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Date: December 07, 2018 at 10:45:31
From: ryan, [DNS_Address]
Subject: EPA’s New Water Rule Will Gut the Clean Water Act |
URL: https://theintercept.com/2018/12/07/epas-new-water-rule-will-gut-the-clean-water-act/ |
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lardass continues to tear down environmental protections that took decades to enact...
EPA’s New Water Rule Will Gut the Clean Water Act
Sharon Lerner
December 7 2018, 9:01 a.m.
A new water rule will greatly reduce federal water protections, imperiling drinking water, endangered species, and ecosystems across the country. According to the rule that the Environmental Protection Agency is expected to release next week — some details of which were leaked Thursday — streams that are dependent on rainfall and wetlands not physically connected to year-round waterways will no longer be covered by the Clean Water Act.
As a result of the change, an estimated 60-90 percent of U.S. waterways could lose federal protections that currently shield them from pollution and development, according to Kyla Bennett, director of science policy at Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. Alaska and the arid west will be hit particularly hard by the new rule, which will be subject to a comment period before it is finalized.
Environmentalists are bracing for what they predict will be disastrous consequences for our nation’s waterways. “For some parts of the country, it’s a complete wiping away of the Clean Water Act,” said Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity.
By removing water quality standards and permitting requirements, the rule will open these streams, rivers, and wetlands to being paved over, filled in, or polluted. The result, environmentalists say, may take us back to the days of river fires. “You’ll be able to dump as much crap into them as you want,” Hartl said of our nation’s waterways. “Anyone will be free to destroy them as they see fit.”
Rivers of Fire
Jane Goodman had just graduated from high school when the Cuyahoga River caught fire in June 1969. The river fire focused attention on the extent to which Americans had fouled their waterways and is widely seen as the final indignity that spurred Congress to pass the Clean Water Act.
But for Goodman, who grew up in a suburb of Akron, Ohio, not far from the Cuyahoga, the blaze barely registered. She had always known the river, which flows north from Akron into Cleveland and from there into Lake Erie, to be coated with a slick of oil and floating debris. Heavy pollution was the norm back then. The water, which made downtown Cleveland smell like a giant septic tank, was often the color of whatever paint the Sherwin-Williams company happened to be cleaning out of its tanks. The Cuyahoga had caught fire at least nine times before that day, which explains why Goodman hadn’t thought much of the 1969 fire. She couldn’t remember the river when it wasn’t flammable.
Yet something about that particular moment turned into a national environmental turning point. Just months after a Time magazine story about the fire described the Cuyahoga as a giant cesspool — “chocolate-brown, oily, bubbling with subsurface gases” — Americans reached a collective limit when it came to abusing their waterways. The next year saw the founding of the EPA and the country’s first Earth Day. Two years after that, Congress overrode President Richard Nixon’s veto to pass the Clean Water Act. For the first time, the country had national water quality standards and significant restrictions on what industry could dump into rivers and streams.
The new Trump administration rule imposes the most substantial restrictions on the Clean Water Act since its passage in 1972. Over the last decades, the law has succeeded in removing the most offensive pollution from the nation’s waterways. The floating human excrement is mostly gone, as are the putrid stenches, and rivers rarely flow in day-glow colors or with so much industrial waste that they pose fire hazards. PCBs and DDT are no longer freely dumped into rivers and streams, as they were before the law took effect.
But many of the less obvious water problems remain. “You only see the surface,” said Goodman, who is now the executive director of Cuyahoga River Restoration and has spent the past 12 years fighting to improve that waterway. “River restoration is like an onion,” said Goodman. “As soon as you fix those problems, that peels away the top layer. But then underneath it is a different layer.”
Indeed, there are many areas in which the law was not so successful. The drafters of the Clean Water Act set the goal of stopping all pollution discharges by 1985 and making all waterways fishable and swimmable. “It’s completely failed in that area,” said Daniel Estrin, general counsel and advocacy director at Waterkeeper Alliance.
To make matters worse, the number of contaminants in water has ballooned in the intervening years. The Environmental Working Group recently surveyed states and found 267 contaminants in drinking water across the country, 93 of which were associated with cancer risk. Many more chemicals that end up in water, including certain members of the class known as PFAS, have yet to be identified let alone regulated.
The result is a water pollution crisis that is still dire, if less visible. Today, the Cuyahoga is one of 43 contaminated sites deemed official areas of concern in the Great Lakes basin alone. Among the environmental threats it faces are bacteria, storm water runoff, hazardous waste disposal sites, sewer overflows, and warming due to climate change.
While the Cuyahoga, along with all other navigable waterways and their tributaries, will still be protected by federal law, any wetlands not directly connected to them by surface waters will not be.
“Just about all of our tributary streams have wetlands that serve them by holding and filtering the water before it gets to the stream,” said Goodman. “Now, if someone wants to build something between the wetland and the receiving stream there’s nothing to stop them.”
Goodman said that by lifting the protections for certain waterways, the administration was disregarding the science that shows their interconnectedness. “It’s like keeping protections for your kitchen sink and the sewer in the street and taking them away from all the plumbing in between.”
