THE ST. LAWRENCE SEWER? The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel launches a three-part report on the state of the St. Lawrence Seaway.

Now, nearly 50 years after the manmade shipping link between the Great Lakes and Atlantic Ocean opened for business, it turns out Seaway boosters were right: Foreign cargo did flood the lakes, but it wasn't what we had hoped for. And the Seaway did change our lives, but not necessarily for the better.

Alas, no spices from the Indies or exotic Teutonic brews in the holds.

Fouled beaches, beleaguered fish populations and ominous wildlife die-offs - all linked to the Seaway and to biologically contaminated ballast spills from overseas freighters - are often written off as a grim but necessary cost of the Great Lakes doing global business.

But with each passing year, that global business is looking more and more like a bust.

Most bulk and container freighters can't even fit into the Seaway, which was undersized from the day it opened. The result is that Great Lakes overseas traffic is limited to a small fleet of pre-World War II-sized ships that typically bring in slabs of foreign steel to feed the region's dwindling manufacturers, and depart with shrinking loads of Midwest grain.

And with the railroads able to price grain shipments by the trainload, and thin-slab casters able to recycle scrap into decent sheet, neither the importers' nor the exporters' price advantage is what it used to be.

One estimate of the total annual economic benefit associated with floating that material in and out of the Great Lakes basin on overseas ships instead of bringing it into the region by some other means, such as trucks or trains or Mississippi River barges, is less than $55 million.

Not much benefit given the possible recreational losses.

Yet the total cost of the two-decade-old zebra mussel invasion just to utilities and municipal drinking systems - which must keep water intake pipes clear of the clustering mollusks - has been estimated at $1.5 billion. That figure likely tops $2 billion when similar expenses to other industries are factored in. Then there are the costs that don't appear in a ledger - the immeasurable price tag of a shredded Lake Michigan food chain, or a family's ability to enjoy a day at the beach.

And the traffic benefits of the Great Lakes are overwhelmingly movements of bulk-cargo through the Upper Lakes in boats so large that they're landlocked. (Leave aside for the moment the possible valuation of recreational opportunities. We can do such things with the proper tools.)

U.S. Seaway boss Albert Jacquez says Great Lakes and Seaway shipping generates $3.4 billion in business revenue annually on just this side of the border. Ships plying these waters move 222 million tons of cargo per year, according to a 2002 Army Corps of Engineers study.

But here is a critical point that gets lost in the Seaway's annual reports and press releases: The overseas portion of that traffic is a skimpy 15.4 million tons - 6.9% of the total cargo moved. And that overseas trade - mostly inbound steel and outbound grain - registers barely a blip on the U.S. import-export charts.

Last year, for example, Seaway grain exports accounted for about 3.6% of the nation's overseas grain shipments, according to the U.S. Grains Council. In a typical year, Seaway steel imports account for around 6% of the U.S. annual total.

Regular readers are aware of these points. Is it time to pull the plug on the St. Lawrence Seaway?

CLOSE THE WELLAND CANAL. Exotic predators enter the Great Lakes as stowaways in the ballast tanks of ships, as well as by swimming up the Chicago River.

"We haven't done anything," says Gary Fahnenstiel, a senior ecologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "It's all been rhetoric by politicians. I'll be among the first scientists to say: Let's close the Welland Canal. Let's start there. This is ridiculous."

That will limit the access of overseas hitchhikers in ballast tanks. There is still the little problem of Asian big-headed carp making their way north in the Illinois River and the Sanitary and Ship Canal.

If bighead carp make their way into the lakes, says Dennis Schornack, President Bush's handpicked person for U.S.-Canadian Great Lakes issues, "then it is just a matter of time before we end up with a carp pond."

Suppose the U.S. and Canadian governments did in fact close the Seaway and the Welland Canal. What would the economic consequences be?

Perhaps not much, according to this study conducted for the St. Lawrence Seaway Development Corporation. The study notes some 152,000 jobs dependent on cargo movements on what the report calls the "U.S. Great Lakes St. Lawrence Seaway System" as of 2000.

Note the conjuring trick being employed. Absent the Welland Canal, three of the five Lakes would function as a connected ecosystem as well as a contiguous transportation route, and the St. Mary's River from Lake Superior to Lake Huron allows for some movement of fish. The Sault Ste. Marie ("Soo") Locks permit the movement of boats between Lake Superior and the other three Lakes. These locks are much larger than those on the Welland Canal and the Seaway. There are lakers that have been built and remain confined on the Lakes for their entire service lives, transporting iron ore, coal, and sand and gravel aggregates, which are three of the top four cargoes transported on the Lakes. (Iron and steel products, which for the most part move within the contiguous Lakes, are in second place.) Note what is missing: grain (which in principle could be moved from elevators at Duluth-Superior, Milwaukee, and Chicago overseas), paper (Minnesota and Wisconsin ports), timber, and livestock. Those export cargoes can be sent by rail or truck to an Atlantic port.

Questions:

What is the value of the St. Lawrence Seaway?

Is the St. Lawrence Seaway corporate welfare?

Do the economic benefits it confers, if any, warrant the introduction of invasive species?

This site at the University of Michigan identifies some of the invasive species. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel provides an instructive primer on how those hitchhikers get here.

IN THE ABSENCE OF PREDATORS.

The St. Lawrence Seaway has not been the passageway for commerce that its promoters anticipated, although it has been a conduit for invasive species, most recently zebra and quagga mussels.  Here's more cheerful news from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

But the consequences of opening a nautical freeway into the Great Lakes for globe-roaming freighters proved disastrous — at least 56 non-native organisms have since been discovered in the lakes, and the majority arrived as stowaways in freighter ballast tanks.

Insofar as the volume of water-borne commerce is so slight, there's a very simple way to protect the upper Great Lakes from any more invasive species.

