fifty-two known coal ash landfills in Michigan, almost all are leaking heavy metals into Michigan’s groundwater.
There are more than 900,000 active oil and gas wells in the United States. Oil and gas production from shale formations uses 1.5 to 16 million gallons of water for each well. This water becomes contaminated with a variety of chemicals and oil and gas constituents.
Oil and gas produced from shale formations require “hydraulic fracturing,” a process using large volumes of water, chemicals, and sand pumped under high pressure to keep pore spaces open so that oil and gas can be recovered. The drilling process yields contaminated “flow-back” water, as well as naturally occurring brine that is pumped out with the oil and gas. This chemical laden water is then disposed of by pumping it back deep underground.
Burning natural gas produces emissions that include nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, volatile organic compounds, and particulate matter – all of which inevitably find their way into Michigan’s surface waters.
Pipelines transport crude oil and gas to refineries, and refined oil and gas to their end use. Between 1998 and 2017 there were 11,758 pipeline spills in the United States that were classified as “significant” by the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration.
Included among them is the most catastrophic pipeline failure in United States history. The Enbridge pipeline rupture near Marshall, Michigan in July 2010, released more than 1 million gallons of tar sands oil into a direct tributary of the Kalamazoo River. The rupture of Enbridge Line 6B resulted in pervasive contamination and massive ecological damage to the waters and surrounding wetlands.
Another oil pipeline now threatens the world’s most valuable fresh surface water system. The 70-year old Line 5, also owned and operated by Enbridge, traverses the Straits of Mackinac at the confluence of Lakes Michigan and Huron. The free spanning underwater pipeline has been repeatedly struck by ship’s anchors and cables dragged by passing vessels have damaged the pipelines and its supports. Line 5 is uniquely vulnerable to multiple impacts that could result in irreversible environmental harm and billions of dollars of damage to the Great Lakes regional economy.
Climate Change and Michigan Waters
We are only beginning to understand the pervasive impact climate change is having on our lakes, rivers, and other water-dependent resources. Climate change brings specific climate related impacts, risks, and challenges to the protection and management of public water resources.
The combustion of fossil fuels has raised regional temperatures 2.3 degrees since 1951. Warming temperatures destabilize lake, river, and stream ecology, altering conditions and habitat for fish and aquatic organisms. Like the oceans, the Great Lakes are absorbing excess heat. Lake Superior, despite its size, is one of the fastest warming lakes in the world with temperatures increasing 3-4 degrees Fahrenheit.
Warming temperatures are changing our weather. The National Climate Assessment forecasts both increased frequency and severity of storm events in the Great Lakes region. Increased flooding will cause sewer overflows that reach our Great Lakes, increased soil erosion; and more fertilizer, pesticides, and herbicides to wash into our streams and rivers.
The Energy/Water Nexus
We can mitigate or even potentially avoid the most severe effects of climate change by implementing Governor Whitmer’s energy and climate plans. The transition from fossil fuels to clean energy cannot come soon enough.
The benefits of the proposed energy transition to our water resources are not speculative, they are measurable and based on science. Wind and solar energy are now the least expensive new energy infrastructure available worldwide. Every megawatt-hour of wind and solar energy saves 8,270 gallons of water from being used for thermal cooling.
An acre of solar panels producing electricity keeps 121 to 138 metric tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, every year. That same acre of solar panels can power an electric vehicle 40 to 100 times farther than ethanol produced from the same acre of corn. And ethanol production can require up to 865 gallons of water for each gallon of fuel produced.
The benefits of clean energy, significant as they are, pale when compared to the harms that clean energy can help us avoid. The economics of clean energy do not include the difficult to quantify but very real aggregate cost of “negative externalities” – the harmful environmental and health impacts that flow from the use of fossil fuels.
Annual environmental and health damages linked to coal mining, processing, and combustion have been estimated at $365 billion annually (2010 dollars). The annual environmental and health damages from burning fossil fuels have been estimated at up to $970 billion annually.
Globally, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimates that pollution from fossil fuels cost the world’s economy more than $5.6 trillion in 2022. This amount, roughly equivalent to total annual global energy expenditures, if added to the cost of producing fossil fuels, makes the favorable economics of clean energy technologies undeniable, and an overwhelming and compelling basis to transition from fossil fuels as quickly as possible.
