Editorials from around Ohio

Recent editorials of statewide and national interest from Ohio newspapers:

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The Plain Dealer, April 21

The Columbus Dispatch recently reported, citing a study by two environmental groups, that at least half the manure in the Maumee River’s watershed comes from often sizable livestock farms that aren’t big enough to be required to obtain state permits. The Maumee is the largest watershed in the Great Lakes basin, and it sluices phosphorus-laden manure from these poorly regulated livestock farms directly into Lake Erie. There, the phosphorus feeds toxic algal blooms that threaten drinking water for millions.

Most of the Maumee watershed is in Ohio — where only 14 percent of livestock operations have state permits, The Dispatch reported. Without an Ohio permit, there are no routine state inspections.

The study by the Environmental Working Group and Environmental Law & Policy Center used satellite and aerial photos and state permit figures to track unregulated livestock farms.

Among other findings was a 40 percent jump overall over the last 13 years in the number of hog, cattle and chicken farms in the Maumee watershed, which also reaches into Indiana and Michigan.

Ohio’s shamefully lax regulation of factory farms is something the state can and must change if it’s serious about preserving Lake Erie.

The Dispatch reported, for instance, that Ohio requires permits for farms with 700 or more mature dairy cows - but not for a farm with 699 cows.

But 699 dairy cows are capable of producing more than 52 tons of manure every day (based on a New York Times report from 2009 that a single, lactating Holstein cow on average produces 150 pounds of waste daily).

The phosphorus from manure that gets into the Maumee River and thence into Lake Erie promotes the growth of algae, which in turn can produce a toxin that poisons drinking water supplies. In 2014, an algal bloom in western Lake Erie contaminated public drinking water for hundreds of thousands in the Toledo area. That threat remains.

A solution is possible. Some of the $900 million that Gov. Mike DeWine, very much to his credit, wants to earmark for freshwater protection for Lake Erie and Ohio’s other freshwater sources should be used to bulk up Ohio regulation of farm runoff. It could also be used to provide aid to smaller farmers who want to limit — or better yet, prevent — runoff.

Many of Ohio’s farmers are dedicated stewards of land and water. Factory farms don’t necessarily share those values. That’s why - absent tougher state policing - Ohio faces a critical challenge in keeping Lake Erie from becoming a farm-waste cesspool.

Last summer, due to agribusiness griping, legislative Republicans stymied a bid by then-Gov. John Kasich, a fellow Republican, to clean up parts of the Maumee basin. That must not happen again: The public interest in protecting Lake Erie must outweigh the demands of a special interest seemingly more inclined to exploit rather than conserve a resource that belongs to every Ohioan.

Online: https://bit.ly/2KWmmU1

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The Akron Beacon Journal, April 19

What happened, exactly? That has been the question needing an answer at least since American intelligence agencies reported the Russian intervention in the 2016 presidential election, first seeking to sow discord and aggravate divisions, then favoring Donald Trump in an effort to defeat Hillary Clinton. Typically, the task of pulling together a narrative would fall to an independent commission. The hyper-partisanship of today doesn’t permit such an option, a measure of the degraded state of the country’s political life.

What arrived Thursday is the closest thing to a complete narrative. William Barr, the attorney general, released the 448-page report of Robert Mueller, the special counsel tapped to investigate the Russia matter and any links to the Trump campaign. Mueller and his team conducted their investigation by the book and deserve appreciation. If Barr has faltered in his judgment, appearing too much the president’s advocate, losing sight of the independence of the special counsel, the attorney general deserves credit for keeping his word in releasing a lightly redacted report.

The narrative is clear, richly detailed and easily read. The hope is that Americans will take the opportunity and go through the report.

What will they find? The earlier indictment of Russian operatives revealed much about their hacking and scheming to disrupt the presidential election. The special counsel report fleshes out what it describes as a “sweeping and systematic” campaign. The origin actually goes back to 2014, raising questions about why the effort wasn’t detected earlier by the intelligence community during the Obama years.

