Great Lakes Organizations Release

Shared Policy Priorities

In advance of Great Lakes Day this Thursday, a binational coalition of regional agencies, Indigenous nations, legislators, local communities, and business, maritime and environmental groups released shared priorities for restoring the Great Lakes and supporting the region’s economy.

The priorities include fully funding the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative at $450 million, ensuring water infrastructure investments tackle historic inequities, increasing Great Lakes climate resiliency, developing coordinated regional science plans, strengthening ports and maritime transportation, and addressing harmful algal blooms, emerging contaminants, and invasive species.

Supporting organizations are: the Great Lakes Commission, Great Lakes Fishery Commission, Healing Our Waters-Great Lakes Coalition, Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Cities Initiative, Chippewa Ottawa Resource Authority, Great Lakes Metro Chambers Coalition, American Great Lakes Ports Association, Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Legislative Caucus, Great Lakes Business Network, and Lake Carriers’ Association. The Northeast-Midwest Institute provides expertise and advice in the preparation of this annual statement of Great Lakes policy priorities.

Read the shared priorities statement here. 

NEMWI Continues Its

Voices from the Great Lakes Program

The Northeast-Midwest Institute's Voices from the Great Lakes program provides a forum for experts and scholars to give insights into issues that impact the Great Lakes region. VGL is a series of guest essays from leading Great Lakes researchers, policymakers, stakeholders, and more that will showcase key perspectives that help shape federal policy discussions in Washington, D.C.

Below is an excerpt from the second of a three-part series on the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, written by Cam Davis, vice president at GEI Consultants, and elected commissioner at the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago.

If you missed it, read the introduction and part one here, and read part two in its entirety here.

"The region scored a significant victory with the Legacy Act, and not just because of the $50 million boost annually for cleaning up toxic mud at the bottom of working rivers and harbors in the U.S.’s 30-plus “Areas of Concern.” The region also proved to itself that when traditionally adverse stakeholder interests identify common interests, Congressional bipartisanship follows. The ecosystem, economy, and public health benefit. And everyone shares in the credit. If these lessons could net a long-overdue investment for restoring Areas of Concern, could the same lessons be used for an even more expansive investment in Areas of Concern plus habitat recovery, reducing polluted runoff, blocking invasive species, and other significant ecosystem threats?"

Read part two of Cam’s Voice in its entirety here or at

nemw.org/reports-output/vgl

Also, sign up here to get new Voices directly in your inbox the moment they publish, and/or our Weekly Update and notices about NEMWI events.

NEMWI To Hold Briefing on HABs Research

on March 18^th at 3:00 PM

The Northeast-Midwest Institute will hold a briefing on Harmful Algal Bloom (HAB) research on Monday, March 18, from 3:00-4:00 (ET) on the GoToMeeting platform. The briefing will cover the upcoming summer research season, including the work researchers are doing, and what they hope to learn. Additionally, the briefing will explore the many ways that HABs research is used and distributed, and the wide-ranging impacts of HABs research.

More details will be forthcoming.

Great Lakes Scientist Testifies at Microplastics Hearing

The Senate Subcommittee on Chemical Safety, Waste Management, Environmental Justice, and Regulatory Oversight held a hearing last Tuesday on the current state of microplastics research. A microplastic is a unit of plastic between 1 nanometer (or .001 micrometers, or µm), or and 5 millimeters (5,000 µm) in size. They are either produced at that size as an additive to a product, like microbeads, or are a result of larger pieces of plastic breaking down in size in the environment.

Senators' opening remarks focused on what is and is not known about microplastics. “While we are aware of the existence of microplastics in the environment, their existence in drinking water sources is not well defined,” Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) said. “Additionally, the effectiveness of treatment processes in removing them is not well understood... and assessing the associated health effects has proven challenging.” Sen. Alex Padilla (D-CA) alluded to those research challenges and focused on the pervasiveness of microplastics. “While the study of microplastics is still emerging, one thing we do know, beyond the shadow of a doubt, is where we can find microplastics,” he said. “Because the answer is: everywhere.”