Building a barrier to protect the upper Great Lakes from Seaway invaders would actually be simpler than restoring the natural watershed divide at Chicago. In fact, such a barrier already exists.

It's called Niagara Falls.

Meanwhile, the international ships have brought in a predator for the mussels: the round goby.  The Erie Island water snakes have an appetite for gobies.  Whether they can be introduced elsewhere in the Lakes remains to be seen.

Perhaps when the infrastructure known as the St. Lawrence Seaway crumbles, the best policy response is ... let it.

CLOSE THE SEWER. A Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel article notes the growing popularity of ending one of the Eisenhower Administration's more foolish boondoggles.

[Conservationists in Great Lakes United argue] that the idea of slamming shut the Seaway to oceangoing "salties" has become an environmental and economic no-brainer, like padlocking a struggling little factory that is ruining life for everyone in town because it won't fix its oversize smokestack.

There's cost-benefit analysis involved.

Evidence suggests that the costs of the biological pollution gushing from the [transatlantic]ship-steadying ballast tanks far outweigh the benefits of maintaining the world's largest freshwater system as a nautical highway for saltwater traffic.

A draft study from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, meanwhile, indicates that recreational boats dwarf overseas freighters in terms of economic importance to the region, yet the recreation industry is entirely dependent on the very waters the salties continue to irreversibly pollute.

The infrastructure, which opened to great fanfare half a century ago, is due for renewal or retirement.

The original system of locks and channels, which are crumbling in places, cost $3 billion in today's dollars. Then there are the costs of dredging and maintaining channels and harbors in ports across the Great Lakes.

All to move a volume of export traffic in bulk cargoes such as grain or scrap metal that the railroads could easily transport to the existing saltwater ports. Let me refresh readers' memories: most of the traffic handled in the Great Lakes - St. Lawrence Seaway system is intra-Lake traffic for which ballast pumping simply transports marine life already in the Lakes to someplace else in the same Lakes.

The commercial fishery is at risk.

Nobody is precisely sure why so many fish have disappeared so quickly, but likely factors are high numbers of the planted predatory salmon, along with spiraling numbers of invasive species.

Invasive round gobies, a bug-eyed, prehistoric-looking fish known for gobbling eggs of native lake species, have been ballooning in number since they were discovered in the lake in 1993. But the pace of their expansion appears to be accelerating - the number of fish found in the survey jumped 16-fold from 2005 to 2006.

On balance, the gainers (sport fishermen, commercial fishermen, operators of waterworks, and railroads) appear to be well able to compensate a few overseas shippers for losses they might incur by closing the St. Lawrence Seaway.

YOUR TAX DOLLARS, BEAVERING AWAY. Years ago, I heard a professor of political science characterize the Army Corps of Engineers as a beaver bent on damming any stream capable of floating more than a canoe. That's a bit harsh, but the third report on the St. Lawrence Seaway catches a nugget of truth.

The balding, bespectacled and soft-spoken economist [Don Sweeney with the Corps] stumbled into big trouble with his bosses several years ago while working on a study of a proposed $1 billion Mississippi River lock expansion. When he told the Corps of Engineers brass that the costs of the navigation project outweighed the benefits, they ordered him to fudge the numbers so the bulldozers could roll.

Sweeney declined to play the good soldier. He was removed from the project and suspended for insubordination. But he blew a whistle that echoed into the nation's capital, where he ultimately was hailed as a hero who had finally flashed a bit of light on the inner workings of one of America's more controversial institutions.

That dodge of lowering the discount rate to reflect social priorities and including as many benefits as practicable just doesn't go away, does it?

"Corps officials and employees exerted improper influence over the economic study at issue and manipulated the cost-benefit analysis in order to justify the expensive extension of locks," Elaine Kaplan, boss of the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, said in December 2000, after an investigation by the Army inspector general.

Furthermore, the investigation spawned by Sweeney's complaint revealed that the corps appeared to carry an "institutional bias for large-scale construction projects."

But why let mere economics get in the way of some creative beavering? The Seaway appears to have all kinds of potential for same. But on to the economics.

The U.S. Merchant Marine Academy's Jon S. Helmick, in a presentation to Congress several years ago, illustrated just how time-sensitive deliveries involving ships, trains and trucks have become.

He pointed specifically to Toyota Motor Co.'s system of delivering engines from Japan to a Kentucky assembly line.

"Upon arrival in a Southern California port, the containers are discharged from the ship and then loaded aboard an eastbound double-stack train for overland transport to Chicago. At the terminus of the rail move, the containers are pulled from the train and placed on a truck chassis for the final leg of the journey," he said. "The astonishing reality is that after 17 days in transit,
the engines arrive at the plant in Georgetown within pre-scheduled 15-minute delivery windows, at which time they are stripped from their containers and moved directly to the assembly line for installation."

This, of course, could not happen on a Seaway that is plagued by unpredictable weather and closed by ice each winter. And while it may be technically feasible to keep shipping lanes ice-free, the cost and environmental disruption in terms of flooding and erosion have to date made it a political impossibility.

Congress agreed that the potential expansion costs outweighed the benefits pitched in the 2002
reconnaissance report, and told the Corps of Engineers to drop its expansion studies.

And, contrary to what Richard Corfe, who heads the Canadian Seaway authority, the Seaway can be replaced.

"You can't build another six lanes of highway, and you can't build another three or four rail tracks to do what would have to be done," he says.

Let's take that challenge seriously. Head of the Lakes to Chicago, put back the second track on the Omaha Road as far as Camp Douglas and put back the second track on the Milwaukee to Milwaukee. Restore the second tracks on the C&NW freight and passenger mains from Milwaukee to Chicago or the second track on the C&NW from Wyeville to Harvard, Illinois via Madison. East of Chicago, there are plenty of downsized multiple-track mainlines with room to add tracks. Toledo to Albany on the New York Central alone has room for four most of the way. There's also space on the old Canada Southern along the north shore of Lake Erie for additional trackage. Could the Seaway be cost-effectively replaced by restoring the pre-1959 railroad capacity? Possibly. Would you want to put all of the Upper Lakes traffic in ore, coal, and limestone onto trains? Probably not. But the Upper Lakes traffic only hauls the current aquatic life around in ballast tanks.

