Sound familiar?

Gov. Jennifer Granholm on Tuesday hammered a company responsible for an 819,000-gallon oil spill near Marshall as the crude continued to flow westward along the Kalamazoo River, and government officials and company workers attempted to stop the disaster from spreading.

Cynthia Price of Grand Rapids, MI, puts it this way: "Given that every Republican candidate in Michigan is running on a platform of "fewer regulations on business," it seems unlikely that we ever WILL learn ..."

A quick Google News search for 'asian carp' yields over 2,000 articles in the last month alone.  Not many of them speak favorably of the latest and largest non-native aquatic threat to the Great Lakes.

Kind of makes you think the carp should hire a K street lobbyist.

But they won't and they can't and so they're easy to beat up.

It's heartening to see Great Lakes political leaders speak out in unison (except for those from Illinois) against the carp.  It's great to see specific anti-carp measures proposed.  It's a little difficult, however, to see some of the rhetoric as anything but pure posturing.

What do they have in common?  Well, they're all large bodies of water, and they're covered in a single executive order signed by President Obama Monday.  The text of the order is here.

The import of the order for the Lakes is unclear. Its central feature is coastal and marine spatial planning, a kind of aquatic zoning that earlier caused unfounded concern about the "outlawing" of sport fishing on the Great Lakes.

Why do many environmental groups hail as big victories the passage of laws there are no dollars to enforce?

Why can't the supporters and opponents of offshore wind in the Great Lakes sit down and work out a common position that facilitates growth of the industry but does not demean the opponents as not-in-my-backyard naysayers?

Why are opponents of Michigan legislation to protect Great Lakes and tributary waters spreading clearly false and misleading information? Are they afraid they can't win on the facts?

No, Star Trek fans, it's not outer space, it's the spaces beneath the world's water -- including Great Lakes water. And it's time to explore it by creating a formal system of underwater preserves in the Lakes.

The issue has been on my mind for some time -- almost 30 years, since Michigan established a "bottomland preserve" system to manage access to and preserve shipwrecks.  That's worthy, but shouldn't older historic sites underwater and other sites that are geologically or ecologically important also enjoy protection for this and future generations?

Nationally, efforts are underway to catalog so-called marine protected areas (MPAs) and marine managed areas (MMAs). Interestingly, the Great Lakes already has a number of each.

A recent report from the Large Lake Observatory of the University of Minnesota-Duluth caught my eye.  Tucked inside was a piece on observations of Lake Superior temperature trends.

The key finding was that traditionally frigid Lake Superior is in recent decades warming about two degrees F per decade compared with a warmup of one degree F in air temperature per decade. The explanation for the warming water appears to be a long-term trend of declining ice cover, which permits quicker and more pronounced warmup by sunlight.

Interestingly, higher winds, helping drive the surface layer deeper, may also be contributing.

It's not proof of climate change, but it's a sign of what could happen.  A warmer Lake Superior ain't the same Lake Superior.

In this timely and urgently needed commentary in the Muskegon Chronicle, Michigan State Rep. Mary Valentine takes on directly the misinformation spread about a bill she is co-sponsoring to protect the public interest in Michigan's water.

For months, special interests who stand to benefit from exploiting groundwater, lakes and streams and the Great Lakes themselves for private profit have unrolled a carpet of untruths to stop tht legislation.  This is not the place to dignify the falsehoods by repeating them.

The key points of Rep. Valentine's commentary: