Qilin Li
Professor Joel Wood
WR 39C 33354
January 24,2022
For my AP draft, I have mainly used Clean Water Act as my main source of advocacy and problem building body. When readers gradually understands the importance of water quality under climate change. There should be an strong advocacy to suggest people to preserve the environment more and care about the environment more. I listed the Clean Water Act as an example in response, it was considered successful at the beginning of enactment.Yet as time goes it was soon discovered that it only solve part of question and not the whole picture.
Originally, I was planning on adding few more other parts of advocacy like carbon credits to add more information or alternative solution. Yet it has the potential to digress from my main topic.
According to professor Wood's comments, I did do a good decision not going to far away on carbon credits for it confuses my main arguments. I then worked on elaborating more on Clean Water Act.
Professor Comments:
Hi Qilin, Thanks for this submission! Great questions as well. I think for the sake of connection and focus, it might work best to continue to focus on issues related to water quality in the US (rather than further developing carbon credits, which has a more distant and tenuous relationship to localized water pollution). With the material you have so far, try to incorporate more citations and work towards precision. What did the CWA, in a material sense, actually do? Is the problem gradually getting better, or are new loopholes and factors outpacing new amendments to the legislation? As you revise, I think you should also try to polish a bit more on the sentence level - sometimes sentence construction or grammatical issues cloud the clarity and ideas behind the writing in this draft. Let me know if you have any questions! All best, - Joel
Joel Weston Wood, Mar 2 at 5:25pm
Deteriorating water mitigation and potential resolution
It is known to us all that water had comprised more than half of our body ingredient and as much as we need air, we need this precious water to survive and thrive. As serious as former statement sounds, there aren’t many of us who go in depth in terms of saving some daily water or even make a fully usage of our water. Climate changes had also done some damages to water body around the entire world in a not so easy to spot way. The extreme floods and droughts or even bacteria released from another stream into our well would put potential threat on our previously clean water and in the end transmit diseases or go as far to causing individual death. Scientists have accomplished a great and through job in realms of water quality and how us human combined with climate change, in both the short and long run, had gradually “poisoning” the water.
Americans, recognizing this environmental issue, had enact the 1972 Clean Water Act (CWA) which had done a remarkable job when it comes to reducing factories’ wastewater and loss of wetlands. One important sign is the waterways nowadays are cleaner than they were before the passage of CWA. Many useful requirements and methods are used when implementing such act. People, as public, deserves the right to know when sewage spill had occurred and how that might affect them. Also, they provide direct find to municipal treatment facilities to construct and expand the State Revolving Fund (SPF). The municipal treatment plants had been successful in what they are designed to accomplish where they managed to decrease industrial wastes and reduced the rate of loss on wetlands.
As perfect as the CWA sounds, there is still problem that over more than 50% of American’s waters are influenced. For instance, many beaches are closed in summer season, the loss of wetland is not unthreatened, and fishing advisories had obviously multiplied. Why would there be such a contradictory effect of the CWA when all its functions are indicating an effective and useful tool of treating the water bodies? The core idea here is the CWA can only accomplish goals which are designed to finish. To illustrate on that, CWA does not address nonpoint source pollution or so many perspectives of habitat modification. The pollution caused by diffuse sources such as runoff of farmland or construction sites (also known as nonpoint source pollution), is the primary reason for deteriorating water today.
Aside from these, the alteration of water flow or even features of habitat is the core reason responsible for many waters failing the standard. Strictly speaking, many professional experts argue that the largest issue regarding aquatic ecosystem is not pollution, but rather the destruction and changing of aquatic habitat. Loopholes had created and further weakened the protection of wetland and other waters. Industrial facilities discharging used water and wastes into municipal sewer systems are in fact not qualified for the pretreatment standards.
Climate change, at the same time, poses a high threat on our water resources. The higher the temperature, the more effects it will put on the seasonal availability of our water through the increased evaporation and lessened snowpack. The southwest area will be largely influenced by this problem due to large drop in rainfall amount. And it’s not hard to imagine that the coastal areas will inevitably be affected by the rising sea level. The extreme weather conditions have a large potential of bringing heavy rainfall, more overflows of sewers, deteriorating water quality and water-borne diseases.
