Oregon Water Pollution Trading

Water pollution trading—sometimes called water quality credit trading—is the concept that a pollution discharger with a permit can clean up someone else’s pollution instead of its own in order to meet its Clean Water Act permit limits. Oregon has embraced this dubious proposition, as a part of its ongoing efforts to issue water pollution permits that don’t require pollution control expenditures by dischargers. Water pollution trading schemes do require spending but the costs are inevitably lower than reducing pollutants in a source’s discharge.

NWEA believes that water pollution trading is not always a bad idea. In particular, it can—but does not always—require a significant amount of electricity to cool the temperature in a discharge, with the environmental costs of making that electricity not worth the minimal benefit to water quality. So temperature is a particularly important pollutant to consider for trading. However, the most fundamental aspect of a trading program is that it not be a way to allow polluters to cheat in meeting the Clean Water Act. Because the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) does not care about this most fundamental of issues, it has authorized a few trading schemes that do not protect against it. And, DEQ issued rules to use for trading that likewise provide no protection. For its part, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has no federal rules, only guidance documents, and it has been happy to look the other way when states like Oregon use water pollution trading to undercut the Clean Water Act.