Showing posts with label water. Show all posts
Showing posts with label water. Show all posts

Friday, August 29, 2025

America, this is your president

 


“We send hundreds of millions of gallons of water a day to the Pacific Ocean. They turn a valve and the valve heads out. And we turned the valve back.”

Critics were fired up when he added, “I actually had to do it using force. We turned the valve back and now they have water.”

  Inquisitr
Good god. I THINK he means he used the force of the federal government to make them turn the valve, and not that he physically turned it himself. Either way, there is no valve.




Tuesday, January 28, 2025

Trump 2.0 - Full throttle bullshit


How fucking stupid are his supporters?

I'll tell you what's flowing abundantly.


Did they post that on "Truth Social" too - where Trump posted his insane bullshit?

Friday, June 30, 2023

We're bleeding her dry


Humans are essentially parasites.


...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Friday, March 10, 2023

This is your Republican party

Earlier this week, ranking member Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) sent a letter to Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) urging Republicans to join him and his fellow Democrats in denouncing “white nationalism and white supremacy in all its forms, including the ‘Great Replacement’ conspiracy theory.”

Though all 20 committee Democrats signed the letter, all 26 Republicans on the committee refused to sign.

  The Hill
The House voted on Thursday to overturn the Biden administration’s water regulations — a goal that’s not expected to come to fruition but one that gave Republicans another chance to force some Democrats into a tough vote.

[...]

The rule in question designates which waters require permits for activities like construction and mining that may hurt water quality, deciding what counts as Waters of the United States under the Clean Water Act.

The Biden administration takes a broader view than its predecessor on which waters are subject to protection. However, prior to the Biden regulations, the narrower regulations from the era of former President Trump were also not in effect after they were taken down in court.

[...]

The resolution will head to the Senate, where its prospects are unclear.

[...]

Complicating things more for Democrats, Sens. John Fetterman (Pa.) and Dianne Feinstein (Calif.) are out for medical reasons.

However, the White House has already said Biden would veto the measure if it makes it to his desk.

  The Hill
And Mitch is also out for medical reasons. (Feinstein should have been replaced years ago.)

Meanwhile, Fetterman is working from the hospital.

Wishing him a speedy recovery and looking forward to hearing of his coming influence on the Senate.

UPDATE 11:18 am:




UPDATE 03/14/2023:



Saturday, December 4, 2021

Not a moment too soon

The first major infusion of federal cash from the bipartisan infrastructure law is on its way to states to overhaul the country's aging water infrastructure and dangerous lead pipes.

The Biden administration announced Thursday that the Environmental Protection Agency will distribute $7.4 billion to states, tribes and territories for 2022 focused on water infrastructure grants and loan forgiveness. The funding is part of a broader $50 billion investment in water infrastructure from the infrastructure law, which will be doled out over five years.

EPA Administrator Michael Regan said in an interview that it is the "single largest investment in water infrastructure" in the history of the federal government.

  NBC
This is good news. The only problem will be where it goes to states with Republican administrators who don't spend it on its intended purpose. You know there'll be some of that.
The Biden administration has only limited say in how the money gets spent. Some of the funding will flow through federal grants, which the administration can issue to specific projects. But the majority of the dollars will be distributed to states, which will ultimately decide what projects they want to fund.

That has created a challenge for the administration to ensure that the money is spent in a way that meets its goals, such as focusing funds on underserved and disadvantaged communities, rather than on other priorities that states may have.

In a letter being sent to governors Thursday and obtained by NBC News, Regan said the federal government and the states "share the same goals" and implored them to focus their share of funds on low-income, disadvantaged and minority communities.
Don't hold your breath.
The money includes $2.9 billion specifically earmarked to replace lead pipes — President Joe Biden has promised that every remaining lead pipe in the country will be eliminated under the deal. Another $866 million will be designated to deal with "forever chemicals" and other water contaminants that threaten the drinking water supply, the EPA said.
Can we expect Flint, Michigan, to finally get cleaned up? Again, don't hold your breath.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Monday, July 26, 2021

Pesticides are still killing the world

The Salton Sea was formed in 1905 when the Colorado River breached an irrigation canal and filled up an ancient basin in the desert, creating an oasis for migratory shorebirds and, by the middle of the 20th century, for celebrities and dignitaries. Developers dotted the shores with palm trees and built up luxury resorts around its perimeter, and the area became a destination for Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby and the Beach Boys. President Dwight Eisenhower used to come by the golf course.

[...]