Dr. Sherri A. Mason, the director of sustainability at Penn State Behrend in Erie, PA, and a leading microplastics researcher, especially in freshwater systems, provided testimony at the hearing. “Over the five years that I sailed and sampled all five of the Great Lakes, we established a hard and sad truth: as the water flows from one lake to another, the amount of plastic within that water increases,” Dr. Mason said. “Each Great Lake now harbors between one and five billion pieces of plastic each,” 97 percent of which are microplastics.

Wastewater treatment plants are very good at filtering out microplastics, but they don’t catch everything. Dr. Mason recently authored a study that found an average of 5.5 particles of microplastics per liter of tap water. She and her team found much more in bottled water: 325 particles per liter – nearly three orders of magnitude higher. And even the microplastics that treatment plants filter out don’t go away. They are caught in the sludge and turned into fertilizer. “This application allows plastic particles within the sludge to be re-released into nearby waterways as runoff or move through the soil into the groundwater,” Dr. Mason said.

As witnesses and Senators reiterated at the hearing, microplastics research is a nascent field, and there is still much to learn. Most prominently, we don’t yet know about adverse health effects in humans. Researchers have found, however, that nanoplastics, particles of plastic even smaller than 1 nanometer, travel around the body prolifically. Nanoplastics “can easily move across the gastrointestinal tract, be carried by the blood, end up in our livers, kidneys, brains, even crossing the placental barrier into embryos,” Dr. Mason said.

Watch the hearing here

Learn more about Dr. Mason’s research here

U.S. Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works Holds Hearing on Geologic Hydrogen 

The U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources held a hearing on Wednesday, February 27th to examine the opportunities and challenges associated with developing geologic hydrogen, a potential major energy resource in the United States.

Committee Chair Joe Manchin (D-WV) opened the hearing by emphasizing the need to engage “all of our abundant resources in the cleanest way possible—including all types of hydrogen—to safeguard our country’s energy security.” He reminded the Committee of the critical role of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act in making hydrogen cost-competitive, and opposed the current Administration’s proposals to “impose extreme limitations on the hydrogen tax credit” that are an example of “an agency overstepping the authorities Congress provided.” Specifically, Manchin was concerned that the Department of Treasury’s recent regulation proposal would restrict the tax credits to certain locations and project types and would render the seven new Regional Hydrogen Hubs, a program of the Department of Energy, economically unviable.

In his opening statement, Ranking Member John Barrasso (R-WY) agreed with Sen. Manchin’s all-of-the-above energy policy and his opposition to the Treasury rule proposal, asserting that “Republicans have advocated for reducing carbon emissions through innovation, not regulation, and without elimination.” Sen. Barrasso explained how geologic hydrogen presents the opportunity for an energy-dense, clean resource to meet growing demand. In contrast to traditional hydrogen energy, which requires energy input, geologic hydrogen is a primary energy source ready-made for use. Sen. Barrasso also highlighted the compatibility of hydrogen with existing workforce skills, stating: “Many of the people exploring for hydrogen today spent their careers exploring for oil and gas.”

The first witness, Dr. Evelyn Wang, Director of the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E), discussed the high risk and high reward of investments into the development of technologies for the location and extraction of geologic hydrogen. Dr. Wang stressed that “the realization of these technologies would make hydrogen a primary energy source in addition to a carrier of energy, potentially increasing the domestic supply of hydrogen and lowering costs of this form of energy for millions of Americans.” She further shared that “while simply extracting the current supply of naturally accumulating hydrogen, in and of itself, can enhance the U.S. energy economy, ARPA-E is committing research support to explore a potentially disruptive step in the process,” that has “theoretical potential to produce enough clean hydrogen to impact U.S. energy demand.”