THE RAILROADS ARE CLOGGED. But the eastern Great Lakes are lousy with fish pathogens.

Viral hemorrhagic septicemia, known as VHS, was discovered in the Great Lakes basin just last year, and already it has been blamed for the deaths of thousands of fish in the eastern Great Lakes.

The virus, which bleeds its victims to death, doesn't pose a danger to humans. But the potential for it to spread into the nation's other waterways so spooked the federal Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, or APHIS, that it ordered some fast and drastic steps to contain it.

Michigan is seeking an emergency order prohibiting boats bound for Lake Huron or further west from taking on ballast in Lake Erie.

Specifically, the Michigan Natural Resources Commission wants the federal government to order an emergency ban on freighters filling their ballast water tanks in the virus-infected waters of Lakes Erie, Ontario and St. Clair, as well as the St. Lawrence River. The idea is to protect the virus-free Lakes Michigan, Huron and Superior.

Ballast water is necessary for freighters because it stabilizes and maintains the structural integrity of a less-than-full cargo vessel, so a prohibition against it could devastate the shipping industry.

Although I have noted the downside of the St. Lawrence Seaway before, this emergency order would disrupt the movement of ore to the remaining Ohio Valley steel mills as well as limestone and cement to the Northeast, which comprise the bulk of Lakes shipments.

The article notes that the virus is particularly deadly to one of the junk fish that previously made its way into the Lakes.

Indeed, one of the species that has been most susceptible to VHS die-offs in the eastern Great Lakes is the round goby, itself an invasive species from Europe that scientists believe was brought into the Great Lakes more than a decade ago by overseas freighters traveling up the St. Lawrence Seaway.

The virus, however, has the potential to wipe out the sport and commercial fisheries as well.

OVERPRICED CORPORATE WELFARE? The editors at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel are not yet ready to close the St. Lawrence Seaway.

But those pushing to close the seaway - the conservation group Great Lakes United called for an overseas-freighter ban in late March - forget that the seaway provides economic benefits.

So did the North Shore Line, but when the railroad was no longer able to meet its payroll, it closed.

While oceangoing traffic accounts for only about 7% of all Great Lakes shipping, that percentage is higher for some ports and carries an economic impact beyond the small number. Port of Milwaukee Director Eric Reinelt said the annual percentage for Milwaukee is usually around 11% and has been as high as about 20%. In 2006, the port handled more than 710,000 metric tons of imports and exports through the seaway, up 99% from 2005.

Yes, and a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant can be depended on to say something about the "intrinsic worth" of his creations. That tonnage works out to about 7100 railroad cars, or about 20 car movements (some of which involve a car arriving with one cargo and leaving with another) per day. That's fewer freight cars than the North Shore Line handled in a day.

In addition, he says, oceangoing ships provide the best and cheapest way to deliver such freight as steel and wind turbines used in power generation, as well as to move grain from farmers in southeastern Wisconsin to foreign ports.

With a side order of round gobies, zebra mussels, and fish viruses. The Seaway has a positive marginal product. Whether that marginal product makes its continued operation worthwhile is another matter, and the Port Director is unlikely to say, yes, turf me out. It's up to the editorialists to give that case consideration.

NO RUNNING FROM THE LOTKE-VOLTERRA EQUATIONS.

Lake Michigan used to be somewhat isolated from the predator-prey cycle elsewhere, with no easy access by Mississippi River or European fish.  Then came the St. Lawrence Seaway, with sea lampreys and alewives.  (And the latter had the usual fish habit of spawning, then dying, all over all the beaches.)  Thus did the fisheries managers introduce Pacific salmon to dine on the alewives.  But now there are ominous signs of a collapse of the alewife population.  But now come some particularly messy predator-prey cycles.

The collapse of alewives on Lake Huron had one surprising consequence — it opened the door to a surge in native species like lake trout and walleye. A likely reason is the alewives prey on the young of native fish. Alewives also aren't a good food source for lake trout because they carry an enzyme that makes it difficult for lake trout to produce healthy offspring.

The cause of the alewife crash on Huron has long been a subject of debate among biologists. Some believe it was a function of too many stocked and naturally reproducing salmon for the alewife population to survive. Others say it was triggered by the invasive mussel population that stripped away the food that alewives depend on. Others believe it is a combination of the two. Some biologists have blamed the cold winter of 2003 for the Huron alewife crash.

In Lake Michigan, the complication is that quagga mussels (just another hitchhiker on the few ships plying the spectacularly unproductive St. Lawrence Seaway) are filtering out the plankton that alewife fry (and many other young fish) eat.  I've been following that dynamic for some time, and the same question remains.

The likely outcome will be a collapse of the whitefish population. But when the quaggas exhaust their food supply, the quagga population collapses? The article mentions a seaweed called cladophora that prefers clearer water. What is cladophora's food supply? What fish use cladophora for food?

At the time the whitefish were attempting to eat the quagga, shells and all.

Although the researchers can quantify the various fish and mussel populations in the Lakes, they ought be careful about modulating the cycles.

CLOSE IT. The editorial board of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel sees the St. Lawrence Seaway as a net drain on the region's economy.

Close the Seaway until oceangoing ships prove they won't continue to bring in strange new species in their ballast waters.

This doesn't necessarily mean closing Great Lakes ports to international cargoes. Those cargoes could be transferred from oceangoing ships to lake freighters or they could be placed on trains to finish their journeys. Yes, that would cost a little more than allowing oceangoing freighters free travel through the lakes. But given the cost that more invasive species will add, the price is worth it.

