With the Environmental Protection Agency’s own data showing that nearly half of our rivers and streams and a third of our wetlands are in “poor biological condition,” and with millions of Americans exposed to unsafe chemicals in water systems, this is a bad time to make a mockery of the Clean Water Act. But that is precisely what the Trump administration did this week when it issued its Navigable Waters Protection rule and completed its rollback of the Obama administration’s 2015 Waters of the United States rule.
Navigable Waters Protection. Let me guess...the "protection" part is prtecting corporations' rights to pollute and/or confiscate it.
It cannot be about water when the administration excludes from regulation other potential aquatic transporters of toxic chemicals, such as groundwater, rivers that run only during rainfall (a huge feature of the arid West), waste treatment systems, ditches, and ponds and depressions related to mining and construction.
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Not when it will reportedly remove half of the nation’s wetlands and nearly 20 percent of streams from protection.
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No, the Trump rule is designed to allow oil and gas producers, chemical makers, agricultural interests, and developers to navigate a federal water regulatory world cleared of permits and penalties for pollution, a world not seen since the 1960s. It flies in the face of a 2018 study by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley and Iowa State University that found that the 1972 Clean Water Act “has driven significant improvements” in water quality. [...] In the early 20th century, water-related mortality like cholera and typhoid killed tens of thousands of people every year. At the same time, regular fires occurred on many US rivers.”
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EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler [...] said the new rule assured “regulatory certainty and predictability for American farmers, landowners and businesses to support the economy and accelerate critical infrastructure projects.”
Wheeler offered no such certainty or predictability for the welfare of mothers and children drawing a drink from the faucet, nor for cities that need wetlands as a buffer against storms, not to mention the threat of floods, dangers to wildlife, or the outdoor recreation, fishing and hunting industries. Instead, he boasted that EPA rollbacks of regulations under Trump, which are among the nearly 100 environmental rollbacks being tallied by the New York Times, have saved American businesses $6.5 billion.
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The Trump administration may claim that rivers, lakes, ponds, streams and oceans have different levels of protection, but the end result is obvious: all of them will contain more pollutants.
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