Dr. Geoffery Ellis, who leads the U.S. Geological Survey’s (USGS) research on geologic hydrogen resources, discussed the status of knowledge on geologic hydrogen deposits. The USGS is currently refining a model of global hydrogen resource potential. Thus far, Dr. Ellis reported that “the vast majority of the in-place hydrogen resource is likely to be in accumulations that are too deep, too far offshore, or too small to be economically recovered. However, the remainder could constitute a significant resource.” While “the amount of naturally occurring hydrogen in the Earth’s interior is likely to be large,” he cautioned that further research is needed to determine whether this hydrogen “could be economically, safely, and responsibly recovered.”

The third witness, Pete Johnson, Chief Executive Officer of Kaloma, a geologic hydrogen exploration company, made the clean-energy case for geologic hydrogen, which has a near-zero carbon footprint. He also noted that a growing geologic hydrogen industry will create new, domestic, high-paying jobs. In questioning, Mr. Johnson made it clear that for the continued development of geologic hydrogen resources, it is critical that the 45V tax credit be implemented in a technology-neutral manner so as not to disadvantage geologic hydrogen relative to incumbent hydrogen producers.

A topic of questioning was the timeline for the commercialization of geologic hydrogen. Dr. Wang reported that by the end of the year, a lifecycle analysis of the carbon footprint of geologic hydrogen will be published, allowing for geologic hydrogen companies to qualify for the 45V tax credit. Sen. Manchin inquired as to what states have potential geological hydrogen. Dr. Ellis replied that by the end of the year, the USGS model should be able to identify areas for more detailed exploration.

View a recording of the hearing here.

Reported by NEMWI Intern Eva Kappas, Brown University

U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security Holds Hearing on Port Security

The Subcommittee on Transportation and Maritime Security held a hearing last Thursday to discuss cybersecurity in United States ports. The hearing comes after the Biden administration signed an executive order just last week to bolster the security of the nation's ports, as well as taking other measures to secure U.S. supply chains.

The hearing began with an opening statement by Rep. Carlos Giménez (R-FL-28) who voiced his concerns about Chinese manufacturing on our nation's ports, saying “I have witnessed firsthand the destructive power of communist regimes, and have no interest in allowing the CCP to conduct industrial and economic espionage in our ports, through our cranes.” Giminéz continued: “It is not just about commerce, it’s also about national security, it’s about protecting the very fabric of our society from those who seek to unravel it. Going forward we must take decisive action to secure our ports, to invest in domestic manufacturing of port infrastructure, and to ensure that every ship to shore crane, every bolt, and every piece of equipment that operates within our borders is safe, secure, and serves the interests of the United States.” Currently, it is estimated that 80% of cranes on United States ports are manufactured in China.

All four of the witnesses sympathized with Rep. Giménez’s concerns about the possible implications of Chinese manufactured cranes potentially having the intention of a cyber security attack. “The threat of disruptive cyber effects to our critical infrastructure, specifically the MTS [Maritime Transportation System], requires us to be vigilant, proactive, collaborative, and resourceful,” Rear Admiral John Vann, member of the Coast Guard Cyber Command, said in his opening statement. He went on to point out that increased use of automotive systems in shipping in port and cargo facilities is very efficient, but because of an increased use of automotive technology, it introduces new vectors for cyber attacks.

Rep. Laurel Lee (R-FL-15) asked about what Congress can do to work with the DHS to help build domestic infrastructure capacity for our cranes. Christa Brzozowski, Assistant Secretary for Trade and Economic Security, at the Department of Homeland Security, responded, saying: “If an adversary is exploiting some of these systems, the port can completely shut down, that is why we are working very closely with the Department of Transportation and the Department of Commerce, on some of these incentive programs, so I think full funding of these programs, communication out to your constituencies about the availability of these programs, and an amplification of the vulnerabilities that we’re seeing from a security perspective would raise the attention and promote further production of some of these capabilities.” One example of an incentive program includes the Port Security Grant Program (PSGP), which aims to help the development of port infrastructure from terrorism and improve maritime security.

Reported by NEMWI Intern Aiden Meyer, Nazareth University

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