Pollution from industrial facilities like this one at East Harbor in Indiana up to the 1970s left a legacy of contamination still in need of cleanup from new Great Lakes restoration funding.

Giving President Obama a major victory, Congress on Thursday sent him a spending bill containing $475 million in new funding to help restore the Great Lakes. During his 2008 campaign, candidate Obama committed to a multi-year effort to combat Great Lakes invasive species, habitat loss, climate change impacts and threats to water quality. The Great Lakes contain almost one-fifth of the world’s available surface freshwater.

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Legal skirmishes in Ohio and Michigan are reviving debates over whether those who own Great Lakes shoreline properties exclusively control their waterfront land or whether the public can access and travel along the coast.  The same legal doctrine at issue in these battles is a central focus in current debates about n a time of potential c ommercialization of Great Lakes water.

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Lyngbya wollei, south shore Maumee Bay in Ohio, September 23, 2009.

Lake Erie, declared dead by the news media in the 1960s because of widespread, repulsive algae blooms, is once again marred, this time by both old and new causes. Some scientists and lake advocates worry that the unsightly algae is a warning of a lake once again in decline.

Tom Bridgeman, a lake scientist with the University of Toledo’s Lake Erie Center, said, “I’ve never seen the water as green as it was this year — and it’s not showing any signs of dying off yet. This is a growing problem.” Increased phosphorus runoff from farms and city streets, coupled with the feeding and excretion habits of non-native mussels introduced through ballast water, is believed to be associated with the resurgent blooms.

The western end of the lake has suffered from a surge in microsystis algae this summer. Bridgeman hypothesizes that in addition to phosphorus, underwater sediment shifts are culpable.

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In a century of rising fresh water scarcity, a community of activists in the Great Lakes region is working to prevent private ownership of that water resource, although most mainstream conservation and environmental activists are focused elsewhere. If the activists’ concerns are valid, their battle has national as well as international implications.

The fear stems from the interaction of the North American Free Trade Agreement, other trade pacts, and the Great Lakes Compact ratified by the eight Great Lakes states and Congress last year. The definition of “product” in the Compact includes water once extracted from its natural state and location. A controversial Nestle Waters North America, Inc. bottled water operation in Michigan that is pumping hundreds of millions of gallons per year of state water heightens the concern.

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The North American Great Lakes contain 6 quadrillion gallons of freshwater, about one-fifth of the world’s available freshwater supply.

For more than 25 years, residents of the Great Lakes region have feared large-scale public works projects to take freshwater from the Lakes to thirsty, faster-growing areas of North America. That’s why the eight Great Lakes states and Congress last year approved a compact barring most water diversions of the Lakes, which contain 80% of the continent’s fresh water. But ideas about turning the Lakes into a cash cow, floating around for years, are not dead yet. At the same time, relatively little attention has been paid to the idea of “sharing” the water of the Lakes to alleviate a global humanitarian emergency in an era of freshwater scarcity.

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While public opinion remains divided about the risks and benefits of installing wind farms in the Great Lakes, several of the eight states with Great Lakes water are racing to be first to approve projects capturing energy from frequently strong offshore winds. It remains to be seen whether a public generally supportive of developing wind energy will support turbines in the Lakes for the first time. Opposition to the proposed Cape Wind project in Nantucket Sound because of aesthetic impacts has slowed that saltwater proposal.

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View of Blüemlisalp and Oeschinen lake, Bernese Alps

As climate scientists scour the Earth’s surface looking for indications of climate change impacts, freshwater lakes and reservoirs are becoming the sentinels of choice for many investigations. Although they make up a small percentage of the planet’s surface area, such bodies of water–small to large–are providing clues to past climate fluctuations, as their sediments and “catchments” (the total chemical and biological material that results from the presence of the body of water) often record ancient climate shifts and impacts and offer indicators of current climate change.

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In the Obama Administration’s proposed 2010 budget, it’s $475 million in new money in the first year for Great Lakes restoration. The five lakes hold about 6 quadrillion gallons of water and provide drinking water for 40 million North Americans but are afflicted with aquatic invasive species, habitat destruction, lingering and new chemicals, and animal and human waste.

Long sought by the region’s advocates, the money would be divided up in more than 100 separate initiatives among federal agencies. The U.S. EPA is on the road with public meetings taking comments on the plan.  A meeting in Milwaukee Tuesday night was the first; the final meeting takes place August 4 in Duluth. Citizens can also comment on line.

