You may be among the 30 percent of Americans whose water quality will be negatively impacted by the Trump regime's scrapping of a 2015 update to the 1972 Clean Water Act. Here's what you need to know (from Popular Science):
The Trump Administration just announced yet another blow to the country's environmental protections. On Thursday, officials from the EPA and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers repealed an Obama administration update to the 1972 Clean Water Act, which had expanded protection to wetlands and streams that are disconnected from navigable rivers. "They're effectively sending us back 30 years in our protections of U.S. waters," says Peter Gleick, co-founder of the Pacific Institute and a MacArthur "genius" Fellowship winner for his work as a climate and water scientist. [snip]
The original definition of "waters of the United States" mainly covered large rivers, their tributaries, and adjacent wetlands. The Clean Water Act requires industrial and municipal polluters discharging to these rivers to obtain permits from the EPA and the 2015 update expanded those regulations to include smaller streams and wetlands. Thursday's repeal will soon be followed by a rule change, and the replacement text would basically revert to the '70s-level protections. [snip]
... [T]he 2015 update was enacted for a reason: the streams and wetlands that aren't flowing into or right next to major rivers are still crucial for wildlife and humans. Drinking water for one in three people in the lower 48 comes from same waters that just lost their federal protection in the repeal, as PopSci has reported previously. "The weakening that we're seeing today is really serious—It's really cutting protection for drinking water for a lot of Americans," says Gleick. "A lot of our groundwater resources and a lot of our surface water resources are now going to be vulnerable to far more pollution."
The 2015 rule also regulated pesticides and nutrients leaching from many farmers’ fields—a diffuse but cumulatively significant source of pollution. In the Mississippi basin, for example, the pollutants from numerous farms that trickle into small streams and wetlands eventually flow into the river and then into the Gulf of Mexico, says Gleick. This impacts water quality and leads to the growth of massive algal blooms and fish die offs. “Some farmers would have had to get permits to discharge pollutants into the streams and wetlands,” says Gleick. But now that requirement has been lifted, and our waters will suffer for it.Due to a provision in the Clean Water Act, suits that will be brought against this rulemaking will have to be heard in state- level Federal District Courts rather than Federal Appeals Courts, meaning there will be a plethora of legal challenges at the state level and, inevitably, chaos.
Overall, says Gleick, “We can expect more pollution in our waterways, more threats to drinking water supplies, more court cases, and more confusion about where this country ought to go on environmental protection.” (our emphasis)
Chaos. That's a hallmark of the Trump regime, as are ignorance, greed and corruption, all of which have played roles in putting millions of Americans lives at risk through this action. And it's only the latest in a long list of environmental protections scaled back or ended by this dystopian regime. Even if you're not personally affected by this specific action, millions of your fellow Americans are. So, please keep in mind the damage that's being done to our country and the world by these evil nihilists as we ramp up to the 2020 election. Just another reason they have to be stopped.
(Photo: via Natural Resources Defense Council)