After the breached canal that created the lake was mended, it was mostly sustained by runoff water from nearby farms - water that was full of pesticides and nitrates, which blended with salt deposits in the lake bed to create an increasingly salty sea. By the 1990s, the sea had started getting even smaller, and saltier, killing off masses of fish and birthing noxious algal blooms. Over the past few decades, tens of thousands of migratory birds around the lake have died of either starvation or poisoning.

“And then came the odor,” said Miriam Juárez, 37, who has lived near the sea for most of her life. “It’s repugnant.” Her parents used to take her and her brothers to fish in the sea as well, she said. But her kids have only ever known the lake as a toxic void that periodically spews up fish bones and poison dust.

  Guardian
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Wednesday, August 12, 2020

NOW you'll want to vote for Trump

The U.S. Energy Department proposed easing water efficiency requirements for shower heads Wednesday following multiple complaints from President Donald Trump about how low water flow is impeding his ability to properly wash his hair.

The plan would allow manufacturers to bypass a 2.5 gallon-per-minute maximum flow rate set by Congress in the 1990s. Under current law, each shower head in a shower counts toward that limit. If finalized, the administration plan would allow multiple shower nozzles with 2.5 gallon-per-minute heads to each meet that requirement separately.

  Bloomberg
Oh, never mind. I only have one shower head per shower. How many people have multiples? I know, the people who matter.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Saturday, December 7, 2019

Tuesday, July 23, 2019

Kamala Harris "Water Justice Act"

The senator from California says the "Water Justice Act" being introduced Monday is meant to ensure the country's water supply is safe, affordable and sustainable.

Harris would invest nearly $220 billion in clean and safe drinking water programs, with priority given to high-risk communities and schools. Harris wants to declare a "drinking water infrastructure emergency" devoting $50 billion to communities and schools where water is contaminated.

  NYT
Should have already been done. But good on her. She's certainly taking the right timing opportunity.
Harris is focusing on the issue as Democratic presidential candidates head to Michigan, where the city of Flint has been rocked by a high-profile water crisis. The NAACP's national convention is in Michigan this week, and the Democratic Party's second set of presidential debates will be in Detroit next week.

Sunday, July 21, 2019

Coming soon to an area near you: water wars

[In the eastern US, f]racking and strip-mining pollute freshwater supplies. Cities and counties refuse to build infrastructure for freshwater delivery to some communities, especially poor and Black communities. Aging and ill-maintained infrastructure means that in Flint, just a stone’s throw away from some of the largest freshwater resources in the world, people are being poisoned. And at the same time, eastern water companies have been squeezing poor and especially Black residents with ever-rising water bills and ever-intensifying enforcement methods, including foreclosing on people’s homes when they can’t afford to pay for their water. But these are all management and delivery problems. The water is there, it’s just a matter of getting it delivered to people in a safe, affordable, and non-discriminatory way.

The west is a different story altogether. And if we can’t manage to solve the problem of safe and affordable water in places where water is plentiful, you can imagine the problems that arise when real scarcity is involved. Water history in the west is a full-service crash-course in all of 19th- and 20th-century American capitalism’s very worst tendencies. We encountered a scarce and necessary resource, understood exactly how scarce and necessary it was, then proceeded to kill each other for the chance to turn as much of it as possible into profit before all of it was gone. Now, in 2019, it’s mostly all gone and the west is burning.

[...]

[B]y the 1870s, westward expansion was in full swing. [...] Areas that were once labeled “Great Desert” were increasingly re-dubbed “Great Plains,” and throughout the 1870s, (paid) scientists were pushing some absolutely insane theories to encourage people to move west. The most absurd of these may have been the “rain follows the plow” theory. Think Field of Dreams, but for farming. The idea was that once people started farming in dry regions, rain would naturally come. When you plowed soil, even very bad and seemingly un-arable soil, the plowing would just automatically release trapped moisture into the atmosphere. This was, of course, nonsense. At heart, the “great plains” and “rain follows the plow” were marketing slogans, an early instance of real estate developers rebranding a previously undesirable area to turn a profit.

[...]

The Homestead Acts were granting western lands (to people but also to corporations, and with very high rates of fraud) in 160-acre tracts. This tract size made sense in the east where irrigation wasn’t necessary. But 160 acres was too large a tract to productively irrigate, and too small a tract to use as unirrigated land in the west.

[...]