Sometimes journalists think like economists.

Preliminary results from a federally funded study under way at the University of Notre Dame estimate that the economic loss tied directly to 57 exotic species scientists believe were delivered to the lakes by overseas vessels is about $300 million a year. And there are a lot more than 57 invasive species in the lakes now.

On the other side is the economic benefit of the seaway: about $55 million a year in terms of transportation savings, according to a 2005 Joyce Foundation-funded analysis of cargo flows on the Great Lakes. In a strict cost-benefit analysis, the seaway loses, big time.

Most of the Lakes traffic is bulk cargo from lake port to lake port in any event, and the biggest ore carriers are too large for the Welland Canal.

REVERSE THE FLOW

A Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel article from a year ago suggests that restoring the flow of the Chicago River into Lake Michigan offers more benefits than costs.

Such a project would have dramatic and expensive consequences for the way Chicago manages its waste and storm water. It would require significant sewage system upgrades because the city would once again send at least some of its effluent into Lake Michigan instead of down the canal system into the Mississippi. It also would affect barges that ply the canal, and the industries that rely on the materials they haul.

But it also would go a long way to protecting the Great Lakes, the world's largest freshwater system and a drinking water source for more than 30 million people, the study says.

The study reports that the cost for separation ranges between $3.2 billion and $9.5 billion and is targeted for completion between 2022 and 2029, depending on where the barriers would be built and to what extent waste-water treatment and navigation systems would be upgraded.

It cites no specific funding sources but suggests local, regional and federal financing to bankroll the work.

That is a load of cash, but the stakes of doing nothing could be equally high. Many biologists fret that just the Asian carp, which have already infested the Mississippi River basin and could colonize the lakes via the Chicago canal system, could wreak havoc on the Great Lakes sport and commercial fishing industry, which has an estimated annual value of $7 billion.

The paper followed up last month.

Biologists predict the number of unwanted organisms moving on the Chicago canal will only grow until the waterway is somehow plugged. And it is much more than a Great Lakes problem because biological pollution travels both directions on this invasive species superhighway.

Not only do rapacious Asian carp threaten to unleash havoc on the lakes' multibillion-dollar fishery, but some troublemakers such as pipe-clogging zebra and quagga mussels already have ridden canal waters in the opposite direction - out of the Great Lakes and into the Mississippi basin. From there they have hitched rides on recreational boats towed over the Rocky Mountains and now plague irrigation and hydroelectric systems across the West.

The cost of these unwanted organisms is hard to comprehend, but it is growing. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service predicts that if the fingernail-sized zebra and quagga mussels get into the Northwest's Columbia River hydroelectric dam system, they could do more than a quarter-billion dollars in damage. Per year.

Other noxious invaders are poised to make the same trip. A fish-killing virus now menacing the Great Lakes could do incalculable damage were it to slip down the canal and into the South's aquaculture industry.

In this sense, the Chicago canal system isn't so much a waterway as it is an open wound.

"This is not about Asian carp," said Peter Annin, a Great Lakes author who is managing director of the University of Notre Dame's Environmental Change Initiative. "This is about two artificially connected watersheds that many people argue never should have been connected."

Fixing the problem would be a massive public works project that would likely cost at least $4 billion and take years to accomplish. But beyond stopping invasive species, it could lead to dramatic improvements in water quality and flood control, as well as fuel a navigation boom on Chicago's increasingly neglected canal network.

I'm not sure what sort of navigation boom the report contemplates, although there are some promising riverside neighborhood properties along the various canals and the interior rivers draining into the Illinois River. It's interesting, though, to put tax dollars to work undoing the effects of previous tax dollars put to work, unproductively.

The canal project was considered an environmental success in an era before the lakes were open to global shipping, when nobody pondered the biological costs of bridging the two massive basins. But now the threat posed by dozens of unwanted crustaceans, protozoa, algae, plants, mollusks and fish spilling through the breached divide has become clear as a zebra mussel-infested lake.

Today the canal is recognized by many as one of twin blunders that destroyed the ecological isolation of the Great Lakes. The other was construction of a shipping channel between the Great Lakes and Atlantic Ocean.

The St. Lawrence Seaway, which was completed in 1959, tamed obstacles such as Niagara Falls and the roaring St. Lawrence River with a system of canals, channels and locks to allow deep-draft ocean vessels - and all the biological pollution clinging to their hulls and lurking in their ballast tanks - to sail into the lakes from ports around the globe.

The Great Lakes are now home to 186 non-native species, some of which have ravaged native fish populations, spawned noxious algae growth and triggered botulism outbreaks that have killed tens of thousand of birds. Federal regulators this year ordered a multiyear phase-in of ballast water treatment systems on Great Lakes-bound freighters to block new seaway invasions, though many are dubious the regulations are stiff enough to solve the problem.

This would be mostly just a Great Lakes dilemma were it not for the back door from the lakes that Chicagoans opened to the middle of the continent.

Pressed by the Asian carp threat to examine the extent of ecological danger posed by the canal, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers last year identified dozens of "high risk" organisms poised to ride its waters into or out of the Great Lakes. Most are species few have ever heard of. The tubificid worm. The testate amoeba. The bloody red shrimp.

The Seaway has been a commercial failure, although the upper Lakes are a convenient way to move bulk commodities to elevators and mills. The interior river system is also useful for bulk commodities, although there's ample rail capacity in case the Illinois River canal is reversed.

COLD WATER ON A FATAL CONCEIT? Led by zebra mussels, a host of invasive species is wreaking ecological havoc in Lake Michigan. Some errors are easier to undo than others.

Thanks largely to the Clean Water Act of 1972, it rebounded in the last generation from decades of industrial dumping and, Milwaukee's periodic sewer overflows notwithstanding, its shores are far from the cesspool they were before the arrival of modern sewage treatment.

