Trading Pollutants to Save the Bay

A few days ago, I blogged an article about how the Bay environmentalist community was being split over the idea nutrient trading, with the Bay Foundation being 'pro', and the more grassroots Riverkeeper community being 'anti'.  Today we see a report that seems to strongly support the 'pro' position:

Pollution trading could trim bay cleanup costs

Steep projected costs for cleaning up the Chesapeake Bay could be trimmed by billions of dollars, a new study suggests, by allowing polluters to buy "credits" for less-expensive reductions made by others.

The study, presented Thursday to the Chesapeake Bay Commission, an advisory panel of legislators from Maryland, Pennsylvania and Virginia, estimates that nutrient pollution trading could trim projected costs for upgrading sewage treatment plants and controlling urban and suburban storm water pollution by $1 billion or more a year baywide.

Millions more could be saved, the report says, by letting developers and communities pay farmers to plant trees or create wetlands on their land to offset nutrient pollution produced by growth and new development.

The economic analysis, done by RTI International of Research Triangle Park, N.C., comes as officials in the six-state watershed, which includes the District of Columbia, Delaware, New York and West Virginia, wrestle with hefty preliminary cost projections for reducing nutrient and sediment pollution enough to comply with a bay restoration plan imposed by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Maryland officials have estimated cleanup could cost $15 billion in the state alone by 2025, the deadline for meeting the bay's "pollution diet." Virginia officials have projected costs of $7 billion to nearly $15 billion.

Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia have embraced varying approaches to nutrient trading as part of their bay cleanup plans.

Saving a billion bucks isn't a bad thing.  Nutrient trading, handled right, is a reasonable free market solution to the nutrient problem, by letting individual polluters decide how much it's worth to reduce flow of nutrients into the Bay.