Governor Whitmer’s clean energy and climate initiatives redound with multiple benefits to public health, the environment, the business community, and Michigan citizens at large. And thanks to the Governor’s policies that are being advanced today, the largest, most extraordinary fresh surface water system in the world – our Great Lakes – will also enjoy long-term future benefits and be preserved and protected for our future generations.
Evergreen Collaborative, The Michigan Clean Energy Framework, https://5lakesenergy.com/wp content/uploads/2023/08/MI-Clean-Energy-Framework-report.pdf
Climate Power, One Year of Our Clean Energy Boom, July 25, 2023 https://climatepower.us/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2023/07/Clean-Energy-Boom-Anniversary-Report-1.pdf
Great Lakes Commission, Annual Report of the Great Lakes Regional Water Use Database, 2021 https://waterusedata.glc.org/pdf/2021-Water-Use-Report-FINAL.pdf
NRDC, Power Plant Cooling and Associated Impacts: The Need to Modernize U.S. Power Plants and Protect Our Water Resources and Aquatic Ecosystems, April 2014 https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/power-plant cooling-IB.pdf
Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, 2005 Estimates of Anthropogenic Mercury Air Emissions in Michigan, November 2011 https://www.michigan.gov/media/Project/Websites/egle/Documents/Reports/AQD/mercury/2005-michigan-anthropogenic-mercury inventory.pdf?rev=b56f9f929bad4c229f36f6639b3f07b2
EPA, Health Effects of Exposures to Mercury, Accessed September 9, 2023 https://www.epa.gov/mercury/health effects-exposures-mercury
NRDC, Poisoning the Great Lakes: Mercury Emissions from Coal-Fired Power Plants In the Great Lakes Region, June 2012 https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/poisoning-the-great-lakes.pdf
U.S. Energy Information Administration, November 10, 2022 https://www.eia.gov/electricity/state/michigan/
Earth Justice, Toxic Coal Ash in Michigan: Addressing Coal Plants’ Hazardous Legacy, May 3, 2023 https://earthjustice.org/feature/coal-ash-states/michigan#:~:text=Michigan%20utilities%20operate%2030%20regulated,of%20the%20state’s%20regulated%20dumpsites
USGS, Methods for Estimating Water Withdrawals for Mining in the United States, 2005 https://pubs.usgs.gov/sir/2009/5053/pdf/sir2009-5053.pdf
U.S. Energy Information Administration, Coal Explained, Accessed October 9, 2023 https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/coal/how-much-coal-is-left.php#:~:text=Based%20on%20U.S.%20coal%20production,would%20last%20about%2021%20years.
U.S. Energy Information Administration, The Distribution of U.S. Oil and Natural Gas Wells by Production Rate December 2022 https://www.eia.gov/petroleum/wells/pdf/full_report.pdf
USGS, How much water does the typical hydraulically fractured well require? Accessed October 9, 2023 https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-much-water-does-typical-hydraulically-fractured-well-require?qt news_science_products=0#qt-news_science_products
EPA, Natural Gas, Accessed October 9, 2023 https://www3.epa.gov/ttnchie1/ap42/ch01/final/c01s04.pdf
Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, https://www.phmsa.dot.gov/data-and-statistics/pipeline/pipeline-incident-20-year-trends
National Transportation Safety Board, Accident Report, Enbridge Incorporated Hazardous Liquid Pipeline Rupture and Release Marshall, Michigan July 25, 2010 https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/PAR1201.pdf
Petoskey News-Review, History shows record of multiple Straits anchor strikes, May 16, 2019 https://www.petoskeynews.com/story/news/local/2019/05/16/history-shows-record-of-multiple-straits-anchor-strikes/44233105/
Enbridge, Inc., Investigation into Disturbances to Line 5 in the Straits of Mackinac in May and June of 2020, August 21, 2020 https://onedrive.live.com/?authkey=%21ANaLBWlYH%2DsOquY&cid=ED235B80C2B9171B&id=ED235B80C2B9171B%2126489&parId=ED235B80C2B9171B%216332&o=OneUp
Great Lakes Integrated Sciences and Assessments https://glisa.umich.edu/climate-change-in-the-great-lakes-region-references/
Phys.Org, Lake Superior is among the fastest-warming lakes on the planet. Climate change may be the culprit, October 22, 2021 https://phys.org/news/2021-10-lake-superior-fastest-warming-lakes-planet.html
Utility Dive, Renewables would provide cheaper energy than 99% of US coal plants and catalyze a just energy transition, February 9. 2023 https://www.utilitydive.com/news/renewables-cheaper-energy-than-99-percent-of us-coal-plants-just-energy-transition/642393/
NREL, A Retrospective Analysis of the Benefits and Impacts of U.S. Renewable Portfolio Standards, January 2016 https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy16osti/65005.pdf
