In the first of the back-to-back storms that rocked Maine’s coast early this year, employees of the Wiscasset wastewater treatment plant watched as the high tide lapped at the edges of its tanks, which sit on a small island in the Sheepscot River.
Fearing the next storm’s even higher tides would flood the facility and compromise its essential microorganisms, the town’s public works department built a berm around the wastewater treatment facility in a day.
Though the plant avoided flooding in that case, the January storms were a wake-up call for the town, according to wastewater treatment plant superintendent Robert Lalli. More than 30 years after it was built, the facility has to move.
“The super tides, I think, emphasized in the citizens’ minds, ‘Hey, you guys really are on an island down there, and you really do have to move,’” Lalli said.
Rising tides and aging wastewater treatment facilities are not unique to Wiscasset. In fact, several facilities on Maine’s coast are facing a similar choice: move, upgrade or flood.
Wastewater treatment plants around the state are vulnerable, including at least six that will be at risk of permanent flooding due to sea level rise by 2050, according to Maine’s 2020 climate action plan.
One of these facilities, in Saco, broke ground on its new wastewater treatment plant this summer, which will be elevated to escape sea level rise. Portland is installing four underground tanks that will keep its facility from backing up and sending untreated wastewater into the ocean. Bangor has made major improvements to its system over the last few years.
And the city of Bath is accounting for rising seas as it upgrades its pump stations and other infrastructure, said wastewater superintendent Bryan Levitt.
It’s not cheap. Maine’s climate action plan estimated the cost of replacing low-lying facilities could reach up to $93 million. Lalli estimated that moving Wiscasset’s wastewater treatment plant to another potential location in town — the current public works site — and related work such as demolishing the old plant could top $50 million. Wiscasset residents will vote in November on whether to use the new site.
Residents of Bath approved a $25 million bond last year to upgrade their own aging system, with work that will include separating the stormwater and sewer systems and upgrading the pump stations, some of which were also at risk of flooding during the January storms, Levitt said.
Municipalities continue to request state funding for wastewater facilities through the Clean Water State Revolving Fund, which was created as a part of the federal Clean Water Act. But as requests climb, the aid provided through the fund has decreased in recent years.
In 2021, 51 applicants requested a total of $235 million, and the state awarded $113 million. But this year, the state was only able to award $67 million, despite getting 66 applications requesting a total of $392 million.
A Maine Department of Environmental Protection official who oversees that fund did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Wiscasset has put a hold on seeking funding for its project until voters approve the new site, Lalli said. If they vote it down, the town will have to search for a new location.
“A lot of things are in flux,” he said.
For now, though, the berm constructed in January stays in the case of another storm.
Levitt said Bath has portable generators to keep its facilities and pump stations running during storms and is considering investigating whether sea level rise could back up its piping system.
“You throw climate change on top of this, and that alone is this huge problem that, you know, it’s difficult to find a solution for,” Levitt said.
The cost of elevating sewer plants and other elements of Maine’s and the country’s infrastructure is nothing compared to what we’re spending on windmills, solar farms, new electrical grids, etc., etc. Billions vs trillions, and those trillions are all being needlessly wasted.
Here’s Lomborg, from Earth Day 2021:
This Earth Day let's replace alarmism with smarter policy
Today, almost every catastrophe is blamed on global warming, and we are being told that we must radically change the entire world until 2030 to avoid the apocalypse. Such irresponsible exaggerations are destroying our ability to make sensible decisions for the future. The evidence actually shows that climate-related disasters are killing far fewer people than ever before. Over the past century, the number of dead from floods, droughts, storms, wildfire and extreme temperatures has dropped by an incredible 98 per cent.
Climate change is real and human-caused, and it is a problem we should tackle smartly. But rabid hyperbole scares us witless and in our panic we make expensive but poor policy choices, leaving the world much worse off.
The Paris Agreement has been marketed as the solution to climate, yet, by the United Nation’s own reckoning, it will accomplish almost nothing. In a best-case scenario, it will achieve just one per cent of what political leaders have promised. And no major nation is on-track to actually deliver on its promises.
The Paris agreement is phenomenally expensive, costing US$1-2 trillion every year by 2030. But even if all nations actually kept their promises, including Barack Obama’s for the U.S., and also stuck to them through the rest of the century, the impact would be an almost immeasurable 0.19°C reduction in temperatures by the end of the century. The cost would vastly outweigh the benefit: each dollar spent would avoid just 11 cents worth of global climate damage.
But there is another cost to excessively focusing on climate in a world that is full of problems. COVID-19 showed us how worrying mostly about climate leaves us poorly prepared for all the other global challenges. The World Health Organization itself fell prey, which is perhaps one of the reasons it seemed to be blindsided by coronavirus.
When U.S. National Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy warns us that climate is the “most significant public health challenge of our time” she effectively ignores much bigger health problems. A third of all U.S. deaths are caused by cardiovascular disease and more than a quarter by cancer. In comparison, just a third of one per cent are caused by heat deaths — compared to the almost seven per cent who die from cold each year. Extreme weather kills just 0.015 per cent.
The world’s poor battle with much greater challenges: starvation, poverty, dying from easily curable diseases and lack of education. And these challenges have solutions where each dollar spent can help much more. Spending just a thousandth of the cost of the Paris agreement could save more than a million people from dying of tuberculosis. Each dollar would do more than a thousand times more good than when spent poorly on climate.
Similarly, we could do phenomenally much better at much lower cost helping children out of malnutrition or improving learning in schools. We could address most of the world’s top issues with just a fraction of what we’re spending on climate.
Earth Day reaffirms that we should care about the planet and its inhabitants and reminds us that we should tackle climate. But we need to do so smarter and more effectively. We shouldn’t continue, and we certainly shouldn’t ramp up, our massive subsidies to inefficient electric cars and solar and wind power. Instead, we need to spend much more on green innovation. If we can innovate the price of future green energy down to below the cost of fossil fuels, then not just rich Canadians, but everyone — in China, India and Africa — will switch to green energy.
Let’s re-focus Earth Day away from exaggerated climate alarmism toward straightforward effective solutions.