Ohio currently has its own water protections in place that may continue to protect the Cuyahoga. But with the removal of federal protections and the recent election of a Republican governor, Goodman worries that the state may no longer be as committed to protecting water. “We don’t know if local communities are going to protect their piece of the watershed or if they’ll be able to,” she said.
Even before the new rule goes into effect, more than half of the waterways in the U.S. are officially impaired, according to EPA data. The majority of the more than 1 million miles of rivers and streams that have been assessed violate federal water quality standards — as do more than 70 percent of ponds, lakes, and reservoirs, and almost 80 percent of the bays and estuaries that have been assessed. Of the 4,460 miles of monitored Great Lakes shoreline, 98 percent is contaminated, as are virtually all the Great Lakes’ open waters, which now contain PCBs, dioxin, mercury, pesticides, and other pollutants.
Yet by easing the public’s concerns about water quality, the visible improvements made possible by the Clean Water Act have ironically paved the way for the new rule that will further increase pollution.
“The Clean Water Act succeeded just enough to doom itself,” said Estrin, whose organization helps people across the country contend with coal ash leaks, chemical spills, algal blooms, drinking water contamination, and all matter of water crises. “The rollback will take us backward. And most people don’t remember just how bad that was.”
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Date: December 15, 2018 at 10:40:32
From: ryan, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: EPA’s New Water Rule Will Gut the Clean Water Act |
URL: https://theintercept.com/2018/12/15/clean-water-act-rollback-epa/ |
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EPA’s Own Data Refutes Justification for Clean Water Act Rollback
Sharon Lerner
While Environmental Protection Agency Acting Administrator Andrew Wheeler was introducing the new rule that will vastly scale back federal water protections, Matthew Starr was preparing to take water samples from the Neuse River.
Starr, one of two official keepers of the North Carolina river, already has a hard job. As a protector of the Neuse, a body of water that has been judged “most endangered” and the nation’s seventh-most polluted river by the environmental group American Rivers, Starr contends daily with pollution from human and animal waste, chemicals, real estate development, storm runoff, coal ash, and wastewater treatment plants. Climate change, which has resulted in more intense and frequent storms, has intensified the river’s challenges.
With the new water rule, which the EPA released on Tuesday, Starr’s job of measuring and cleaning up water contamination in the Neuse is about to get exponentially harder.
Consider what he calls the “poop side of the problem.” In the past few months, Starr has spent much of his time measuring E. coli levels that have increased after raw human feces and urine was released into the Neuse from wastewater treatment plants and sanitary sewers after Hurricane Florence.
A swine facility from Smithfield owned hogs in Eastern North Carolina.
“The storm also dumped a tremendous amount of swine and poultry waste into our water,” said Starr, as he drove his beat-up blue Chevy pickup truck past rows of identical hog barns. It’s easy to see how the liquefied waste of the river basin’s 1.4 million hogs, which is stored in 640 hog waste lagoons, could make its way into the river, which is sometimes just dozens of feet away from the hog farms. Using machines that look like giant metal paint rollers, the farmers spray the waste onto the nearby fields, many of which are cut through by small streams and ditches.
Some of those waterways, which swell and multiply after rainfalls, will no longer be subject to the Clean Water Act when the new rule takes effect. And that means that when Starr finds elevated levels of pollutants, he will have no recourse. Just figuring out which waterways are still covered by the federal law may soon add significantly to his burden.
Wheeler promised that the new water rule, which will replace water protections that the Obama administration put in place in 2015, would simplify water regulation. “Property owners should be able to stand on their property and be able to tell if a water is federal or not without hiring outside professionals,” he said at a press call on Monday.
But the idea that the new rule will be simple to implement is one of several Trump administration narratives about its latest rollback that have begun to unravel in the days since the rollback’s announcement.
Starr and others who work directly with rivers and streams say the EPA’s new definition of Waters of the United States will make it harder rather than easier to tell which waterways are regulated. The new rule takes protections under the federal Clean Water Act away from all ephemeral streams, which depend on rainwater, while likely leaving in place protections for some but not all “intermittent” streams, which flow during only part of the year.
“The idea that people who aren’t scientists can figure out which streams are ephemeral and which are intermittent is laughable,” said Starr. “This is not a simple you walk out and look at it. There’s a lot of science that goes into it. When does the stream have flow? What kinds of flora and fauna does it have? What’s the topography? Does it have a bank or a clear, defined channel?”
Matt Starr, the Upper Neuse Riverkeeper.
Indeed, the similarity of the two types of water bodies is underscored by the EPA’s own documents. A 2008 report from the agency on the hydrological significance of intermittent and ephemeral streams notes the overlapping roles of both kinds of waterways.
“They perform the same critical hydrologic functions as perennial streams: they move water, sediment, nutrients, and debris through the stream network and provide connectivity within the watershed,” the report noted, going on to warn of the dangers of harming these critical components of our water system. “The disturbance or loss of ephemeral and intermittent streams has dramatic physical, biological, and chemical impacts, which are evident from the uplands to the riparian areas and stream courses of the watershed.”