Columbia Climate School, Solar Panels Reduce CO2 Emissions More Per Acre Than Trees — and Much More Than Corn Ethanol, October 26, 2022 https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2022/10/26/solar-panels-reduce-co2-emissions-more-per-acre-than-trees-and-much-more-than-corn-ethanol/
Columbia Climate School, Ethanol’s Impacts on Our Water Resources, March 21, 2011 https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2011/03/21/ethanol%e2%80%99s-impacts-on-our-water-resources/
Epstein, P., et al, Center for Health and the Global Environment, Harvard Medical School, February 17, 2011 https://nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1749-6632.2010.05890.x#:~:text=These%20costs%20are%20external%20to,of%20a%20trillion%20dollars%20annually
Shindell, D., The social cost of atmospheric release, February 25, 2015 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-015-1343-0#/page-1
International Monetary Fund, IMF Fossil Fuel Subsidies Data: 2023 Update, August 24, 2023 https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2023/08/22/IMF-Fossil-Fuel-Subsidies-Data-2023-Update-537281#:~:text=Globally%2C%20fossil%20fuel%20subsidies%20were,warming%20and%20local%20air%20pollution
If you’re in the midwest or the mid-Atlantic, chances are you’ve been affected by dangerous air quality this summer. Here in northern Michigan, the Air Quality Index (AQI) soared above 200 in late June, as smoke clogged the atmosphere. Our most basic, life-sustaining element was rated “Very Unhealthy” to breathe.
This unthinkable situation stems from over 500 wildfires burning across Canada, consuming a record 23,491,740 acres as of July 11, 2023. A dangerous cocktail of unrelenting heat, parched ground, and lightning strikes thousands of miles away has brought climate change to our doorstep and into our lungs.
In the fight to stabilize the climate and heal the Great Lakes, everything is truly connected, and everyone has a role. Here are a few resources that can help us better understand the situation:
Wildfires & Pollution: What Comes Next (recorded webinar) A Michigan Environmental Council conversation with Nick Leonard, executive director of the Great Lakes Environmental Center, and Melody Reis, senior legislative and regulatory policy manager of Moms Clean Air Force.
By: Liz Kirkwood, Executive Director January 17, 2023 // Bridge Michigan
Michigan is a water wonderland — think Great Lakes, 36,000 miles of rivers and streams, groundwater that supplies 45 percent of our state with drinking water, and more than 6 million acres of wetlands.
But these waters face a daunting array of challenges, everything from microplastics to toxic “forever chemicals,” inadequate infrastructure funding to the stresses of climate change. The impact on residents includes soaring water bills, water shutoffs and widespread concern about lead and chemical contamination.
In 2023, Michigan needs an inspiring vision, championed from the highest places inside our government and out. In her State of the State message set for Jan. 25, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has a chance to show the way by articulating bold proposals for Michigan’s water. I urge herto declare 2023 the Year of Keeping Water Public and Protected for All in Michigan.
Secure Affordable Rates and Public Control
Water affordability and access:Water is essential to sanitation, health and life itself. No Michigander should be denied public water service because of inability to pay. Michigan should enact legislation to ban residential water shutoffs, fix the affordability crisis and address water injustices.
Public Water Legislation:The state should enact legislation imposing royalties on bottlers who commodify waters owned by the State of Michigan at practically no cost and reap extraordinary profit on the resale. The royalties should make up a clean water trust fund to serve Michigan residents and communities for dedicated public purposes, including ending water shutoffs and helping people whose wells are contaminated.
Keep municipal water utilities public:Michigan must draw a clear line against any plan to privatize public water services, which weakens local control and can ratchet up rates while maintenance lags.
Protect Drinking Water and Public Health
We have made considerable progress in dealing with the kind of pollution the 1972 Clean Water Act targeted, but new threats continually emerge for which our laws are ill-prepared. The governor should call for actions to address not only these threats but also the mistakes of the past:
Groundwater:These vital but largely invisible waters are contaminated in over 15,000 localities. Another $50 million a year should be dedicated to the cleanup of toxic sites and prevention of groundwater contamination.