In the early- and mid-20th century, the U.S. embarked on an epic dam-building spree. But much of this building was driven less by need for water storage and electrical power than by competition for funding between two giant federal bureaucracies. Marc Reisner’s exhaustive and surprisingly thrilling retelling of the battle between the Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers in Cadillac Desert is the authoritative history on this point. Reisner documents decades through which the agencies battled to outmaneuver each other, spending billions to build thousands of dams just to make sure the other agency didn’t build them first.

[...]

The beneficiaries of the dam-building extravaganza were largely agricultural interests in the surrounding areas. More dams than could possibly be justified meant relatively large water stores. A combination of the mythology around small American farmers and the reality of agribusiness lobbying power meant that agricultural interests could reap direct benefits from these federal projects, mostly through heavily subsidized water, power prices, and food control.

[...]

Most of the west now uses a prior appropriation system for allocating water rights rather than a riparian system. This means that water rights are divorced from land ownership: Anyone who can access water can make a claim to it, and those claims operate on a first come, first served basis. So if water sources dry up, the senior rights holders are the most protected, while newer users are left out to dry, both figuratively and literally.

Like dams, this is not an unreasonable system on its own. But it has combined with crafty capital and legal maneuvering to disastrous effect. First, to hold your water right, you have to use it. This means that nearly all water is going to get used, because there’s no formal protection (in the system as first conceived—things are slightly better now) for letting water run its natural course. Throughout the west, water systems have seen the complete loss of native wildlife populations and increasingly compromised water supplies, as water is taken out of rivers to irrigate land and returned to the water system in lower quantities and with higher salt content.

Second, water rights can be purchased and the water diverted far away. This is what allowed someone like William Mulholland in Los Angeles to buy up the entire Owens River and divert it to the San Fernando Valley, turning the Owens River Valley from “the Switzerland of California” into a desert, drying up Owens Lake, and massively increasing the value of Mulholland’s own properties in San Fernando. The battles over the Owens River [...] involve spies within the Bureau of Reclamation, lies and grift and outright theft to obtain water rights, locals dynamiting the L.A. aqueduct, and Mulholland mustering an army of 600 gun-toting LAPD officers and transporting them hundreds of miles inland to protect his waterways.

[...]

Massive underground aquifers underlie much of the U.S., and the western states have managed to produce agriculture [...] thanks to the use of that groundwater. The problem, of course, is that groundwater is largely a non-renewable resource. Depending on the type of aquifer, it might recharge slowly or not at all. And the coastal aquifers, like the one underlying Santa Barbara, are at risk of seawater intrusion if they’re drawn down too low.

And have we managed this non-renewable resource in a reasonable way to preserve it for as long as possible? Spoiler: We have not. In fact, officials in charge of regulating groundwater have always been well aware that it was a non-renewable resource, and decided to exhaust it anyway. The former head of the Colorado Water Conservation Board described their decision to use the state’s groundwater supply over the course of 25 to 50 years like this: “ [...] Well, when we use it up, we’ll just have to get more water from somewhere else.” The New Mexico State Engineer openly admitted the same: “We made a conscious decision to mine out our share of the Oglalla (aquifer) in a period of twenty-five to forty years.”

[...]

California is a particularly depressing example of harm wrought by greedy water policies. Groundwater extraction in California has been largely unregulated for most of its history, and as a result the central valley of the state is literally sinking. The entire valley is estimated to have sunk more than 28 feet since the 1920s, with some regions having sunk much more than that.



Some of the largest groundwater extractors in California these days are not even farmers—they’re oil companies. California droughts result in severe restrictions imposed by municipal water departments, which levy steep fines against people for overusing water at home. Meanwhile, 80 percent of water use in California continues to come from agriculture and big business.

The brazenness of these government subsidies to agribusiness is particularly apparent in the Yuma desalination plant. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed after the Mexican-American War, guarantees Mexico a certain volume of water from the Colorado River. But massive agriculture in the U.S. portion of the Colorado watershed meant that the water we were sending to Mexico was too salty to use for irrigation and was actually destroying crops. As a result, the U.S. built the Yuma desalination plant to purify water as it crosses the border into Mexico. Running this desal plant costs nearly $500 per acre-foot of water, and we use this plant to clean millions of acre-feet. But many of the upstream agricultural users, the ones who are responsible for the salt content in the water in the first place, pay less than $5 per acre-foot. [...] Meanwhile, residential users in San Francisco pay the equivalent of $773 per acre-foot, plus a monthly service charge.

[...]

