Opps, I may have been duped. Following is a reply from the same post on CoastSide..
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There's an old expression: lies make it halfway around the world before the truth gets its shoes on. Here the commercial shipping industry, through the shrewd use of misleading press releases, has persuaded some in the recreational community that the government has targeted recreational boaters.
These bogus scares have been raised and responded to here before.
http://www.coastsidefishingclub.com/foru...true#Post460412
The sky is not falling and the scaremongers are counting on people not reading the court's decision and coming to their own conclusion. However, I did find and read the decision for myself.
Quote:
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I've read Judge Illston's opinion from cover to cover. The case is about whether the EPA may exempt from federal permits those ships that discharge ballast water in the navigable waters of the United States. The EPA took the position that ballast water is merely incidental to the operation of a ship and therefore falls under an exclusion from the permitting requirement. Plaintiff argued, and the court agreed, that ballast water contains foreign organisms and is therefore a statutorily-defined pollutant that may not fall under the "incidental operation" exception. Accordingly, the EPA acted in excess of its statutory authority when it exempted ballast discharges from the permitting process.
That is what this case stands for: you can't blow your ballast tanks without a permit. Ballast water is a pollutant and the discharge of all pollutants requires a permit. The effort to tie this to recreational boaters is truely shameless.