The difficulty of distinguishing between these two types of waterways was further underscored by the agency’s own slides, which the EPA released in response to FOIA request from E&E News. While Wheeler told reporters on a press phone call hours earlier that it was impossible to calculate the impact of the new rule because the “data doesn’t tell the difference between intermittent and ephemeral streams,” the slides showed that the EPA had already crunched those numbers. According to its analysis, 18 percent of streams nationwide are ephemeral and 52 percent are intermittent. The agency pointed out in a footnote that because many ephemeral streams are “classified as intermittent or are not mapped,” that figure likely underestimates the true number of intermittent streams.
In addition, the new rule would lift federal protections from “isolated” lakes and ponds, which are not directly connected by permanent water to navigable rivers. And depending on the feedback it receives during an upcoming 60-day waiting period, the new rule may wind up stripping protections from intermittent streams and even some stretches of perennial waterways.
An economic analysis of the rule released by the Army and the EPA this week undermines another fiction the agency has put forward about the water rule: that states will protect waterways that the federal government abandons. Wheeler and other proponents of the EPA’s rollback of the water rule put in place in 2015 have celebrated the proposed language as returning water regulation to the states. But, as the report notes, 13 states, including North Carolina, have laws in place that make it impossible for states to pass water regulations stricter than federal ones. Twenty-three other states have laws making it difficult to adopt water regulations that are stricter than the federal law.
Even states where more protective laws remain on the books may not have the funding or political will to enforce them. The difficulties tracking and holding powerful polluters accountable is a large part of the reason that most waterways that have been assessed (including more than 70 percent of ponds, lakes, and reservoirs) already violate water quality standards.
In North Carolina, which has repeatedly slashed funding for its Department of Environmental Quality, the state is already struggling to hold polluters accountable for violations of water laws.
“We have to do a lot of the enforcement work ourselves,” said Starr, as he drove his pickup past a stretch of Lick Creek on a recent Tuesday. Recognizing the muddy flow as the result of sediment pollution, which can threaten fish and drinking water, Starr pulled over so that he could call in the problem to the state’s Department of Environmental Quality.
Starr regularly finds himself doing environmental policing and had even called the state twice before about this particular creek, which is near the site of a large residential development. The state fined a company working on the nearby construction site $210 last year. And, when he called, a representative of the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality told Starr that the agency was “working with the company on the problem.” But the sedimentation, which can threaten fish and drinking water there, has remained.
“And this is a regulated waterway,” said Starr. “What will happen when they’re not regulated?”
A construction site in Durham county where the development of houses will be, is causing a construction overflow that is causing pollutants to leak into Lick Creek.
The question of enforcement under the new rule is baffling some legal experts, who point out that in many instances it will be extremely difficult to punish polluters even when they release contamination into waterways that retain federal protections.
“Even if it’s technically true that you could hold someone responsible for discharging into a ditch that wouldn’t be a water of the U.S., the argument is that you could nail them when those pollutants flow from the ditch into a regulated water,” said Daniel Estrin, general counsel and advocacy director of the Waterkeeper Alliance. “But that ignores practical realities. Most often that pollution is going to flow miles past many landowners before it gets there. And the idea that you could ever hope to prove where the pollutants entered the stream is a practical impossibility.”
The challenges that the new rule poses to enforcement may explain why so many water-polluting industries pushed so hard for it. The Waters Advocacy Coalition, an umbrella group that spent more than $1 million lobbying to limit federal water protections and had 48 trade group members — including the National Pork Producers Council and the Fertilizer Institute — as of 2017, lobbied for the new rule. Other industry associations that lobbied for it, too, include the National Renderers Association, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, the American Farm Bureau, the National Turkey Federation, and the Commercial Real Estate Development Association.
The corporate interest belies yet another myth about the water rollback: that it was intended to bring relief to the small farmer. While the Trump administration worked hand in hand with the beef lobby to assail the 2015 water rule as an assault on small farmers, the rule didn’t actually affect how they operate.
“The Clean Water Act has very clear exemptions for agricultural activities and that wasn’t changed by 2015 rule,” said Betsy Southerland, an environmental scientist who served as director of science and technology, among other positions, during the three decades she worked at EPA. “This is one of those situations where the American Farm Bureau has fostered a false narrative that has scared farmers about the implications of the 2015 rule.”
Now that the new rule has been introduced, it’s environmentalists who are scared.
“It’s hard to overstate how bad this will be for our waters,” said Starr. He is now awaiting the results from the latest round of testing he did on water from the Neuse River. “Though, when the protections go away, the samples will mean jack shit.”
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15641 |
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Date: December 08, 2018 at 07:59:20
From: abra, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: EPA’s New Water Rule Will Gut the Clean Water Act |
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ryan, speaking as a farmer and a sane water use advocate, the navigable waters act was a total clusterfuck from the beginning. Imagine if they enforced it, my farm, which runs along a small stream, well I just couldn't farm. I'd have to have my fences back 150 feet from the bank, this would not allow me to farm in any way. Liberal idiots have no clue, sad to say.by the way, the way it was originally written it would preclude letting animal out in fields with drainage ditches, i shit you not, they are considered "navigable waterways", by what? a paper boat? This "law" was more fucked than I can say. You are WRONG on this one Ryan.
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