The thing about political boundaries is that they have historically served military purposes. The border of my territory is as far as my army can reasonably reach, as affected by how far your army can reasonably reach. In practice, this meant borders often conformed to geographic features like mountain ranges and rivers. It’s hard for me to cross the river to attack you, and it’s hard for you to cross the river to attack me, so the river is our border. In the U.S., we have continued to use geographic features like rivers as internal borders. There does not appear to be a logic behind this other than it’s a way people have always drawn borders.

[...]

[N]either [...] doing what we’ve always done with rivers and mountains, or drawing easy straight lines [...] do much to help the actual function of the political bodies that operate within those borders.

[...]

In fact, rivers make particularly poor borders between states because a primary purpose of our union is to facilitate interstate commerce, and rivers are natural barriers. But, more importantly, rivers are an important natural resource, especially in the west. And rivers don’t respect borders. This is why California, Nevada, and Arizona have to continuously negotiate and update a giant contract about how much of the Colorado River each of them gets to use. It’s why the U.S. and Mexico have to negotiate and re-negotiate agreements about how much of the Colorado will flow into Mexico and what its salinity will be. And it’s why the longest continuous litigation in the U.S. legal system is an attempt to determine who has rights to use water in [the Gila] river.

[...]

States or even local jurisdictions could avoid a lot of conflict and unnecessary bureaucratic wrangling if they simply drew their jurisdictional lines by watershed [...] . Watersheds, you may remember from a life science class at some point, are areas in which all runoff water ends up in the same place. Every river, stream, lake, and puddle has a watershed. The continental divide splits the Pacific’s North American watershed from those of the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic. If you pour some water on the ground, and that water eventually ends up in a river, you are in that river’s watershed. Because of gravity, watersheds tend to consist of valleys or basins, with the edges running along ridges.

When your border is a river, as between California and Arizona, you have the exact opposite of a watershed border. Both states contribute to the health of the river, and both will often fight, politically and sometimes physically, to use as much of its water as they can. If a state is part of a river’s watershed but has no access to that river, its residents have little incentive to keep the river healthy and might be more inclined to pollute, since someone else will bear the cost. A system of political boundaries based on watersheds, in addition to avoiding conflict, would allow states to more consistently regulate and protect their surface and groundwater resources.

Obviously, not every river, stream, and puddle in the U.S. should have its own state. And there are likely logical divisions for the same river, like the upper and lower basins of the Colorado, to avoid very large rivers with huge watersheds spawning super states.

  Current Affairs
And wouldn't that be a nightmare? To redraw state lines? Here's a look at one attempt back in the late 1800s to determine state borders in the west:


[The early] vision was a locally and efficiently managed water system, one that took into account the peculiarities of each watershed and river system, allowing those most immediately affected to decide how the resources should be allocated. The system that we ended up with [...] is just the opposite in philosophy and practice: The federal government spends billions on top-down projects motivated by pointless rivalries or desire to grant corporate subsidies, while domestic uses and the environment pay the price.

Fresh water is a precious and scarce resource, especially in the west. It’s the sort of thing that demands the most democratic control, but has historically been subject to the least. The stakes couldn’t be higher. Droughts in the west are becoming more frequent and last longer. [...] To say that the freshwater status quo in the west is unsustainable would be an understatement. Democratizing water is a big project—much bigger than redrawing some political boundaries. We have to enact a massive shift in power and control from capital to local people and political organizations. But watershed borders would probably be a good start.
Sadly, no democratic apportionment of water is going to happen in this country. Water will sooner be privatized, and good luck to the poor.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Monday, April 8, 2019

Deconstructing America

Elsewhere in our rapidly blossoming authoritarian state, the president* is planning to demonstrate the Republican Party's devotion to the 10th Amendment by trying to strip the states of their rights to regulate pipelines that pass through them. From CNBC:
The effort was spurred by the blockage of the construction of the 125-mile Constitution Pipeline from Pennsylvania to New York. A protracted legal battle over the project has been underway since the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC, gave a greenlight in 2014 and 2016, because the state of New York has refused to issue a water permit. According to four current and former administration officials, the order directs the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency to clarify Section 401 of the Clean Water Act, the law that gives states authority over permits where water quality is concerned.
This is of dubious legality, which is no surprise to anyone. And because this administration* is good only at firing people, and doing that by remote control, it's undoubtedly important that it left itself an escape hatch.
The executive order is currently slated to be signed on Wednesday, with Texas as one suggested location for the event. Administration officials caution the plans could change.
As they generally do, without warning, and to the detriment of the republic.

  Charles P Pierce


...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Tuesday, January 29, 2019

Trump just cares about Americans

The Trump administration will not set a drinking water limit for two toxic chemicals that are contaminating millions of Americans' tap water, two sources familiar with the forthcoming decision told POLITICO.