There are other ecological successes. Scientists used poison to control, but not eliminate, the invasion of lake-trout-killing sea lamprey in the mid-1900s. And shortly thereafter biologists managed an invasion of beach-fouling alewives by planting hundreds of millions of Pacific salmon to eat them.

But that tinkering has perhaps given the public a false confidence in humans' ability to fix the Great Lakes when something goes wrong. Beneath the lakes' shimmering surface, a mounting number of invasive species are wreaking an ecological havoc that scientists are having a hard time understanding, let alone stopping.

Today, at least 180 non-native species lurk in the lakes, and a new one arrives, on average, every eight months. Most come in the ballast water of commercial ships that shuttle between the Great Lakes and Atlantic Ocean via the St. Lawrence Seaway, a largely artificial link between the two aquatic worlds that opened for business in 1959.

Yes, I remember the fireworks show Milwaukee put on to commemorate the opening of the Seaway. International Port of Milwaukee. Big deal. The Seaway has been a net loss to the U.S. and Canada. It is not competitive with deregulated railroads and trucks. And it has been the vector for numerous exotic predators, some of which are doing tremendous damage to the zooplankton of the Great Lakes. (Freshwater lakes with plankton? Yes. One never stops learning. Read the article.)

And don't lose sight of last week's article, spelling out disturbances in the balance of nature that the salmon spawned. (Pun intentional.)

IT'S NOT WORTH IT. A Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel article asks readers to consider the potential loss of the Great Lakes.

What price would you put on our Great Lakes - the sand beaches and rocky shores; the salmon, perch and rainbow trout; the smell of a freshwater breeze? Should we give it all up so that international shippers can save about $55 million a year?

That $55 million figure appears to be valid.

Only about $55 million a year, in terms of transportation savings over truck, rail and barge alternatives, according to a 2005 Joyce Foundation-funded analysis of cargo flows on the Great Lakes. The study has been ferociously criticized by shipping interests as an overly simplistic look at a complex transportation system, but it was successfully defended before an independent panel of transportation experts.

"I don't think there is any disputing the study," says Dennis Schornack, a former President Bush appointee who served as U.S. chair of the International Joint Commission, a binational panel created to resolve boundary water disputes between the U.S. and Canada. "It was peer reviewed, and they say if anything it erred on the high side of the benefits."

Though the raw numbers indicate the public might be getting a raw deal, you are not likely to find protesters on the lakefronts.

This doesn't surprise Notre Dame biologist David Lodge, who has been working with economists for more than three years to find the shipping-specific costs tied to invasive species in the Great Lakes. He explains that most people are unaware of the scale of the problem. At the same time, the shipping industry that benefits from the traffic - and the ability to pollute - reaps most of the gain.

"The damages of invasions are spread thinly over every member of society, and the benefits of the status quo are more concentrated," Lodge says. "So the incentive to maintain the status quo is strong for the people who benefit, and the incentive on the part of society to advocate for change is small for each individual. So we don't get the political reaction."

What the article does not spell out is how small, in the scheme of things, that $55 billion is. I have been following the St. Lawrence Seaway story for some time. The overseas business for the Port of Milwaukee works out to fewer freight car loads per day than a now-abandoned Wisconsin electric railroad handled in its final years. Elsewhere, the traffic is bulk cargo in relatively small ships (ocean going tankers and container ships are larger than the Seaway permits) that serve as transportation for invasive species. The tankers will dock where the refineries are, on the coasts. The container ships will dock at Halifax, because the Canadian rail system can get those containers inland much faster than the ships can.

Meanwhile, the lake life appears headed for a Lotke-Volterra crash.

While politicians dawdle and scientists scratch their heads over how to keep the lakes safe from the next invader, a Darwinian drama plays out at a Pentium pace under the waves.

This year the U.S. Geological Survey released its annual prey fish survey for Lake Michigan, and it showed a jaw-dropping plummet in the numbers of little fish that sustain the lake's prized salmon and trout species.

The estimated "biomass," or overall weight, of prey fish in 1989, the year after the zebra mussel's discovery in the Great Lakes: about 450,000 tons. The estimated biomass now: about 31,000 tons. That's a drop in half from the approximately 60,000 tons recorded in 2006, itself a record low since the annual surveys began in 1973.

At the same time, there has been an explosion in the number and range of quagga mussels on the lake bottom. Quaggas were first documented in Lake Michigan in 1997, but remained a bit player in the lake's ecology until five years ago.

Quaggas have since squeezed out most zebra mussels and have expanded their range well beyond that of the zebras, which can survive only in shallower waters.

Quaggas are proving to be far more disruptive to the lake than zebra mussels, which must cling to a hard surface and normally don't live in water deeper than 75 feet. Quaggas can lurk at depths exceeding 500 feet and can make a living on both rocky and clay bottoms. Zebra mussels essentially formed a necklace around the lakebed's perimeter. Now quaggas are carpeting it.

As a result, the lake's invasive mussel numbers have increased a hard-to-comprehend 16-fold in just the past five years, and are spreading so fast that the biologists who make their living studying them have a hard time finding the words to describe what's happening.

"I've calculated that there are 380 trillion mussels in Lake Michigan," says Tom Nalepa of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "That was based on estimates in 2005, and I know the quagga mussel population has increased three- to possibly fourfold over 2005, so you can multiply that by threefold. I don't even know what that number is. Quadrillions?"

Yes.

"It's clear as a bell, it's like distilled water out there," says University of Michigan limnologist and Great Lakes fishery expert David Jude. "But there are all these implications for the food chain, and we haven't seen the end of it all yet."

At this point nobody can say what the lake will look like when the population of quaggas finally plateaus.

But zebra and quagga mussels are already implicated in the demise of a fatty shrimp-like animal called diaporeia that once flourished on the bottom of Lake Michigan at densities as high as 20,000 per square meter.

