Today will mark a turning point in the long fight to protect our wetlands and streams from polluters chasing a dollar. Today, the corrupt Trump administration is finalizing rules that will remove environmental protections for wetlands, streams and other bodies of water that were established by the Waters Of The United States rule under former President Obama. Demagogue and mentally unstable Donald "Pinocchio" Trump has been systematically ripping up every environmental rule promulgated under Obama, whom he envies and feels profoundly inferior to.
Not surprisingly, the gutted rule benefits golf course owners like Trump, as well as corporate agriculture, fossil fuel producers, and real estate developers. It also reaches back into protections under the 1972 Clean Water Act:
"[Trump's] administration had completed the first step of its demise in September with the rule’s repeal.
His replacement on Thursday will complete the process, not only rolling back 2015 rules that guaranteed protections under the 1972 Clean Water Act to certain wetlands and streams that run intermittently or run temporarily underground, but also relieves landowners of the need to seek permits that the Environmental Protection Agency had considered on a case-by-case basis before the Obama rule. [snip]
The new water rule will remove federal protections from more than half the nation’s wetlands, and hundreds of thousands of small waterways. That would for the first time in decades allow landowners and property developers to dump pollutants such as pesticides and fertilizers directly into many of those waterways, and to destroy or fill in wetlands for construction projects." (our emphasis)This is a criminal act against the environment we all share. It's all the more repugnant that Trump will benefit financially from the action. When you think he can't go lower, he never fails to prove you wrong.
BONUS: This comes on the day a report by the Environmental Working Group found that our drinking water is, and has been, far more contaminated by "forever chemicals" than was previously known.
(photo: Let's hope it's water from a polluted source)