Climate resilience and water infrastructure funding:Climate change is putting unprecedented stress on already-faltering water systems. Despite a one-time infusion of federal funds last year, our water infrastructure faces a multi-billion dollar investment gap. We need long-term funding sources, and new water projects must be designed for an era of intensifying storms.
A new approach to chemical contamination:We can no longer deal with chemicals like PFAS one-by-one and after they have done environmental harm. Instead, the precautionary principle should be the foundation of our chemical policy, requiring chemical manufacturers to demonstrate the safety of the chemicals before they can be authorized for commerce.
Our actions now will define and shape the future of the Great Lakes. This future demands a new relationship with water, and recognizes, in the words of Jacques Cousteau, that “the water cycle and the life cycle are one.”
Imagine a future where we place water at the center of all decision-making. And imagine the profoundly positive impacts that result in energy choices, food systems, the transportation and housing sectors, urban development, manufacturing and more.
Safeguarding our Great Lakes is a deeply shared value and, despite daily indications of bitter polarization in our politics, this important area of common ground bridges political divides. Prudently conceived and boldly implemented, keeping our water public and protected for all can help secure Michigan’s future.
Ten years to save the planet from climate change. PFAS, microplastics, and invasive species. Wetland destruction and failing, polluting septic systems. Sometimes it seems as though the only environmental news is bad news.
Here’s an antidote, borne in a glass half-full.
Great Lakes Piping Plover
An endearing, small shorebird that nests on Great Lakes beaches, the piping plover is on the federal endangered species list. Its preferred habitat is also a lure to people and their dogs. But thanks to intensive recovery efforts by federal and state government officials and citizen volunteers, the population of Great Lakes piping plovers has rebounded from 13 nesting pairs in 1990 to approximately 65-70 nesting pairs today, and the outlook is favorable.
Protecting Wetlands
Wetlands are important because they filter water pollutants, store floodwaters, and provide habitat for fish and wildlife. Yet they were regarded as wastelands from the time Europeans arrived to the 20th Century. Draining and filling cost Michigan 4.2 million acres of its original endowment of 10.7 million acres of wetlands. But the passage in 1979 of Michigan’s wetland protection law has made a dramatic difference. It has sl
owed the rate of wetland loss to less than 2000 acres a year, from a former pace of tens of thousands of acres a year. Meanwhile, private groups are working to restore wetlands.
Michigan’s Recycling Rate Improving
For years, Michigan’s recycling rate was the lowest in the Great Lakes region. But things are changing. Michigan has significantly improved its recycling rate from 14.25% prior to 2019 to 19.3%, based on an analysis released by the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy (EGLE) earlier this year. An EGLE survey found that Michiganders’ understanding of recycling best habits has increased in every corner of the state. The recycling rate translates to 110 pounds per capita each year.
Public Drinking Water
The twin lead-in-drinking water disasters in Flint and Benton Harbor have raised public doubts about the safety of community drinking water systems. The good news is that community systems in Michigan and the Great Lakes region generally maintain a high degree of compliance with federal health-based drinking water standards. Of the 19.5 million U.S. residents served by public water supplies that rely on the Great Lakes as their source water, 99.1% had drinking water that met all applicable health-based standards in 2020. In the Province of Ontario, approximately 60% of the population is supplied with treated drinking water from the Great Lakes. In 2020, 99.8% of municipal residential treated drinking water quality tests met Ontario Drinking Water Quality Standards.
Defending the Monarch Butterfly
The exquisite monarch butterfly is in trouble, but the Village of Elk Rapids has stepped up to do something about it, recently becoming the second Monarch City USA in Michigan. The designation commits the Village to several actions, including:
Converting abandoned lands to monarch habitat
Integrating monarch conservation into the Village’s future land use conservation
Working with garden clubs and citizens in planting milkweed and nectar gardens
Building sanctuary sites, installing signage and hosting an annual Monarch Butterfly Festival
The population of migratory Eastern monarchs (those east of the Rocky Mountains) declined 90 percent during the last 20 years. If more communities follow the lead of Elk Rapids, the monarch butterfly has a chance.
Jim Olson is the founder and President of FLOW. He and his wife Judy have seven grandchildren.
We are only beginning to understand the pervasive impact climate change is having on our lakes, rivers, and other water-dependent resources. Climate change brings specific climate related impacts, risks, and challenges to the protection and management of public water resources.
Converting abandoned lands to monarch habitat