Diaporeia have almost completely disappeared from vast expanses of Lake Michigan. Though scientists have yet to prove the link between their demise and the mussels' arrival, few doubt the connection.

This lost battle for the bottom of the food chain affects everything above it.

Lake Michigan's struggling whitefish are an example. The regional favorite at restaurant fish boils evolved to depend heavily on nutrient-rich diaporeia. The average weight of a 7-year-old whitefish was more than 5 pounds in 1988, the year zebra mussels were found in the Great Lakes. It has since crashed to barely a pound.

With their main source of food disappearing, whitefish are trying to eat the mussels, shells and all.

The likely outcome will be a collapse of the whitefish population. But when the quaggas exhaust their food supply, the quagga population collapses? The article mentions a seaweed called cladophora that prefers clearer water. What is cladophora's food supply? What fish use cladophora for food?

THE INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS DELUSION.

Two hundred years ago, the Erie Canal opened for business from Albany to Buffalo.  In his tribute to the canal, Pajamas Media contributor Rick Moran notes that once upon a time presidents looked to the Federal Constitution for the specific authority to spend money.

DeWitt Clinton tried to get financing from Congress for his project, which Thomas Jefferson called "madness." However, President James Madison believed that using federal dollars for a state project was unconstitutional and refused to sign the bill authorizing congressional funds.

America's longest canal up to that point was 27 miles. Clinton was proposing the construction of a canal 13 times larger, much of it through wilderness, using Irish immigrant labor and, most astonishingly, without any trained engineers.

The original engineers were largely self-taught locals who designed and constructed the canal despite having never seen one before.

It got built, and although the original course has in places been filled in and elsewhere bypassed by subsequent expansions to create the New York Barge Canal, historic bits of it remain for your entertainment or edification.

THE CASE FOR CLOSING THE CHICAGO CANAL.

The Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal and the St. Lawrence Seaway are two illustrations of public spending gone wrong.  The economic benefits of these waterways are slight, and the potential for both to bring invasive species into the Great Lakes remains large.

Apparently new restrictions on ballast-pumping by oceangoing ships are having an effect, with no new invasive species being found in the Great Lakes recently (but don't celebrate just yet.)  On the other hand, we're dealing with multiple possible causes.  Seven years into the era of hope and change, there hasn't been the kind of worldwide economic recovery to keep the ships at sea.

Furthermore, here's fear from seven years ago about the absence of a bad flood being all that's keeping the Asian carp out of the Great Lakes.

The problem is the carp also have recently migrated up the adjacent Des Plaines River, and that river has a history of flooding its banks and spilling into the sanitary and ship canal. The distance between the two waterways is, in places, only a matter of yards.

That the Des Plaines River and the Root River, which drains into Lake Michigan, share a common marsh in Wisconsin suggests there's more than one way for those fish to find a new habitat.

Those fish are in the Mississippi River system in part because a government experiment went wrong.

[Environmental Protection Agency official Judy] Beck told the [2009 "State of the Lake" conference] that the fish escaped Southern fish farms during the 1993 floods in the Mississippi River.

That's not the whole story.

A 2006 Journal Sentinel investigation revealed the EPA played a role in their release.

Three decades ago, it funded programs in Arkansas that used the fish in sewage treatment experiments, and those fish were among the first known to have escaped into the wild.

No doubt, four of five experts were confident there was minimal, or no, risk, of experimental fish going rogue.

A FORMERLY MOVABLE FEAST.

In the course of remarking on flamingos foraging on Lake Michigan, I noted, "I suspect flamingos will not find Wisconsin winters congenial, and zebra mussels are also filter feeders."  I'd forgotten about another filter feeder.  "The likely outcome will be a collapse of the whitefish population. But when the quaggas exhaust their food supply, the quagga population collapses? The article mentions a seaweed called cladophora that prefers clearer water. What is cladophora's food supply? What fish use cladophora for food?"

THE GREAT SOCIETY WAS THE TRAGEDY. BIDENOMICS IS THE FARCE.

I'm on record as skeptical of the entire arc of the Democrats' technocracy.  "Perhaps the simpler explanation is that the New Deal failed as a macroeconomic policy."  My elaboration, with footnotes, is

At one time, academic historians were in general agreement that President Lyndon Johnson would be recognized as the greatest of all presidents. A few funerals later, he's probably fallen to the stature of a minor post-Rooseveltian. Perhaps one reason is that the Great Society's record is not what the true believers would have others believe. I am on record as attributing much of the now-missed-by-self-styled-"progressives" unionized, monopolized, and cartelized 1950s to the unusual position the U.S. economy enjoyed after World War II.

That post foreshadowed the "victory dividend" line of argument I have subsequently used.  Having the resources to attempt to build back better is one thing, but it's not the same thing as having the knowledge to do so, and the capability to make it happen.

The "wouldn't it be nice" ratchet has been screwing over people much longer than that: the interstate highways, and urban renewal, and the Great Society, and the story is always the same: self-congratulation over good intentions never compensates for bad policy.  Go, read and understand Thomas Sowell's The Vision of the Anointed.  I'll wait.

That's the tragedy. What are the elements of the farce?

SPEAKING OF SPECIAL PLEADING. Airport boosters do it. The St. Lawrence Seaway managers do it. Higher ed does it, too.

States have significant control over higher education - and a real economic interest in its success. Wisconsin spends roughly $1 billion on its university system, which generates $10 billion annually to the state's economy, according to a University of Wisconsin report.

Across the country, higher education boosts tax revenues, cuts dependence on welfare, and boosts community service among other social benefits, according to the Institute for Higher Education Policy in Washington.

(Via Joanne Jacobs.)

RESPECT THE BOX.

A soon-to-be released (to journeyman economists like me; the Recognized Pundits rate advance copies) book titled The Box : How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger draws a great deal of attention.

I read a review in The Economist.