As CWA constructs a blueprint for future reform, they stride first step on the publishing of technology-based limitations. The congress set technology-based limitations upon point sources to control how much pollution these sources can discharge into waters. And for every point source discharger, they must obtain a permit to do so and not commit to any potential administrative or even criminal penalties. The one crucial step is the utilization of technology-based standards which set the wastewater treatment for a specific industry to be at the same basic level regardless of which industry it is currently in. When the pollutants had entered the area of publicly owned treatment work’s (POTW) collection system, the technology-based approach demands the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to discern between pollution-reduction controls and to choose the optimal technology that is the most compatible with the congressional objectives. EPA first designs the industrywide regulatory demands by releasing over 50 sets of waste limitations for industries vary from pharmaceutical manufacturing to leather finishing. After being published, these regulations will merge into the national pollutant discharge elimination system (NPDES) permits for specific facilities. In the end, NPDES permits put attentions on restricting pollutions at its origin and set ahead the specific amount in which the pollutants are allowed to discharge.
As CWA is continuously implementing and reforming, there are always some other voices that are trying to offer different approaches to resolute the potential water quality deteriorating problems. Early works on water resources designing which deals with uncertainty of waste discharge or flooding amount are generally reactive or more straightforwardly put it, passive. Many are merely constructing acts or policies that prohibits the over discharge of waste waters which is just a slowdown of harms to the environment and waters. Instead of restrictions upon discharge of waters, people now are more concerned with another heated and influential notion called carbon neutrality. Carbon neutrality means there is a balance between emitting carbon and absorbing carbon in the atmosphere. One also needs to understand the notion of carbon sink which is any system that can digest more carbon than it emits. For instance, soil, forests, and oceans. And since carbon stocked in natural sink is released because of the forest fire, logging, it is crucial to maintain stable environment and reduce carbon emission. Most importantly of this approach is that people now have incentives to preserve and get involved in environmental protection. Carbon credits, as a permit to emit a certain amount of carbon dioxide and are tradable among firms. For example, one may own a mountain of trees and even though these trees are hard to sell, there are always precious carbon credits where one can trade that for profit. Compared to traditional restrictions on water discharge, carbon credits can spur the economies and further the incentive to preserve the environment since it is tradable and popular.
Questions:
I am kind stuck on my advocacy for I am intending to write only about waters and how climate change affect that. I believe you can incorporate more examples and reference to not only support your essay but also enlengthen it.
Yet at the advocacy level, I think adding carbon credits would bring some second party advice and ideas. Even though it’s not directly related to water quality, carbon credits still relate to climate change and seems to be one potential way to help water quality.
At the first glance, the part of carbon credits is uncorrelated with the water mitigation. It is weird to read new information at the last paragraphs, but I believe you just did not write the end. However, I like the idea of carbon credits. Maybe you can try to incorporate them together.
I did not elaborate too much on that for I feel like this might digress from the subject.
And I also don’t know how much of an length should I assign to this discussion, 2 pages? 4 pages?
Classmate Response:
Overall, I like this essay. It points out the emergence of regulating the water quality and a specific advocacy which can help mitigate the deterioration of water quality. This essay analyzes both the advantages and disadvantages of the advocacy. It did help reduce the pollution and make water cleaner, but there are still lots of pollution which this advocacy cannot resolve. For me, a better structure may provide the acts of CWA before analyzing them since readers can think about the analysis along with the advocacy. I may prefer more references and examples to support the claim. The carbon credit part seems to be separate from others, so there may be a better connection. Although the essay did not end, the overall quality is pretty good, and the analysis is holistic.
Works Cited
Andreen, William L., and Shana Campbell Jones. “The Clean Water Act: A Blueprint for Reform.” SSRN Electronic Journal, https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1236162.
WHITEHEAD, P. G., et al. “A Review of the Potential Impacts of Climate Change on Surface Water Quality.” Hydrological Sciences Journal, vol. 54, no. 1, Taylor & Francis Group, 2009, pp. 101–23, https://doi.org/10.1623/hysj.54.1.101.
Delpla, I., et al. “Impacts of Climate Change on Surface Water Quality in Relation to Drinking Water Production.” Environment International, vol. 35, no. 8, Elsevier Ltd, 2009, pp. 1225–33, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envint.2009.07.001.
Senhorst, H. A. J., and J. J. G. Zwolsman. “Climate Change and Effects on Water Quality: a First Impression.” Water Science and Technology, vol. 51, no. 5, 2005, pp. 53–59, https://doi.org/10.2166/wst.2005.0107.
Komatsu, Eiji, et al. “A Modeling Approach to Forecast the Effect of Long-Term Climate Change on Lake Water Quality.” Ecological Modelling, vol. 209, no. 2, Elsevier B.V, 2007, pp. 351–66, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2007.07.021.