As it is, the special counsel did not uncover sufficient evidence to establish that the Trump campaign and Russian operatives engaged in a criminal conspiracy or coordination. What Mueller did find are “numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign.” The report concludes the “Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts.”

The report conveys the scope of the Russian penetration into the Trump circle, from working with Michael Flynn on sanctions relief to Paul Manafort sharing polling data and information about key swing states such as Michigan and Wisconsin. If the many contacts do not amount to conspiracy, this was a relationship of shared interests.

Imagine the outrage if the Clinton campaign engaged in something similar. Yet the past two years or more, the fury about the Russian intervention has been muted, many of the president’s Republican allies apparently keen on looking the other way. So the country hasn’t prepared adequately for the next time. Will the special counsel report provide the necessary impetus? That would be the right response.

Part of the failure to respond sufficiently goes to the other part of the Mueller report, the look at potential obstruction of justice on the part of the president. Candidate Trump not only failed to alert the FBI about the Russian intervention. As president, he has attempted to thwart the investigation at almost every turn. The special counsel chose not to make a judgment on obstruction. What he did was expose the president’s character, from the cascade of lies to making clear Trump would have been in deep trouble if not for aides defying his orders.

The Mueller report hardly ends the discussion. There are trials, and hearings, and other investigations still open. What the report does is advance our understanding. The country is better informed about what happened.

Online: https://bit.ly/2ZsKP6w

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The Columbus Dispatch, April 21

Backers of a bill that would bail out Ohio’s two nuclear power plants claim it is the comprehensive energy policy our state needs to move toward a lower-carbon future. If that were true, the nuclear bailout could be a palatable element of it.

As it is, House Bill 6 would wipe out Ohio’s primary means for boosting development of renewable energy and actually would open the door to subsidies for fossil-fueled plants. Supporters claim it provides an improved incentive system for clean energy development, but many questions remain on how that would work.

Without significant improvements, it will amount to a giant step backward for Ohio’s economy.

Sponsors acknowledge that the bill is complicated and say they expect it to be amended. It’ll have to be in order to win over many bailout skeptics and live up to its supporters’ claims.

The bill’s origins invite skepticism.

Like many of the nation’s aging nuclear plants, the Davis-Besse plant near Cleveland and the Perry plant near Toledo, both owned by Akron-based FirstEnergy Solutions, have been seeking state financial support for years. Ohio’s lawmakers had little interest two years ago, when a bailout bill died in the Republican-controlled House without a committee vote.

The return of Glenford Republican Larry Householder as House Speaker has changed all that. After winning election in 2016 to the seat he left more than a decade earlier, he began a campaign to recapture the speakership by supporting candidates loyal to him for seats in 2018. Many of those candidates won after defeating candidates loyal to then-speaker Ryan Smith in the May Republican primary.

FirstEnergy contributed more than $230,000 to Householder and to his supporters’ primary campaigns. One of those, now Rep. Jamie Callender, is a sponsor of HB 6.

The bill purports to be an impartial boost to cleaner energy because it would reward utilities of any sort for zero-emissions energy. A surcharge on electric bills - ranging from no more than $2.50 per month for residential customers to $2,500 for major industrial users - would create and fund something called the Ohio Clean Air Program. The program would pay utilities $9.25 for every megawatt hour of energy produced with zero carbon emissions.

While wind and solar energy are growing in Ohio, the two nuclear plants still account for the vast majority of zero carbon power in the state, so estimates are that they would claim about half of the $300 million the monthly fees would generate. That’s the bailout opponents object to.

FirstEnergy Solutions has said that without the cash infusion both plants will close by 2021. There are arguments in favor of tapping ratepayers to extend the plants’ life. Aside from the jobs and tax base they provide in their communities, there is some value in maintaining such a significant source of zero carbon energy.

Keeping the plants also could help preserve nuclear power as an option for Ohio’s future if the technology becomes cheaper and the problem of nuclear waste storage ever is resolved.

But FirstEnergy’s champions in the General Assembly shouldn’t be asking all Ohio ratepayers to swallow the bailout without a much stronger commitment to truly supporting the renewable energy development that could bring jobs and investment statewide.