WHEN the MSC Pamela sailed into Felixstowe, Britain's biggest container terminal, on her maiden voyage last year, Hutchison Whampoa, the port's Hong Kong owners, took a deep breath and renewed their efforts to build more deep-water berths. They were looking to the future. At 1,053 feet (321 metres), and able to carry the equivalent of more than 9,000 containers, Pamela is the world's largest container ship. But not for long: leviathans with twice that capacity are on their way.

The point of all the media tributes is the ostensible 50th anniversary of the international shipping container, which offers two advantages, reduced handling and reduced pilferage, over traditional transloading methods.

Consider the economics. Loading loose cargo, a back-breaking, laborious business, onto a medium-sized ship cost $5.83 a ton in 1956. McLean calculated that loading the Ideal-X cost less than $0.16 a ton. All of a sudden, the cost of shipping products to another destination was no longer prohibitively expensive.

This opened up all sorts of possibilities. Instead of manufacturing goods locally, a company could afford to replace its overcrowded multi-storey factory in Brooklyn with one in Pennsylvania, where taxes, electricity and other costs were lower, and then ship its goods to New York in a container. Later the factory might move to Mexico; it is now probably in China.

An article I recall contrasted traditional shipping with containerization by using the example of a cask of olives. At each transload, a few got crushed and a few got eaten. Normal costs of business and all that. Virginia Postrel's farewell column at the New York Times (her new print medium port will be The Atlantic) notes the change.

Just as the computer revolutionized the flow of information, the shipping container revolutionized the flow of goods. As generic as the 1's and 0's of computer code, a container can hold just about anything, from coffee beans to cellphone components. By sharply cutting costs and enhancing reliability, container-based shipping enormously increased the volume of international trade and made complex supply chains possible.

She links to a Spiegel article that observes the half-century with musings about the latest generation of ships to round the Horn.

Vessels that accommodate 6,000 to 7,000 standard containers -- or TEUs ("twenty-foot equivalent unit") as they are known in the industry -- are becoming a common sight on the high seas. And designers have already dreamed up huge freighters capable of accommodating 13,000 TEUs.

According to one rule of thumb, a single medium- sized ship can move as many containers as are transported on a typical German autobahn during a whole day. When goods are shipped in such vast quantities, the transport costs become negligible.

These ships are too big for the Panama and Suez canals, let alone the St. Lawrence Seaway. What happens when they hit land? Back to The Economist, with more on the challenges facing port authorities (the government agencies that own the port facilities and have the responsibility for providing the infrastructure that companies in Dubai and elsewhere manage.)

As to the future, the author looks to ships that will approach the “Malacca-Max”, the maximum size of a vessel passing through the Strait of Malacca, the shipping lane between Malaysia and Indonesia. Some container ships are already too big to get through the locks in the Panama Canal. The future giants will be a quarter of a mile long, 190-feet wide with their bottoms 65-feet below the waterline. They will be able to carry enough containers to fill a line of trucks 68 miles long. Hutchison needs to get digging.

A quick calculation: 13,000 TEUs = 6,500 40 footers = 3,250 standard well cars = 26 standard stack trains. It's more manageable that way. But The Superintendent's favorite expert on Pacific port operations notes that there is currently no direct rail access to quayside at Los Angeles or Long Beach: anything headed east is rubbered to the railhead. And when those 26 extra stack trains converge on Greater Chicago (which includes the Union Pacific yard at Rochelle -- there are a lot of short cuts of well cars, bare-table moves, and light engine movements through DeKalb now) they're adding to growing congestion on the rails.

Elmhurst, Illinois, 16 June 2002.

The train-spotters are awaiting the arrival of a steam locomotive, No. 3985, which, as is often the case with special events, arrived just as a rain shower ruined the exposures. The train is a bare-table move (empty well cars) reflecting the loads east, empties west (it's sometimes cheaper to sell the container to a scrap metal merchant than to find a westbound load for it) traffic the articles reference. In Chicago,

After 90 years, the railroads finally have run out of excess capacity. That in turn has restored their ability to raise rates, according to James Valentine, a research analyst for Wall Street giant Morgan Stanley.

"These positive trends in pricing and better returns are likely to continue for years, maybe decades," Valentine said.Because "all roads lead to Chicago," he added, the region will get a generous slice. "It should receive a disproportionate benefit from the railroads' resurgence."

Union Pacific's western competitor, BNSF, expects a near-quadrupling of container traffic from 2004 to 2007.

SERIOUS THINKING ABOUT SOCIAL SECURITY. ‘Crisis’ may be in eye of beholder.

“I don’t think there is a pressing crisis in Social Security right now,” said John Karl Scholz, another UW-Madison economics professor who has studied the system for a long time. “The long-term financing can use some shoring up.”

We can do better with the "shoring up" than the consensus fix among those denying there is a crisis.

Among the fixes suggested by those who are skeptical of private accounts are mixtures of lowering benefits and raising taxes.

Slowly increasing the retirement age and raising the cap on earnings subject to the Social Security tax are often mentioned.

According to a recent report from CCH [Inc., a business information firm in Riverwoods, Ill], if the Social Security tax were collected on wages up to $200,000 instead of the 2005 limit of $90,000, enough money would be raised to deal with the situation.

Yes, if one overlooks the opportunity costs. Max Speak, who has been following the conversation with some care, appears not to be bothered by the opportunity cost.

To be sure, conservative critics of the program believe their proposals would have beneficial effects on savings and investment. In that sense, Social Security reform is the newest vintage of supply-side economics. It presumes that program changes will lead to changes in behavior, a topic beyond the scope of this post.

Why, because the conclusions (Martin Feldstein's research on the growth-reducing effect of the Social Security tax serving as a transfer rather than as savings) would not be congenial to advocates of the status quo?

A previous post on the same topic is positively Panglossian.