[...]

EPA's decision means the chemicals will remain unregulated under the Safe Drinking Water Act, according to sources familiar with a still-unreleased draft plan that acting administrator Andrew Wheeler signed off on in late December. That means utilities will face no federal requirements for testing for and removing the chemicals from drinking water supplies, although several states have pursued or are pursuing their own limits.

[...]

The chemicals, known as PFOA and PFOS, have been linked to kidney and testicular cancer, hypertension and other ailments. Major chemical companies like 3M as well as the Defense Department would face billions of dollars in liability from aggressive efforts to regulate and clean up the chemical, which has contaminated groundwater near hundreds of military bases and chemical plants.

[...]

The expected move is yet another sign of the administration's reluctance to aggressively deal with the chemicals, which have been used for decades in products such as Teflon-coated cookware and military firefighting foam and are present in the bloodstreams of an estimated 98 percent of Americans. And it comes less than a year after the White House and the Environmental Protection Agency faced criticism for delaying publication of a health study on the chemicals, which a White House aide had warned could trigger a "public relations nightmare."

[...]

While EPA has decided against a drinking water limit, the draft chemical plan includes a decision to list those two chemicals as hazardous under the Superfund law, according to the two sources, a move would help force polluters to pay for cleanup.

  Politico
And that makes no sense at all.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Sunday, November 11, 2018

Flint has company

The Chicago Tribune has found 70 percent of houses in Chicago had lead in tap water. In three out of the 10 samples, lead levels exceeded five parts per billion, the maximum level the US Food and Drug Administration allows in bottled water.

  alJazeera
And I bet there's lots more cities and towns with the same issue.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Tuesday, July 31, 2018

Michigan declares emergency over drinking water supply

No, not for Flint
Michigan officials have declared a state of emergency after a city’s drinking water supply was found to be tainted with a harmful nonstick chemical.

Lt. Gov. Brian Calley (R) made the declaration Sunday, days after the discovery of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in the water supply for Parchment and Cooper Township, near Kalamazoo.

“This declaration will allow the state to supply additional resources to help with response efforts and ensure the health and safety of residents in Parchment and Cooper Township,” Calley said in a statement. He is acting as governor while Gov. Rick Snyder (R) is out of state.

  The Hill
Let me guess:  The area is mostly white.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Tuesday, August 15, 2017

Protecting the Environment? Pisssh

You may have missed it during all the events of the past week, but New Orleans is drowning again. For the second August in a row, the city was hit with a massive rain event. The pump and drainage systems were damaged and nobody discovered it until they utterly failed when the storm broke over the city. The power to the pumps failed for several crucial hours.

  Charles P Pierce
Yeah, who needs New Orleans anyway? The Devil's playground.
It's easy to scoff at New Orleans, and to blame bad management and the customary corruption. However, at the end of July, a report was issued that stated plainly that Tampa Bay is woefully unprepared to handle a direct hit from a major hurricane, and that the damage that would ensue would be greater than that levied by Katrina.

[...]

Apparently, the drainage systems in The Swamp are malfunctioning as well.
To wit:
When career employees of the Environmental Protection Agency are summoned to a meeting with the agency’s administrator, Scott Pruitt, at agency headquarters, they no longer can count on easy access to the floor where his office is, according to interviews with employees of the federal agency.

Doors to the floor are now frequently locked, and employees have to have an escort to gain entrance.

Some employees say they are also told to leave behind their cellphones when they meet with Mr. Pruitt, and are sometimes told not to take notes.

[...]

A former Oklahoma attorney general who built his career suing the E.P.A., and whose LinkedIn profile still describes him as “a leading advocate against the EPA’s activist agenda,” Mr. Pruitt has made it clear that he sees his mission to be dismantling the agency’s policies — and even portions of the institution itself.

[...]

Mr. Pruitt’s penchant for secrecy is reflected not just in his inaccessibility and concern for security. He has terminated a decades-long practice of publicly posting his appointments calendar and that of all the top agency aides, and he has evaded oversight questions from lawmakers on Capitol Hill, according to the Democratic senators who posed the questions.

[...]

His aides recently asked career employees to make major changes in a rule regulating water quality in the United States — without any records of the changes they were being ordered to make. And the E.P.A. under Mr. Pruitt has moved to curb certain public information, shutting down data collection of emissions from oil and gas companies, and taking down more than 1,900 agency webpages on topics like climate change, according to a tally by the Environmental Defense Fund, which did a Freedom of Information request on these terminated pages.