HB 6 backers say the Clean Air Program and its zero-emission credits are open to wind and solar producers, but the bill eliminates funding to achieve Ohio’s Renewable Portfolio Standards - a requirement that, by 2027, utilities in the state must produce at least 12.5 percent of their power from renewable sources. Backers say the standards haven’t worked well enough, but the claim is hardly credible given Republicans’ steady efforts to undermine them. From the time they were approved in 2008, think tanks supported by fossil fuel interests published studies claiming the mandate for renewables would kill Ohio jobs and shrink the economy. Those claims generally were rebutted by reports showing that renewables helped lower customers’ electric bills and generated tens of thousands of jobs.

A 2014 bill froze the mandates at their then-current level and created a study committee that eventually recommended doing away with them entirely. To his credit, former Gov. John Kasich vetoed two bills that would have done that, and the standards remain in place for now.

But investment in renewables in Ohio surely has been hurt by the uncertainty created by lawmakers’ hostility to the mandates. As bad or worse, in 2014 opponents of wind power passed a law that essentially shut down new wind development by greatly increasing the required distance between wind turbines and adjacent property lines.

Yet even against those headwinds, clean energy companies and construction projects added nearly 5,000 Ohio jobs in 2018, bringing the total to more than 112,000 - the third-highest in the Midwest and eighth in the U.S., according to a recent report by E2 and Clean Energy Trust, two nonprofit groups supporting clean energy entrepreneurs.

Imagine what Ohio could accomplish by actually supporting renewables.

HB 6 in its current form doesn’t do that. It mostly supports the status quo with the nuclear bailout and provisions that would allow natural gas and even coal plants to claim “clean power” funding if they reduce their emissions somewhat - the bill doesn’t define by how much.

Householder has put the bill on a fast track, as FirstEnergy Solutions has said it needs to know by midyear whether to produce nuclear fuel to operate beyond the plants’ scheduled closing dates.

But the bailout request presents an opportunity to leverage support for a clean energy future, and lawmakers shouldn’t be rushed into a law that would saddle Ohioans with the expenses of the past without providing a clean path to the future.

Online: https://bit.ly/2ZpzYdk

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The Toledo Blade, April 22

The outrage, from certain quarters, directed at Attorney General William Barr following his Thursday press conference is as clear a case of “killing the messenger” as we’re likely to see for some time. While his message won’t please those eager to usher Donald Trump out of the Oval Office, the messenger’s conduct was admirable.

The occasion was the release of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report of his investigation into whether members of the Trump campaign conspired with Russians to interfere in the 2016 election, and whether President Trump obstructed this investigation. Mr. Barr’s presentation was concise, clear, and matter-of-fact.

Since his job as attorney general is to decide how or whether to act upon the findings of special counsel, Mr. Barr explained how he and his colleagues evaluated the report and applicable law to reach their decisions.

He went so far as to say that his team disagreed with some of Mr. Mueller’s legal theories but accepted them anyway as the basis for their analysis.

Mr. Barr explained the report’s redactions and why these were legally necessary, adding that the White House could have requested redactions but declined.

And then he took questions from the media. Some of these were genuine requests for information and clarification, but others rested on unsupported assertions and might be better labeled “bait.”

In particular, much has been made of Mr. Barr’s one-word response to the last question he took: “Do you think it creates an appearance of impropriety for you to come out and sort of, what appears to be spinning the report, before the public gets a chance to read it?”

To which Mr. Barr replied, “No.”

The question is, of course, a double-barreled weapon: It asserts Mr. Barr was spinning his work-product rather than explaining his process and, based on this assertion, accuses him of unethical behavior.

The question was not an honest attempt to seek information or clarity. It was a character smear. It was itself spin.

The two years of the Mueller investigation - covered endlessly and shrilly, with outrageous claims and ever-wilder prognostications from the nation’s talking heads - have exhausted the American public. The constant chaos has further depleted our collective supply of goodwill.

Mr. Barr’s effort to provide transparency to his role in this toxic drama may have been quixotic, but he deserves praise for trying - and for refusing to feed the fire.

Online: https://bit.ly/2DtLBqi