Actually we require income tax revenues to finance part of benefits starting in 2018. Between 2040, before the system is "broke," and after 2042, exactly zero change in taxes is required to finance all benefits. You don't know what you're talking about.

Back to the newspaper:

• As now constituted, the Social Security system will bring in less money than it needs to pay out in benefits beginning in 2018, according to the trustees of the system, or in 2019, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

• When that happens, to keep paying promised benefits, the system will have to cash in the government bonds it has been collecting since the mid 1980s. That could be done by the government redeeming them through other tax revenue or by borrowing from the general public.

What other expenditures of public moneys shall we give up? The St. Lawrence Seaway? High speed trains in the Midwest? Wouldn't a somewhat larger economy with a larger tax base be preferable?

There's another observation in the Max Speak post that bears noting:

An IOU is a promise to pay. Should the Gov renege on its promise?

Sure. Refinance it at the Fed.

Steve Verdon has some additional thoughts on other magic fixes, including immigration and productivity.

SECOND SECTION: Nate at Four Way Stop has been thinking about the debate as well.

When one side of an issue becomes so intransigient it won't look at facts, you can't have a debate. With pretty much the entire Democratic blogosphere/brain trust/political community dead-set in believing Social Security can just be left alone, I think we've reached that point.

Check it out.

COST OVERRUNS? Projected cost of high-speed trains doubles.

The projected cost of a proposed Midwestern network of high-speed trains has more than doubled over the past six years, to $7.7 billion, including about $1.2 billion in Wisconsin alone, a new report shows.

But the federal government has yet to show any interest in putting up its $6.2 billion share of the nine-state Midwest Regional Rail Initiative, and supporters agree the 110-mph train plan won't get out of the station without federal money.

On the other hand, federal money is available for rebuilding the Marquette interchange in central Milwaukee, and continuing to operate the St. Lawrence Seaway. The problem, I suspect, is that this Midwestern network would not offer sufficient pork for northern-border state Senators and Representatives to get on board. First some details.

Planners originally sought four round trips daily at 79 mph, with stops in Neenah, Appleton, Oshkosh, Fond du Lac and either Allenton or West Bend. The revised plan seeks seven round trips daily at 110 mph.

Because the Milwaukee-to-Green Bay leg would be a continuation of the existing Chicago-to-Milwaukee route, service between Milwaukee and Chicago also would rise from the originally planned 14 round trips daily to 17.

The Chicago-Milwaukee frequency would still fall a bit short of the frequency once offered by the North Shore Line alone, but would exceed the frequency offered by either the Milwaukee Road, which Amtrak uses, or the Chicago and North Western during the 1930s and 1940s. There is one additional wrinkle: what happens if Wisconsin works with Chicago's Metra Rail to extend the local train service from Kenosha to Milwaukee, along the old Chicago and North Western 400 route.

Amtrak's Hiawatha line now runs seven daily round trips at 79 mph, covering the distance in about 11/2 hours, with stops in Sturtevant and Glenview, Ill. The boost to 110 mph would cut the trip by about 25 minutes, the report says.

That's a long-sought improvement over the best running time, which was 75 minutes until the late 1950s.

Of the 17 trains on the Chicago-to-Milwaukee route, 10 would continue to Madison, another destination not currently served by Amtrak. At 110 mph, the Milwaukee-to-Madison trip would take about an hour, with some trains stopping in Brookfield, Oconomowoc and Watertown.

Plans have long called for the Milwaukee-to-Madison route to be one of the first in the Midwest network, because of its potential to attract new riders. In June, Amtrak urged Congress to jump-start the route, predicting that extending the Hiawatha to Madison and adding more trips would more than double ridership, to 1.09 million by 2008.

This Madison service would also be a significant boost in frequency compared to the 1930s and 1940s. Now comes the rub.

Of the 10 Milwaukee-to-Madison trains, six would continue to the Twin Cities. That service would replace Amtrak's once-a-day Empire Builder, which now links Chicago, Milwaukee, Minneapolis-St. Paul and the Pacific Northwest on a route that bypasses Madison.

And thus the problem. That northerly train does a little bit of ferrying college kids to St. Cloud or Fargo or Grand Forks, as well as hauling excursionists to Glacier Park. The second function might properly be farmed out to a Nostalgie Orient Express type operation, but that might spell finis to any votes for Amtrak from Minnesota, the Dakotas, Montana, or eastern Washington.

We are, incidentally, speaking of a Neubaustrecke for this service. There is a Milwaukee Road line leaving the current Empire Builder route (which was a 100 mph railroad until 1960) at Watertown and going to Madison, but to continue three trains from Madison to the Twin Cities involves either new construction or an upgrade of a line from Madison to Portage, where it rejoins the old 100 mph railroad. But either there will be a reversal of the train's direction in Madison or a new station somewhere on the east side of the city.

The shopping list for that 12" = 1 ft hobby store runs like this:

The plan now estimates track improvements would cost $227 million between Milwaukee and Madison; $285 million from Milwaukee to the Illinois state line; $243 million from Madison to La Crosse; and $311 million from Milwaukee to Green Bay, Wade said.

New trains for the Milwaukee-to-Madison route would add another $89 million, bringing the total cost of that route to $316 million, with $253 million from the federal government and $63 million from the state, Wade said. For the rest of the Wisconsin routes, trains would cost $152 million, but Illinois and Minnesota would share part of that cost, he said.

Probably a cheaper investment than some of the highway improvement projects in other transportation bills.

Although the overall plan hasn't been approved, more than $100 million has been spent on engineering and on facilities that could improve existing service even if the full network isn't built.

Additional economies could be achieved with a little understanding of history. Those 75 minute trains of years ago were pulled by steam locomotives -- not necessarily built especially for speed -- on jointed rail past semaphore signals that were not repeated in the cab. One does not require space-age electronics and global positioning systems to run fast trains.