[...]

Allies of Mr. Pruitt say he is justified in his measures to ramp up his secrecy and physical protection, given that his agenda and politics clash so fiercely with those of so many of the 15,000 employees at the agency he heads.

[...]

Liz Bowman, a spokeswoman for the E.P.A., categorically denied the accounts employees interviewed for this article gave of the secrecy surrounding Mr. Pruitt.

“None of this is true,” she said. “It’s all rumors.”

  NYT
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Saturday, April 29, 2017

So What's Happening with the XL?

Energy Transfer Partners — the company behind the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline — has spilled drilling fluid into two pristine Ohio wetlands this month, according to information reported to the Ohio EPA.

The spills were not related to the Dakota Access Pipeline, and instead occurred while Energy Transfer Partners was constructing a different pipeline that would stretch 710 miles from Appalachia to Ontario, Canada, according to the Washington Post.

[...]

According to Energy Transfer Partners’ reporting to the Ohio EPA, the company spilled as much as 2 million gallons of drilling fluid on April 13, and as much as 50,000 gallons a day later and 100 miles from the first spill.

[...]

In a statement, Energy Transfer Partners denied that the spills would pose a threat to the environment, saying that the drilling fluid is “a nontoxic, naturally occurring material that is safe for the environment,” and is used in common products like lotions and laundry detergents.

[...]

Drilling fluid is used to cool equipment and is not toxic, but it is often mixed with substances like clay, making it mud-like in texture and viscosity. Environmental groups worry that because of that texture, a large enough spill could essentially smother wildlife and ecosystems in the wetlands.

  Think Progress
I worry that the fact they've had two spills this month indicates a lack of care that we might expect with the pipeline project when tar sands are flowing under the Missouri river.

And the possibility of a Trump administration EPA deregulation of reporting requirements.

 ...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Saturday, April 22, 2017

Two Hours Later...a Caveat



Gibberish that sounds like thoughts.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Without Batting an Eye



Which is why...
[President Trump's proposed budget for Fiscal 2018] calls for a 12 percent, or $1.5 billion, decrease in the Interior Department's budget [which includes the National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and Bureau of Reclamation].

[...]

These cuts will impact economies of local communities and businesses as parks will be forced to close facilities and shorten visitor seasons," said a statement released by the Coalition to Protect America's National Parks.

  National Parks Traveler
And why...
While chaos has been the operative word as the Trump era begins, underlying the disarray a deliberate attack on rivers, clean water, and the environment is well underway.

[...]

The Trump administration just proposed its first federal budget with draconian cuts to EPA’s budget of 31 percent.

[...]

In one of its first actions, the new Congress passed a bill using the, until now, rarely invoked Congressional Review Act to overturn the Interior Department’s Stream Protection Rule.

The Stream Protection Rule, eight years in the making, required coal companies engaged in underground or surface mining, including environmentally destructive mountaintop removal mining, to avoid damaging streams, monitor the impacts of their mining activities on streams, and restore streams that are damaged. At the behest of the coal industry, Congress overturned the rule and President Trump signed the bill into law, falsely claiming it would save thousands of jobs in the coal industry.

[...]

The week after killing the Stream Protection Rule, President Trump signed an Executive Order directing the Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to rescind the Clean Water Rule.

[...]

Of course, one of the most revealing and disturbing actions by President Trump is his appointment of Scott Pruitt to be EPA Administrator. As Oklahoma’s Attorney General, Pruitt sued EPA 14 times to overturn the Clean Water Rule, stop the cleanup of Chesapeake Bay, and block other EPA actions to protect our water and air. Because of Pruitt’s record opposing protection of the environment, American Rivers strongly opposed his nomination.

[...]

We also are seeing efforts in Congress to undermine the Endangered Species Act, one of our most important environmental laws.

  American Rivers
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Wednesday, March 29, 2017

Flint Water Lawsuit

A federal judge has approved an $87 million settlement requiring the state of Michigan to pay the city of Flint to identify and replace at least 18,000 unsafe water pipes running into homes and other properties by 2020.

Six thousand lines made of lead or galvanized steel will be replaced with copper piping by January 1, 2018. A further 6,000 lines are to be replaced in each of the following two years at no cost to homeowners.

[...]

The agreement doesn’t require door-to-door bottled water delivery, but residents will be able to call the city’s 211 number and receive free water deliveries within 24 hours.

  Grasswire
I suspect there will be an appeal.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.