Trump punctures water protections
Move puts ‘millions of Americans’ at risk
WASHINGTON: The Trump administration will this week finalise a rule to strip away environmental protections for streams, wetlands and other water bodies, handing a victory to farmers, fossil fuel producers and real estate developers who said Obama-era rules had shackled them with onerous and unnecessary burdens.
From Day 1 of his administration, President Donald Trump vowed to repeal president Barack Obama’s “Waters of the United States” regulation, which had frustrated rural landowners. His new rule, which will be implemented in the coming weeks, is the latest step in the Trump administration’s push to repeal or weaken nearly 100 environmental rules and laws, loosening or eliminating rules on climate change, clean air, chemical pollution, coal mining, oil drilling and endangered species protections.
Mr Trump has called the regulation “horrible”, “destructive” and “one of the worst examples of federal” overreach.
“I terminated one of the most ridiculous regulations of all: the last administration’s disastrous Waters of the United States rule,” he told the American Farm Bureau Federation’s annual convention in Texas on Sunday, to rousing applause.
“That was a rule that basically took your property away from you,” added Mr Trump, whose real estate holdings include more than a dozen golf courses. (Golf course developers were among key opponents of the Obama rule and key backers of the new one.)
His administration had completed the first step of its demise in September with the rule’s repeal.
Its replacement this week 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 underground, but also relieving landowners of the need to seek permits.
It also gives Mr Trump a major policy achievement to bring to his political base during his impeachment trial.
“Farmers coalesced against the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] being able to come onto their land, and he’s delivering,” said Jessica Flanagain, a Republican strategist in Nebraska. “This is bigger news for agricultural producers than whatever is happening with the sideshow in DC,” she added,
The new water rule will remove 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 fertilisers directly into many of those waterways, and to destroy or fill in wetlands for construction projects.
“This will be the biggest loss of clean water protection the country has ever seen,” said Blan Holman, a lawyer specialising in federal water policy at the Southern Environmental Law Center. “This puts drinking water for millions of Americans at risk of contamination from unregulated pollution. This is not just undoing the Obama rule. This is stripping away protections that were put in place in the ‘70s and ‘80s that Americans have relied on for their health.”
Mr Holman also said that the new rule exemplifies how the Trump administration has dismissed or marginalised scientific evidence. Last month, a government advisory board of scientists, many of whom were hand-picked by the Trump administration, wrote that the proposed water rule “neglects established science”.
Legal experts say that Mr Trump’s replacement rule would also eliminate protections to smaller headwaters implemented under the 1972 Clean Water Act.
Ean Thomas Tafoya, a Coloradobased clean water activist with the group GreenLatinos, said the new rule could harm water quality in the Colorado River, which supplies water to 17 western states. “We are a headwater state,” he said. “This rollback will affect almost every single stream that flows into the Colorado River.”