The Great Lakes restoration campaign was born after Congress approved billions in 2000 to restore the Florida Everglades.  The feds have also directed considerable funding at Chesapeake Bay cleanup, with at best mixed results after a quarter century.

There’s a bit of money, too, totaling about $100,000 from the federal stimulus package, aka the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

The Great Lakes Commission has been granted $99,740 to develop a set of “Best Practices to Accelerate Wind Power in the Great Lakes and Beyond.”

The end result will be a guide to what works and what doesn’t when it comes to protecting the environment, being sensitive to community concerns and … building wind turbines in the water.

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Are we destined to see offshore wind farms cropping up all over the Great Lakes?

Presenters at the Michigan Wind Conference, which closed Wednesday in Detroit, think so. The bountiful prevailing winds and relatively shallow depths make the lakes excellent locations for farms, speakers told the more than 1,000 people attended the event, according to WWJ radio.

“Offshore wind is the next wave — lots of puns, folks, I warn you,” said Peter Mandelstam, founder and president of Bluewater Wind, LLC, of Delaware. “The Northeast and the Great Lakes are natural markets.”

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Then pick the stingiest windows you can find and instruct your architect to use them sparingly. Avoid any use of windows on the Southern elevation. One, at the most.

That will keep the sun out.

Sunshine warms homes for free. That’s socialism. Real men use fossil fuel for the daunting task of warming up a frigid family. There’s no free lunch. Tough sh*t.

And when the fossil fuels run out? It will never happen. Real men will dig more up from under somebody.

In a 390-25 vote, the House approved a measure on Tuesday that will increase protection of the Great Lakes region. It will prohibit any new diversions of the water to other places, and require states that border the lakes to adhere to new conservation standards.

Together, the five Great Lakes account for 20 percent of the world’s supply of fresh surface water.

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The fund would pay for efforts to prevent and control invasive species entering the lakes, clean up polluted sediments and help pay for sewer system repairs throughout the area. The program would also create a Great Lakes coordinator position in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Funding for Obama’s Great Lakes plan would come from reversing some existing tax cuts and incentives for oil companies.

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In the Great Lakes region that includes the upper Midwest and parts of southern Canada, we have the largest fresh water system on earth.  Did you want to start siphoning off our water and selling it to China?  Not so fast…

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The Christman Construction offices in Lansing MI occupy roughly half of the 64,000 square foot building which was initially built in 1928. The project cost $12 million, and also benefited from brownfield credits as well as state and federal historic preservation tax credits.

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The Great Lakes Water Resources Compact aims to protect the water rights of the eight states bordering the lakes: Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Michigan’s approval of the agreement brings the number of states signed on so far to five: Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota and New York.

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Spurred by shrinking freshwater supplies, U.S. states could begin “water wars” in the next years to claim rights to Great Lakes water, warned American and Canadian scientists at a water conference in Toronto last week.

Nations around the world, such as India and Australia, are already experiencing drought and its effects on access to clean water and increases in food prices–and states in the American South and West are bracing themselves for a time in the near future when water resources will be more scarce.

Scientist Milton Clark, a senior health and science adviser for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, was quoted as saying at the conference, “We will in fact get into major water wars. You will see water wars coming in every way, shape or form.”

To prevent states from fighting over–or selling–water, the Great Lakes Compact was created in 2001 among the eight Great Lakes states, Ontario and Quebec.

Ontario and Quebec have signed the agreement, which bans long-distance water diversions to states not bordering the Great Lakes. Minnesota, New York, Indiana and Illinois have also signed the agreement, and Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio and Pennsylvania have not.

As one of the world’s largest reservoirs of drinking water, the five Great Lakes contain 18 percent of all fresh surface water on the planet. Conservationists continue to lobby to protect the lakes’ waters from mismanagement and environmental degradation.

Photo: NASA

When the Internet extended its wiry tentacles to the small town that I grew up in, I had no idea what it was. I pictured it being a room full of wires and lights, like a super computer android version of a phone operator.

As I matured, I realized it wasn’t that at all, but a more mystic existence of floating pockets of digital information in constant flux, existing in digital clouds that were suspended just above the atmosphere.

Of course, neither of those images is or was correct. But as it turns out, I was closer to the target with my first guess. Massive server rooms take up space and energy all over the world, storing the information and websites we web junkies feed on for survival. Luckily, they are starting to go green.

Digital Realty Trust, Inc., a technology real estate company, has taken a bold step into the green world by renovating a 90-year-old printing facility in Chicago. They have turned the plant into the world’s first LEED gold-certified data center. Not only is this a paradigm shift for future data centers—it may change the way LEED building companies approach renovations.

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